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Twitter 101: Tips and Tricks

by Terrence O'Brien on March 26, 2009 at 01:59 PM


How come all the links in tweets say TinyURL? What is a TinyURL?

TinyURL is a URL-shortening service that takes a lengthy, character-hogging Web link like this:

http://www.switched.com/2009/03/17/twitter-growing-at-1-382-rate-but-do-we-all-know-how-to-use-it/

and compresses it to a much more manageable size like this:

http://tinyurl.com/cvc4q5

The new TinyURL forwards you to the original site. Twitter automatically replaces all links, above a certain length, with a TinyURL version in order to save as much of your 140 characters as possible. Just place any link into your tweet, and Twitter will convert it automatically.

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