The instant you try to post a link on Twitter, you realize that most URLs don't come close to fitting in your 140-character limit—especially if you've actually said anything in the message. The good news is that you can get help from an array of URL shorteners, services that take a URL and shrink it down to somewhere between 11 and approximately 30 characters.
If you post a link from the Twitter website or your phone, Twitter itself will automatically use TinyURL to shorten your link. That's handy, but a few other services are built in the major Twitter clients (described in Chapter 2) and offer more sophisticated shortening features.
Two of our favorites are Bit.ly (http://bit.ly), which lets you customize short URLs and track click-throughs, and Is.gd (http://is.gd), which doesn't offer tracking but does make your URLs really, really short.
For a service that hints at the underlying domain (for example, http://oreilly.twi.bz/b), try Twi.bz (http://twi.bz).
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