Choosing The Best URL Shortener

URL shorteners are part of the unexciting world of Twitter and email efficiency. Yes, all the thrills and spills of making your Twitter messages a look a little cleaner of your emails look a little more compact. But, before you fall asleep with giddy delight at the prospect, you should know that not all URL shorteners are alike. They have been known to “introduce an extra point of failure” (life hacker).

An extra point of failure

This is some nerd’s way of saying that a URL shortener can cause you a bit of trouble. The website that published this idea claim that the company WatchMouse monitored a bunch of popular URL shortening tools/services over a month and noticed that they appear to have a few inherent problems.

The quality of the services varies a little with things such as a varying latency and varying uptimes. Their results are only subject to their own tests and bias, but here are a few of the results.

The slowest performance

This has to be the Facebook “FB.ME” which has a performance time that is four times that of its leading competitor. It takes a massive amount of time to connect when compared to the other URL shorteners.

The URL shorteners that are always online

Uptime is difficult to pull off at 100% in any online situation, but somehow the Google and Twitter shorteners had an uptime of 100%. Their tools are called “Goo.gl” and “Twt.tl”. The one with the worst uptime is Snurl. Do not forget the these figures were pull up by the Dutch WatchMouse team and were only based on recorded research that was conducted over a month time period.

Which is the most efficient URL shortener

That has to be the Google tool “Goo.gl” which narrowly beats the YouTube shortener called “you.be”.

The most secure tools

Nobody seems to have published reliable results on this one. However, many of the URL shorteners are from larger companies such as Google, Twitter, etc, which means they have a lot to lose if they are secret back doors for hackers.

Goo.gl

This is the official URL shortener that Google have released. It is highly trusted and reliable too. It contains public stats and can show real-time analytics for any of your short Google links. It is also the fastest for producing shortened links.

Su.pr

This is the URL Shortener that Stumble Upon have released and many people feel that it is one of the best URL shorteners on the market. It has sharing functions and the shortened URLs help to increase traffic from their own website. It has a history viewer and can tell you things such as the number of reviews and re-tweets that the URL has had. It also has real-time analytics like the Google URL shortener. There is also a very sexy function that tells you to best times to post based on the information it has collected in the past.

Tinyurl

It has a cute name and is not bad at its job. It has a browser toolbar and you can use the preview features too. The tool will also allow you to hide your affiliate URLs. It is not the world’s most feature filled tool, but it certainly gets the job done for you.

Bitly

This is a tool that some people use because they claim it helps them build a lot of traffic. It has a sharing functionality, which is rather nice. It also has analytic data with is good for real-time traffic and data analysis. The good thing about this tool is that you can get it in a number of ways. You can get it on mobile Internet and with browser extensions. You can get it via a website and there are lots of third party tools that use it too.

Budurl

This is a URL shortening tool but it does have a lot of premium features that some people have found useful. You are able to schedule your tweets to go out at a certain time and you can send emails to your clients and prospects. They have a mobile Micro-sites that help you to drive traffic for all of your mobile campaigns, and it is good for affiliate links. You can pull up very detailed statistics for comment sites and blog posts and you can add in advertising links. There is also QR Code integration for your print campaigns. You can add links to your PDFs and you can link to other files from your website or your emails.

Image Credit: Photostock

Author Bio:

Kate Funk is a freelance writer at http://www.aussiessay.com. She is mainly focusing on technology, gadgets and all the latest trends which are interesting for networking enthusiasts.