When you send an email with a link to a web page, if that link is very long, many email programs will spread the URL over two lines and the link won’t work.
The cure for this is a “link shortener” which is a service that gives you a short URL that redirects to the page you want.
This also works when you have to fit your message in a limited amount of space, like Twitter’s 140 characters.
One issue with link shorteners is, will they be around forever? Because you don’t want to save a shortened version of a link only to have it non-functional because the link shortening service went out of business or something.
Well, Google now has a link shortening service, and you know Google isn’t going to drop it.
It is http://goo.gl – just go to their site, paste in the URL, click “shorten” and get the shortened URL you can paste into an email, text message, tweet or whatever.
If you’re signed in to your Google account when you do this, you’ll build a library of them you can look up later so you don’t have to save the information elsewhere if you will be reusing shortened links.
Useful.