I have known about tinyurl for a long time, noticed the inexorable rise of bit.ly – helped along by Twitter reaching some sort of tipping point. I finally got round to investigating these URL-shorteners and decided to go with tr.im and mere weeks later a new one has come along: j.mp. It is all a bit confusing.I’m not sure there is much difference between all these sites. In terms of what they do, there is nothing between them – they shorten a URL so it is easy to pass on to others. Especially useful in newspaper or magazine articles and essential in text messages or Twitter.  I went for tr.im because its addresses will be one character shorter than bit.ly – so a bit miffed that j.mp comes along so soon and is even shorter.
The main differentiator seems to be how bit.ly is a lot more integrated into Twitter, although I use the Firefox plugins for tr.im so it is well integrated into what I do on the PC. The fact that j.mp is owned by bit.ly means that not only does it look identical but it will probably soon enjoy the Twitter integration advantages too.
I am forever impressed by the geeks of this world that such a large ecosystem of products with so many features can spring up to support such simple concepts.
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