URL shortening

Introduction

Laymen explanation

Links are long. If you want to sms the link, what you will do? SMS puts restriction on the number of characters. URL shortening feature takes care of such scenario.

Technical explanation

This technique is especially convenient for messaging technologies that limit the number of characters that may be used in a message, such as SMS, and for reducing the amount of typing required if the reader is copying a URL from a print source. Often regular unshortened links may be aesthetically unpleasing.

On Twitter, there is a limit to the number of characters a message can carry. Using a URL shortener can allow linking to web pages which would otherwise violate this constraint.

How URL shortening works

This is achieved by using a redirect on a domain name that is short, which links to the web page that has a long URL. For example, the URL "http://example.com/about/index.html" can be shortened to "https://goo.gl/aO3Ssc".

Reference

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URL_shortening

https://bitly.com/pages/tour

https://goo.gl/