One of my favorite sites, LifeHacker [ http://www.lifehacker.com/ ] has a few tips that I know for a fact a lot of people need; TinyURL etiquitte. Too often people use TinyURLs for everything without remembering that when you use a TinyURL you lose the context of the link, so people don’t know what they’re clicking.
For example, if someone says “Check out this awesome link! -tinyurl-” and you hover over the TinyURL, you have absolutely no idea what you’re clicking on. It could be not safe for work while you’re sitting in your office, it could be signing you up for spam, it could be a virus or trojan horse, you’ll never know, because when you hover over it, you’ll only see the tinyurl link in the status bar of your web browser. Lifehacker explains further why TinyURL can be bad, and actually more annoying than anything else-I came across this personally, on an old mailing list I was on, some of the people who posted links insisted on using TinyURL for literally everything, making their links absolutely worthless. Read on, and the comments are good too:
[ http://www.lifehacker.com/software/web-surfing/tiny-url-etiquette-132763.php ]
Also, LifeHacker suggested today a service that shrinks URLs but also leaves some context so clickers know what they’re clicking on:
[ http://www.lifehacker.com/software/web-surfing/alternative-short-urls-with-burl-133131.php ]