4 Ways To Shorten URLs on iPhone

Tue, May 12, 2009

Have you ever been browsing the web on your phone, and felt the need to share something with your Twitter friends? Kinda hard to share a full URL, and not to convenient to shorten it huh? Well here you have it: 4 ways of shorten URLs and be a happy camper.

1. Twitterlink Free iPhone App

Twitterlink uses the “is.gd” URL shortening service simply because you get between 3 to 6 characters advantage over others such as tinyurl.com, rubyurl.com, and short.ie. You can find it in the appstore for free, but for some of you , it might be tricky to set it up. But don’t worry , i will teach you how to do it, and you’ll see its not hard at all, but it requires like 5 minutes of your time.

First you need to download the app, and fill in your twitter username and password.

What you need to do next is to add a bookmarklet to your MobileSafari, and this is the part that might be a little bit tricky for some of you. First you need to tap on the arrow next to “Add bookmarklet to Safari” and bookmark that page. A webpage will open, and you need to bookmark that page by tappin the “+” at the bottom of the screen. Than just tap “Add Bookmark”.

Now you need to go into Bookmarks and edit the bookmark that you just saved. The bookmark is a long string of javascript and you need to delete everything before the javascript in the bookmark. When into bookmarks , just press edit, and click the arrow on the right of “Tweet with Twitterlink” or what ever name you gave to the bookmark.

Now save the changes and yure done. Thats it! Now just go to your favorite webpage, say funkyspacemonkey.com and use the bookmark that you just edited. It will open Twitterlink with the link shortened and you will be able to write your stuff and send tweet it.

2. Smub.it

Smub.it might be a litte confusing at first but, it is extremly simple to use. The fun part of Smub.it is that it will allow you yo share your shortened link to Twitter and various social networks/bookmarking site such as digg.com , stumbleupon , facebook and even myspace if you still think its 2007. Here is a video where Thierry Lamouline shows us how to use the service

3. TweetBoard

This is not the most convenient way, but its better than nothing. This is actually a twitter keyboard, that has some extra buttons like @ , hashtag, via and URL. Now by tapping the URL button, it will automatically insert a tinyurl.com/ syntax on your screen, but you will have to go to tinyurl first, shorten the link u want and than complete it in the tweet. Like i said , not the most convenient way, but if you are interested in this keyboard, here’s a full revirew.