August 02, 2011
Twitter, the online micro-blogging tool, has changed the way that we communicate online. Users can update (or tweet) multiple times a day, hourly, or by the minute to let others know what is on their mind or what they are doing. This is great as long as you stay under 140 characters, including spaces.
However, if you have found a really great website or want to share a link to a database, 140 characters may not be enough. Some links tend to get excruciatingly long, and even after converting some of your words to text talk (c u l8r), your tweet may end up looking like the above title: cut off.
Luckily, there are resources out there that allow users to share extra long links to their hearts’ content. One such resource is bit.ly. By going to their website, users can copy their long URLs and paste them into the box on the screen. After clicking on the Shorten button, bit.ly will produce a much shorter link (usually 13 characters) that can be used on twitter. In this way, users can tweet a link and still have room to comment about it. For example: ”I just read this great article on tsunamis! You should check it out: bit.ly/giscID.” The length of the actual link is far longer, and would make it harder to comment on twitter.
If you are on twitter and don’t know about bit.ly yet, you should take a look at it. While you’re there, you should follow our branch (@MCPLBS) too!
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