URL Shortener

URL shortening is a technique on the World Wide Web in which a URL may be made substantially shorter in length.

The technique is particularly useful with Twitter, whose messages are limited to 140 characters. At the beginning, the Twitter user had shorten the links by himself. Now, the Twitter service includes a shortener feature hosted at the t.co domain, which is supposed to protect users from harmful activity.

Privacy
Using such service produce enormous volume of personal data while its protection is mostly not covered.

Web Analytics
URL shorteners act as the "Man in the Middle" and can significantly blur the web analytics as they hide the real referrers.

EC URL shortener
Available since December 2013 - deails @ https://webgate.ec.europa.eu/europa-hub/help/url-shortener

The idea is to develop a specific url shortener for (ec).europa.eu urls based on open source.

The next thing to do then is to try integrate that url shortener into Tweetdeck for example.


 * contact
 * [mailto:europamanagement@ec.europa.eu COMM EUROPA MANAGEMENT ]

History
Suggested about three years ago, by Thorsten Petrowski (and by Prabhat Agarwal in 2010) Comment (in 2007): "Not possible, DIGIT will not allow this..."

List public URL Shortener

 * bit.ly (to read "Libya Takes Hard Line On Link Shortening Domains" )
 * goo.gl. Uses reCAPTCHA :-(
 * www.kxk.me
 * t.co - used now by Twitter to protect users from harmful activity. The link service at http://t.co is only used on links posted on Twitter and is not available as a general shortening service.
 * TinyURL.com. Optional custom alias.
 * tweak.tk

Read also

 * ... beside (for many minor) question of privacy and difficulty to analyse the web traffic to Europa sites with this "man in the middle", it may happen that some services shall cease to exist - like the popular BIT.LY. In Lybia (yes, it is Lybian) they start thinking that this site could be not fully compatible with the Sharia Law. A lot of fun when reading "Libya Takes Hard Line On Link Shortening Domains ... http://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/10/07/1222259/Libya-Takes-Hard-Line-On-Link-Shortening-Domains?from=rss
 * https://www.yammer.com/ec.europa.eu/#/inbox/show?threadId=66528773