Is God Smaller Than Tiny?

Finally, some competition for TinyUrl! TinyUrl provides one of those services that is so useful that you slap yourself for not thinking of it first. You give TinyUrl a long web address, like "/" and they shorten it. The way they shorten it is to generate a unique code which they store in their database with your url. Then when someone goes to their website with the code (e.g. http://tinyurl.com/5c8tsq) it will look up the original url in the database and forward you there. I tried half-heartedly once to convince my uncle to compete with them. He's the owner of 42.com, the shortest url anyone I know owns. But now someone has done it, and with a url even shorter than 42.com!

Introducing is.gd, which must be pronounced "is god" or maybe "is good" (either way, not very humble). They claim to pretty much guarantee urls of 18 characters or less, including the protocol (http://). You'll notice that the TinyUrl url above is 26 characters. To write this post, I put in my blog's address to test it. So far, they're only at three-letter codes, and I happened to get one that has some human meaning.

http://is.gd/BVD (16 characters, shortened from 35)

is.gd will also automatically copy the shortened url to your clipboard if you have flash enabled. Very cool!