Url shorteners have been around for some time. The basic idea is that many urls have gotten too long. With all the parameters and information that is needed to provide you with the exact page you need links become quite combersome.

Url shorteners are just a shortcut to the longer link.

For most of the internet this isn’t a big deal; most links are hidden in webpages behind the link caption (e.g. click here). However, a number of tools that people use every day don’t hide these ugly links. These include emails, instant messenger, SMS Messages (a.k.a. Text Messages) and (more and more recently) social networking sites.

Most of these tools allow you to post links, but they don’t allow the html codes that are need to hide the actual link. Making matters worse is the fact that some social sites, such as Twitter limit the amount of space you have to send your message.

This is why there has been such a steep rise in the number of url shorteners available on the web today.

So the next time you need to send an email and are worrying about the link being ‘broken’ by email, pasting a link into facebook, sending a tweet, or even emailing someone who might view the email on mobile phone, consider using a url shortener, such as idek.net, to make things just a little easier.