TinyURL sucks and its about time people find another alternative.  They did invent a new way of shortening links, but they have done little to improve their service since its launch several years ago.  Not to mention it has gone down multiple times over the past few years.  Competitors such as bit.ly have already surpassed them in features.

In fact bit.ly is so good that they have 2million dollars in investment money.  ReadWriteWeb loves it so much that they have writen about the service multiple times. You are probably thinking what I'm thinking. . . wtf does a company that shortens urls need 2 million dollars for?!?

In any case, Bit.ly is a quality service that shows stats about clickthroughs of shortened links that have never been done before.  Here is one such example that is a shortened link about Digg's latest townhall.  Neat right?  Not to mention it is a shorter URL than TinyURL.  So if its characters you are worried about when writting a twitter post, then use Bit.ly.

In my next blog post I will write about how to use bit.ly and provide some example code using its API.  Stay tuned.

Now, take a look at some Bit.ly Example Code