Why short links are introduced? [closed]

Closed. This question is off-topic. It is not currently accepting answers.

---

Want to improve this question? Update the question so it's on-topic for Stack Overflow.

Closed 11 years ago.

Improve this question

I see in many sites the use of short links like this:

http://www.chipbennett.net/2011/04/28/2011-nfl-draft-colts-round-1/

to this

http://bit.ly/mxytw8

but I 开发者_运维知识库wonder to know why they've been used!

The only thing I could imagine is to hide the original link or to gain data weight in a database?

---

Simply because services like Twitter are limited in the message size. Or to make it easier to type in the address instead of copy/pasting. Could also be misused by spammers or phishing attacks to hide the real address. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URL_shortening

---

The user may be doing it to take advantage of link tracking provided by bitly.

Every bitly link has an info page, which reveals the number of related clicks and other relevant data. You can get to the info page in a few different ways.

---

They're mostly used with Twitter (which has a very short message size) and historically for plain text email where mail readers would line-wrap long URLs in the middle.