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A shortened URL or short link is a URL or link which is short in length ( with fewer characters ) that redirects or targets to a destination URL. Regular long URLs are squeezed to short in length by a technique known as – URL shortening . There are various URL shorteners or shortening service providers or companies like Bitly or Owly which enables us to transform our regular URLs into shorter ones. Lengthy URLs are aesthetically unpleasant and are difficult to remember, which may not fit within the size limitations of various microblogging sites. Here short links provide the solution to this kind of problem. Earlier shortening URL technique was invented to avoid the exceeding character limit of Twitter and the 160-character limit of text messages (SMS) but as technology improved short links also developed analytics or tracking capabilities. This generally helped to determine the performance of a particular web page based on the number of clicks that it received. Now the que...

A shortened URL works on redirects and basically masks the original URL. This act of camouflaging a longer destination URL may be abused by the spammers for malicious activities. It is thus needed to check the shortened URLs for safety and privacy. In case of shortened URLs which are not from legitimate sources it is better to be cautious and investigate about its safety and destination URL beforehand. As of now there are numerous URL shortening service providers which regularly shorten the links. They further often check for their links for malware but not all such companies provide the facility to preview the destination URL of a short link. Twitter In case of Twitter it has its own URL shortening service called t.co to shorten links that are shared using its platform. The links used here are automatically shortened to use the t.co domain name i.e. the link address is converted to the shortened t.co form but the link text remains the same as posted by the user. Thus, e...