tinyurl.com is a service that provides shorter urls that automatically redirect to another website with a longer url. For example, "www12.information.elilies.com/square/cube/triangle/betsy101.php?Jesus=elf&marthasvineyard" could be shortened to tinyurl.com/ks9tr3 for sending in emails, to friends, etc.

In response to: "How in the world do you get all those sites into the tiny URLs?! How come they all fit in there? Hell, what is a tiny URL anyways? Where do you get them? Are they dangerous? Do they hurt to use? Do you have to pay money to use them? I mean, you just do all this research on totally obscure stuff that the whole world should probably know about and you get the sites for the research but instead of putting down the site's URL you get this tiny one and you put that one down instead and it just works perfectly and it's cool and all that the information is there and we can use it but it's WEIRD!" ----- Sometimes a URL can be aesthetically unpleasant or difficult to remember. Sometimes URL's become too long, which causes problems when you have a character limit or when you are posting on a site that breaks up long links (such as the case when commenting in YouTube). A good way of solving this problem is to shorten the length of your links. You can do this by creating a URL redirect (essentially a web address that redirects your browser to a different page). There are several websites that provide you with this service, tinyURL is just one of them. :) To generate a new tinyURL, visit http://tinyURL.com and enter the long link into the input box. A new short url will be provided for you. :) There are other services such as shorl, snipURL, MetaMark etc. Please see the link below: http://notlong.com/links/

This is the smallest one I could find.

If your an affiliate or promoting some kind of product. You may want to change the URL assigned to you, because some buyers if they see your link with your id or user name, they would just pass. They would look for the real URL. "CLOAKING"

TinyURL (tinyurl.com) is a web service created by Kevin Gilbertson that provides short aliases to redirect long URLs into shortest one. Hope it helps you.

The TinyURL homepage includes a form that's used to submit a long URL for shortening. For each URL entered, the server adds a new alias in its hashed database and returns a short URL such as http://tinyurl.com/2unsh in the following page. If the URL has already been requested, TinyURL will return the existing alias rather than creating a duplicate entry. The short URL forwards users to the long URL. TinyURL also offers an API that allows applications to automatically create short URLs.[1] Short URL aliases are seen as useful because they're easier to write down, remember or pass around, are less error-prone to write, and also fit where space is limited such as IRC channel topics, email signatures, microblogs, certain printed newspapers (such as the .net Magazine), and email clients that impose line breaks on messages at a certain length. Starting in 2008, TinyURL allows users to create custom, more meaningful aliases. This means that a user can create descriptive URLs rather than a randomly generated address.

TinyURL is a web service that provides short aliases for redirection of long URLs. Kevin Gilbertson, a web developer, launched the service in January 2002 so that he would be able to link directly to newsgroup postings which frequently had long and cumbersome addresses.