Every site needs a built in equivalent to TinyURL. I have come to this realization because of the way URLs are used by many (if not most) Web users. The days of people typing in a URL are over, with the exception of a simple domain name. Raise your hand if you typed n URL beyond “.com” in the last, say, year or so into the address bar of your browser (testing a Web application that you are working on does not count). Yup, thought so.

However, people do an awful lot of linking, and more importantly, people do an awful lot of copy/paste from the address bar into other sources like e-mails. And a lot of those other sources (particularly e-mail, but many text editors as well) tend to do a word wrap, which mangles the URL. Ten years or so into the “Internet age