Thought Sparks

Every once in a while I run across an application or online service that works its way into my everyday life. Quite often the most meaningful ones have such a narrow focus and perform one function very well. One of these services is urlTea.com. urlTea essentially does one thing, it makes long URLs shorter.

Now, when you first start to use urlTea, you may not see what is so significant about this simple little application. As you apply urlTea to your computing processes, I think you’ll find the deeper value of simplification and ease of use.

What urlTea Does

Let’s start with an example. The URL for a recent post on thoughtsparks on the Jing application is:  http://www.thoughtsparks.net/2007/08/28/jing-makes-desktop-
screen-and-video-a-snap/

This URL is a bit long when posting to a microblogging site like Twitter or Jaiku or perhaps you would like to IM or email the URL to a friend.

Past that URL into urlTea and you now have: http://urltea.com/1ctd which goes to the same location.

when doing a mapquest or google maps query with a long URL string it proves very useful. urlTea again turns a three line URL into a short url as shown above. Recently while doing some planning for a road trip, I appreciated pasting short URLs into my document for the trip.

Adding to Your Custom URL

With urlTea you can add your own custom ending, so instead of http://urltea.com/1ctd which does not describe what the URL references you can use http://urltea.com/1ctd?JingProject which gives more information but still keeps the URL much shorter.

Ways to Use urlTea

1. Go to urltea.com and past your long URL into the form field as shown above and press enter.
2. Use Google Talk or Jabber. IM a URL to teabot@urltea.com.
3. Use Imified’s urlTea service.
4. Use the bookmark for urlTea in your toolbar. In Firefox drag this bookmark into your tool bar. In IE, right-click and add to favorites.

So there you have it, a very simple application that has many uses for referencing hyperlinks. Have you used urlTea before? Found any other great uses for this simple application?