Shorter YouTube URLs: Make Way for youtu.be Links

[+Frank B. Subscriber²]

Make Way for youtu.be Links

It's all the rage: link shorteners to ensure that those useful URLs you're sharing don't take up too much precious character count while also giving you an inkling of what you're about to click on. Well, we've just launched youtu.be as a shortener for YouTube video links -- and nothing but YouTube links -- so you can rest assured that when you see a link with this URL, you are indeed about to click on a YouTube video. (Also, because the link contains the ID of the video you're going to see, developers can do interesting things like show you thumbnails, embed the video directly, or track how a video is spreading in real-time.)

To see this feature in action, use AutoShare to link up your YouTube account to social networks like Twitter and Google Reader. Then, whenever you favorite a video on YouTube, for example, that action will get syndicated out to your network, who will see this shortened edition of the video's URL.

To use youtu.be manually, simply take a URL like

and replace the"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=" with "http://youtu.be/" to get: http://youtu.be/FdeioVndUhs. Plug that shorter URL into a browser, and you'll see it redirects to that video.

News source: The Official YouTube Blog

[Syanide]

What's the point? My Twitter client already shortens long links.

[Digitalx]

well that's handy

[still1]

whats the point????

it just removes com and watch?v from the url

[+John. Subscriber¹]

I don't see the point in this unless they're customized. As people have said, most twitter clients automatically shorten these days, and you're essentially removing 10 characters from a link, which isn't a lot.

[lnmnky]

Why doesn't twitter remove the http:// part as they convert it to a link anyway.