YouTube Unveiled Its Own Link Shortener: Youtu.be

When every character count, services like URL shortening which reduce long URLs into small tiny forms is getting more popular. Just a few days after Google launched its Goo.gl short URLs, YouTube follows its mother’s step by introducing its own short URL shortener, Youtu.be, which will exclusively used for YouTube videos. With this URL shortener, besides saving some space, it will also help to reduce spamming activities.

Via YouTube’s new URL shortener, developers can also take advantage of this feature by adding more new things such as show thumbnails, embed videos directly and do real time tracking on video spreading.

“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 use youtu.be manually, just take a URL such as http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdeioVndUhs 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 users will see it redirects to that video.