Short URL is commonly used today for several reasons: avoid url garbling, take smallest space especially for long url which need to be posted at limited space format eg: twitter, also often used to manipulate user for specific purposes eg: hiding orginal url for phising and ads/affiliation links. There are many websites that provide shortening url services, tinyurl, bit.ly, hex.io are some of them, and as addition to my simple twitter, plurk and facebook api implementation, i have created a PHP script to create short url on the fly, currently support: tinyURL, bit.ly, is.gd, tr.im and hex.io, but you can easily add other providers. fast example <?php $url = 'http://forums.digitalpoint.com'; echo ShortUrl::create($url,'trim'); echo '<hr />'; echo ShortUrl::create($url,'tinyurl'); echo '<hr />'; echo ShortUrl::create($url,'isgd'); echo '<hr />'; echo ShortUrl::create($url,'hexio'); echo '<hr />'; echo ShortUrl::create($url,'bitly','your_user_name','your_api_key'); ?> PHP: see the files short-url-class-1.0.zip [1.17 KB] short-url class.php [1.76 KB] sample.php [504 B]