As you, dear readers, probably know, I send a fair amount of links out in Twitter (I mean, you’re following me in Twitter over on @cote…right?). With a 140 character limit, you have to compress your URLs, many of which can be over 140 characters themselves, not to mention needing spare characters to add commentary to the links.

I’ve long used the old standby, TinyURL.com to get, well, TinyURLs. Recently, I found and started using another service, tr.im (that’s right, the domain name is just “tr.im”). I haven’t checked out other URL shortners, but I’m really linking this tr.im service because it has tracking numbers for each URL, e.g.:

There’s also geo-tracking and referral tracking, and graphs if you’re into those:

It’s been interesting, and fun, this week to watch which Twitter’ed links people click on. For example, this one has been the most popular so far.

As with all of these URL shortners, there’s a bookmarklet and even a Firefox extension, though the second seems to have flaked out on me, which is fine: the bookmarklet is plenty.