Tinyurl started the movement years ago, and now URL shortening services are all over the place, from social bookmarking sites to mainstream media sites which have their own shortening engines.

In a culture that is moving more toward 140 characters at a time, those shortening services are rather useful (especially the ones that let you track the statistics). Like almost everything else, shortened links have some drawbacks. Besides sometimes being slow, you also can’t see where the link is pointing. With a lot of malicious users in internet land, you can imagine the security risks. There are websites that will try to inject malware in your system as soon as you visit it. Others that will try to set special filters in your Gmail account and so on.

If you want to be safe, click on shortened links only if you trust the person that created them. If for some reason you don’t know if a link is legitimate, use a URL un-shortening tool. There is a tool that I have used a lot called Sucuri.net and it will reveal the real URL behind the link. It also checks with Google and SiteAdvisor to make sure the website is safe to be visited. Oh, and did I mention that is is FREE. Enjoy!!

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