I normally use tr.im, which does an awesome job giving short urls (shorter than some of the services on this list) but I did a little research because I felt like there had to be something shorter.

I was right!

(For an example URL, I’m using http://livejamie.com/post/206186222/today-reddit-released-its-interview-of-mike-rowe, which is 84 Characters, (Not very twitter friendly.)

1st place: 15 Characters – 3 sites

Threely

http://3.ly/9p3

Shorturl

http://9.gp/can

Z.pe

http://z.pe/otc

All 3 of these sites are going to be the shortest link-generators for you. They all offer a bookmarklet and a way to post to twitter directly from the generated page. Currently Shorturl is the most full-featured of the three, offering an API, user accounts (with a history), statistics, previews, no lookalike characters, optional custom urls, and group bookmarks. (You can access all 11 urls with this group bookmark for example: http://9.gp/ug-b) – It should be noted that Threely seems to be promising a bunch of these features in the future, but they don’t currently have them. (The twitter characters are cute and a nice addition though.)

2nd place: 16 Characters – 2 sites

r.im

http://r.im/1zpg

X.vu

http://x.vu/7919

Both sites are significantly shorter than big-sites like TinyURL and Is.Gd, but neither if them provide anything that would grab me over the three sites that are a character less. r.im is a great domain, but it even feels pretty slow for me. (The site is based in China.)

3rd place – 17 Characters – 3 Sites

LinksPreadeR

http://l.pr/a44sl

re.pl.y

http://p.ly/l5GhW

u.nu

http://u.nu/9xhg3

This group is where things start to get interesting. re.p.ly has a slick aggregated statistics system that will show comments about the url from social networks. So you can see who’s retweeing your URL, commenting on Digg, or posting to friendfeed, etc. – Statistics can be viewed by ammending a plus sign to the end of a url. Example stats: http://re.p.ly/61Q6E+

It’s not as short as all of the domains before it, but it might have the best features of any in this bunch./

4th Place – 18 Characters – 3 Sites

Amendable Short Url Service

http://a.gd/d17045

Amendable Short Url Service

http://a.nf/31b17d

j.mp

http://j.mp/3dtcod

And rounding out the bottom of our 3 letter domains are these sites. It’s interesting to note that j.mp was actually purchased by bit.ly – and interchangeable. http://j.mp/3dtcod and http://bit.ly/3dtcod will go to the same place.

bit.ly has been probably the most innovative player in the market, and according to tweetmeme has 13% of the market.

tinyurl (and it’s ironically large urls) has about 88% of the marketshare – showing that people don’t care, or maybe spammers love tinyurl, or it’s gone mainstream and people don’t care to change.

It should be noted that bit.ly is the default of TweetDeck, Twhirl and others. And maybe the extra few characters are because of how many users and URLs they’re actually storing. Maybe it’s naive of me to judge a service based on how short the URLs are.

But that’s just how nerdy I am, I want it to be as short as possible, and for now I’m going to be using http://9.gp, with a close eye on http://p.ly and http://3.ly

Do you know of any 3 letter domains I missed? Tell me! :)

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In a clean install, clicking a mailto: link will trigger the e-mail client selection dialog, which allows users to choose between using Opera Mail, the system default mailer, and a couple of random web mail providers. Users can change their settings in Preferences > Advanced > Programs by editing the “mailto” handler.

This feature works via a list of web mail providers in the webmailproviders.ini file in the “defaults” sub-directory of the Opera program directory. On Windows, for instance, the file will be in “C:\Program Files\Opera\defaults\”. On OS X, the file is in the Opera.app package in the “Contents/Resources/defaults/” directory. Opera will need to be restarted to pick up new/changed entries in the file.

For whatever reason, they don’t include GMail by default, if you would like to use it add the following code to the bottom of the webmailproviders.ini

[Gmail]
ID=1
URL=https://mail.google.com/mail/?view=cm&fs=1&to=%t&su=%j&body=%m&cc=%k&bcc=%l
ICON=http://mail.google.com/favicon.ico

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I’m not immune from the effects of the economy and it’s sad to see businesses cut their web budgets, there is nothing more damaging you can do to your business.

Your web presence is just as important, if not more-so than your brick and mortar presence, and you should make sure both look tidy. :)

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If you’re like me, you’ve been looking for a way to bring the two services together in some sort of halfway decent manner.

These are two of my favorite ways and I recommend them strongly.

1) Twitter Gadget for Gmail

The Twitter Gadget for Gmail is not to be confused with TwitterGadget – they’re two similar services, but the former greatly outshines the later.

Once the widget is installed you’ll notice that it provides a little box to the left which you can use to quickly update your status. When you click on your name you’ll see a screen that looks like this.

Containing everything that you would ever want in a Twitter client – including the ability to view replies/DMs and it includes the killer read/unread feature that I’ve been looking for in a web-based service. It automatically refreshes and everything is done in-line so you can leave this window open and just watch the tweets roll in.

The developers are currently working on some new features including a way to share tweets between Gmail users, but I’m highly surprised this isn’t one of the most popular clients out on the market currently.

2) TweetByMail

TweetByMail is a Canadian startup launched after Twitter canceled their SMS service in Canada. It lets you send and recieve Twitter status updates from any email client. It looks like this in my email box. (I’ve created a GMail label to filter them out.)

You can see that you can get a good birdseye view of what’s going on, and then you can use the tweets like you would any other piece of email, you can forward them, mark them as read, mark them as unread, move them to folders, add flags to them, etc.

The only downside of this way is you’re unable to filter down replies to you automatically, although you could use some gmail trickiness to star messages that contain @yourname in them, or you could use a service like Twitter2Mail.

TweetByMail supports all of the standard twitter commands, so you can update and reply to updates directly from your email box. In the few times I’ve needed support with the service they’ve been very prompt and very helpful. It’s a service I’m surprised isn’t more popular.

–

Hopefully I’ve pointed you into the right direction to getting a good Twitter solution, if you have any questions feel free to leave a comment or @livejamie me on Twitter. :)

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This site was built using Wordpress and Notepad++ mainly, and I’m happy with the way it came out. I’ve always been looking for a solution that allowed me to easily publish portfolio pieces and keep a blog of sorts on the side – and with some of the newer releases of wordpress it lets me do just that.

If you run into any problems or anything don’t hesitate to let me know, and thanks so much for reading this.

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