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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