Last week Google introduced its own short URL Goo.gl and now YouTube follows and has its own short URL – YOUTU.BE too. YouTube has used a Belgian domain, Youtu.be. These short URL’s are for YouTube videos and be used in conjunction with the Auto Share function and also all videos on the website through these short URL’s reachable. You cannot use short URL’s for other websites as possible with the Google.
In a blog post announcing the new feature, YouTube writes that the short URL will be used exclusively for YouTube videos (which mean it isn’t as useful to spammers for misdirection). The post also notes that because all youtu.be shortlinks include the YouTube video ID, developers can use that information to surface thumbnails and track how a video is spreading.
Unfortunately, embedding a video ID has a downside: they’re relatively long. Whereas your typical bit.ly link weighs in at around 20 characters, a youtu.be link comes out to 27 characters, primarily because YouTube IDs are a beefy 11 characters long. That may not sound like much, but those extra 7 characters represent 5% of your maximum tweet length. Hopefully the features that video IDs enable for developers will outweigh that cost.
Any videos shared through YouTube’s autosharing features to Facebook, Twitter, and Google Reader will take advantage of the new short URLs automatically.
Techcrunch also reported that the youtube URL’s are Still Pretty Long :). And Mashable says Youtube needs its own Short URL Coz they just need one…. :D
You can also create the link yourself in this format:
To use youtu.be manually, simply take a URL like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdeioVndUhs and replace the “http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=” with “http://youtu.be/” to get: http://youtu.be/FdeioVndUhs Plug that shorter URL into the browser and you’ll see it redirects to that video.
