TinyURL Creator is a free web application that creates and manages free URLs in the popular URL-shortening software TinyURL. When you create a TinyURL with the webpage you are visiting, the application automatically copies the TinyURL into your clipboard and gives you the ability to save the URL for reuse in future web applications... but first, let's talk about how this all works! You visit a website, whether through an ordinary web browser or a more "traditional" web-based application like Google Chrome or Microsoft Internet Explorer, you will see a preview of the website on your screen. Once you've viewed the website, you are able to click on the "Create" button located on the far right corner of the web page.
The next time you visit that same page, you'll see a list of all of the current websites that have links to it (hence the term "url-shortening"). You can select any URL in the list, save it, and browse it using any other web browser. One of the nice features of the TinyURL creator extension is that it allows you to select whether you want to convert the TinyURL into an URL or just save it as is for future reference. Either way, the application does a pretty good job converting the TinyURL into a functional link. This also means that whenever you come across a website with a link to another site that is somehow related to your current website (maybe it has a shopping cart feature that you would like to add to your site), you won't have to search for and copy and paste your TinyURL into the address bar. Instead, you'll be able to open up the TinyURL creator application, select the URL you'd like to convert into a link, and click the "Create" button.
The last caveat about TinyURL is that it doesn't appear to be available on all browsers yet. The creators are working on getting the feature included in all major browsers (including Internet Explorer). In the mean time, you can use one of the free or shareware url shortening services to get around this problem, or you can download Google's free Chrome Web Browser instead. Either way, you won't lose any functionality from using the free version.
