Tinyurl is not tiny anymore

I've just setup http://akyl.net, a Drupal 6 website, with nodes configured to automatically be announced on Twitter, and posted my first entry: http://akyl.net/easy-way-extending-linux-logical-volumes. Everything looks great, but one thing. To my disappointment an automatically generated tweet for the post https://twitter.com/#!/akylnet/status/181975402728787968 contained a really not-tiny url like http://tinyurl.com/7whfyfr. 26 character in total. Maybe in the ancient times tinyurl's urls were indeed tiny, but not anymore. Considering Twitter allows tweets of only up to 140 characters, I really would like to spare space to make my titles as long and as definitive as possible.

So why not to switch to other tiny url alternatives like http://j.mp, for example, if you have a long domain name?! But as for quite a short domain name like akyl.net we even don't need to use external shortener services.

All we needed for our project was to install two excellent contributed modules http://drupal.org/project/shorturl and http://drupal.org/project/shurly which complement perfectly an activated on our website Twitter Post module. As a result we get a tidy and a really tiny url like http://akyl.net/ZkJ. You can see it by yourself: https://twitter.com/#!/akylnet/status/181993638400765953

Now just to be able to compare two methods I have re-posted the first entry http://akyl.net/easy-way-extending-linux-logical-volumes on Twitter and got a short url for it: http://akyl.net/ZkJ

Let's compare: http://tinyurl.com/7whfyfr - 26 characters and http://akyl.net/ZkJ - 19 characters for the same URL: http://akyl.net/easy-way-extending-linux-logical-volumes Much better, isn't it?