In its article on TinyURL, the first widely used URL shortener, Wikipedia defined the service as one "that provides short aliases for redirection of long URLs". The launch of Twitter in 2006, with its 140-character limit on posts, prompted the development of many new URL shortening services such as bit.ly and tr.im.

Some content publishers and aggregators have followed suit and integrated URL shortening into their own service to facilitate sharing of links to their content. Examples of these are tcrn.ch (TechCrunch) and digg.com (Digg). Web sharing services have also joined in the fun, a recent example being shar.es (ShareThis).

Here at Propeller we have secured the domain pplr.us and will be launching our own URL shortener shortly. However, up until today, we did not accept shortened URLs as Propeller story submissions. I'm happy to report that we now accept shortened URLs. Story submission has not changed at all to accommodate this--simply submit the shortened URL, and we will save the original ("lengthened") URL as the source of the story.

So for example, a recent Propeller Week In Review blog post has the following URL:

http://blog.propeller.com/2009/06/05/propeller-week-in-review-greatest-hits-edition/

Using the tr.im URL shortener, the alias for the above URL is:

http://tr.im/nyv6

As of today, you can now submit tr.im URLs (as well as any other URL shortening service). Simply enter the shortened URL (in this case, http://tr.im/nyv6) into the URL box. Propeller will then save the story with the lengthened blog.propeller.com URL.

And that's it! Let us know if you have any questions.

Happy shortening,
Tom (member tdrapeau)

P.S. Follow Propeller on Twitter!