With social media platforms with the likes of Twitter using URL trimmers to help users stay under the 140-character limit, YouTube has recently decided that its own URL was too long. The video-hosting site has recently launched youtu.be, its official shortener for YouTube videos.
The youtu.be shortener is going to be used only for YouTube links, so anything with this shortener can be trusted. (Just to make sure you don’t go thinking YouTube is suddenly up to something.) The shortener will still have the same video ID’s, so developers can still show thumbnails, embed videos, or see if you’ve got a viral video on your hand that is spreading.
To use the shortener, use the AutoShare feature in your YouTube account and sync it with, say, Twitter, and the URL will be automatically shortened. If for any reason you want to shorten the URL manually, you can simply replace the “http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=” part of the URL with “http://youtu.be/” and that’s it.
YouTube hopes that several other “cool things” can sprout from the new shortening services.
Via: YouTube Blog, Tech Radar
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