First of all I want to thank the Lockergnome, Chris Pirillo himself for making known the urltea service. For a long time the only service I knew of that could turn long url’s or web addresses into something shorter that could be used in e-mails or micro blogs like my Twitter account, etc.

At first when I heard about urltea (pronouced Earl Tea as in Earl Grey Tea) I thought it was just a competing service but figured I go ahead and “kick the tires” so to speak. At first it didn’t seem that different from TinyURL but I soon learned you can add a custom tag to make it more meaningful and that is one of the things that has bothered me about services that shorten web addresses it that in making them short that take out any meaning and don’t communicate to the receiver what the web address is all about.

This morning a fellow blogger and friend of mine from the Myst fan base shared his frustration with the TinyUrl service. I was happy to point him to urltea and he seemed to think it was an improvement. I do hope the urltea people can continue development and provide a way of automatically making the smaller web addresses it creates more memorable and meaningful.

[tags]url, web address, concise, meaningful, frustration[/tags]