I created a URL trimming service at x.thripp.com [1]. The URLs are the same length as Tinyurl [2]: 25 characters, in the format http://x.thripp.com/xxxxx. I put it together using Hidayet Dogan’s Phurl [3] for myself, but then thought it should be released to the world. I made some modifications to the code so the random part (after the slash) is five characters instead of six (it’ll be a while before the 62 million combinations are used up), it respects trailing slashes, it links to the new address instead of just showing it in plain text, and it tells you the number of characters you’ve saved (it’ll even be negative if the original address was shorter). The service is simple, fast, and clean, unlike thripp.com [4], which is heavy and feature-laden (flexible) and thus more prone to outages. x.thripp.com shares no code and uses a separate database from thripp.com, so you can count on the URLs working forever (barring problems with my host, SYN Hosting). I’ll be using it myself on Twitter [5].

Here’s the first trimmed URL as an example: http://x.thripp.com/83e74 [6].