It was only a couple of years ago when TinyURL was everyone’s favorite URL shortener. Things have changed rapidly over the past couple of months and now there are tons of these services – some a lot better than TinyURL (this growth was no doubt fuelled by Twitter and it’s 140 character limit). The likes of bit.ly and is.gd have revamped the URL shortener segment and now almost everyone on the net probably uses one of these services. But have you noticed that every time you want a URL shortened, you have to visit the service’s web page? For the lazy asses who don’t want to do this, here is a desktop application that’ll shorten the URL for you, with no browser involvement :)
MURLS (short for Multiple Uniform Resource Locator Shortener) is a windows desktop application that can generate shortened versions of any given URL. It supports not only one but 26 different URL shorteners. You get to choose which services to use and if you tick 20 different services from the settings dialog the application will generate 20 links (see above screenshot) in a matter of seconds (although I can’t possibly imagine why anyone would want more than one short link for any given URL).
A downside of using this app would be the unavailability of web based features offered by various such services. For example, you won’t be able to use Bit.ly’s click tracking features with this utility.
Download
MURLS is free, portable and easily downloadable (only 300KB in size).
[Click Here] to visit MURLS download page on Google code
There is also a link to a command line version which I didn’t try.
