Since the arrival of Twitter, the use of URL shorteners has grown incredibly. Just so everyone is aware of what I’m talking about I will explain a little about them here. Due to the fact that twitter restricts all of their tweets to 140 characters or less, it is imperative to get your message into that tweet in as few characters as possible. Therefore when you want to post a link to something you’ve stumbled on around the web, often the link on it’s own gobbles up the 140 characters. This is where the URL shortener  such at bit.ly or tinyurl.com steps in, by creating a shorter version of the link that directs you to the actual site.

This is so convenient and has spread so quickly on the net I think that a lot of people may not be aware of the issues that this technology could cause. Why do I say this? Well with a shortened URL you never know exactly where it is going to take you. In a way it masks the destination that you would end up at. For example if I want to create a short url for this blog’s homepage, the actual URL is www.lukeandmelissah.com but a URL shortener would make it http://bit.ly/xOUfy or something similar. My reason for concern is that if the actual destination that you navigate to has malicious code or something similar on it, you could very easily and possibly without even knowing end up with an infection on your computer!

Take for example the amount of spam email you get, often the links included in the spam appear legitimate, but if you were to click on them or expose what the actual URL is you would see that it isn’t exactly what it claims to be. For this reason I think we all need to be cautious when clicking on these shortened links, in the same way we are cautious about clicking on links in emails. Don’t click on things from unknown sources!!!