The popularity of sharing links on social networking platforms has given rise to a now very widespread type of service on the Internet: the URL shortener. These are super short URLs that point to pages on the Internet with long URLs.

A normal URL might look like this:

http://websitename.com/b/2008/11/14/14-abcd-efgh-ijkl-mnop-qrst-uvwx-yz.htm

That looks quite long and ugly, but with the help of a URL shortener you can shorten it to something more like http://bit.ly/1a7YzQ.