So, let’s just pretend for a moment that there was a link you wanted to send to someone that had an insufferably long URL. So you try to paste it into your email program, but the person you were trying to send it to couldn’t view it because their stupid email program cut the link off. And what ensues is a ridiculous six-email-long conversation in which you say things like “no, backspace but then add a percent sign, and then copy — yeah, control C — and then paste — I think it’s control P — oh, crap, you did a backspace?” And so imagine that you could just say “go to http://shrtlnk.com/daryl/beach” to show off your beach photos otherwise available at an oppresively long url. Would that be useful?

There’s at least one site that provides a similar service (tinyurl.com). Unfortunately, it shackles you to its random url scheme. That is, instead of the short and semantically useful http://shrtlnk.com/daryl/beach or (if you’re logged in) http://shrtlnk.com/beach), it might force you to use something like http://tinyurl.com/g8lrz. But something like http://shrtlnk.com/daryl/beach might be more useful to you and your friends. And something like http://shrtlnk.com/daryl might be a useful as a way of organizing the things that your friend daryl is linking to. Is this something you might find useful?

If you were a Firefox or a Flock user and it were easy for you to click a button, apply a label, and passively share a long-url’d link with a friend, would you do it?