Google or Twitter should buy TinyUrl.com

If you haven't discovered TinyUrl, the awesome online utility from the mind of Kevin "Gilby" Gilbertson, you should check it out.

Hate long, cumbersome URLs (those "Web site addresses" that probably should never have been exposed in the first place)? Enter them in TinyUrl, and get back a 24 character URL.

So this:

http://www.adamcreighton.com/blogs/
ramblings/2007/04/voice-acting-
mocap-and-video-games.html

Turns into this:

http://tinyurl.com/272x9w

Much nicer! Especially for things like mobile and Twitter usage.

Since blog PermaLinks, links to forum posts, links with lots of parameters, etc. are wicked long, think about someone like Google integrating TinyUrl into their services, and automatically converting URLs before display.

I'm not talking just for Blogger.com (I think I'm getting done with them for a variety of reasons), but for all of the other multitudinous efforts Google's got in constant beta -- Google mobile, Google Maps, etc. -- shortened URLs would rock.

And in the Web 2.0 mashup world, I see other opportunities for TinyUrl -- like Twitter. I would so like Twitter to automatically take a posted URL and turn it into a TinyUrl. Makes sense, since TinyUrl is getting so much freaking usage from Twitter users. And it could be configurable, so Twitter users can choose whether they want to convert URLs or not.

In the meanwhile, I've created a "TinyUrl" link at the bottom of each blog post, so folks can more easily create TinyUrls from my posts.

I've found it hard to take my Product Management hat off this week.