Firefox Extension Resizes Shortened URLs

Tools for shortening URLs have become very popular in the age of microblogging, but shortening a URL to incomprehensible code makes it impossible to know what you’re clicking on.

The now quintessential microblogging service is Twitter, which limits messages sent to a group of followers to 140 characters. This makes it difficult to post URLs with long set of parameters that follow. The necessity to shorten those URLs gave rise to services like tinyurl, is.gd, ping.fm, bit.ly, tweetburner and others.

The consequence then became users were clueless about what they were clicking. That wouldn’t be a huge deal so long as the link comes from a trusted source—someone a person knows whom they follow, or a friend on a social network. But recently social network accounts—not so much the networks themselves, except in one very LongURL will return what address the link resolves to so the user can judge whether or not to click on it. There’s also a