Make Your Youtu.be short link
March 3, 2022
Link shorteners are all the rage these days, as they ensure that those useful URLs you’re sharing don’t take up too much valuable character space while simultaneously providing you a hint of what you’re going to click on. We’ve just created youtu.be as a shortener for YouTube video links — and just YouTube video connections — so you can be confident you’re about to watch a YouTube video when you see a link with this URL. (Developers can also do fascinating things like show you thumbnails, embed the video directly, or track how a video is spreading in real-time because the link contains the ID of the video you’re going to see.)
Why did Google create YouTu.be?
Google registered YouTu.be in 2009 as a means to abbreviate YouTube URLs. Microblogging websites (particularly Twitter) were becoming popular at the time. These websites allow users to send messages with a limited number of characters. Twitter, for example, limits each tweet to a maximum of 140 characters. As a result, it was critical to shorten YouTube URLs as much as possible so that they could be quickly shared on social media sites like Twitter. If the amount of characters in a video ID could be reduced, Google could condense YouTube URLs even further. However, as you may be aware, YouTube is a huge video-sharing site. Google requires an ID with a sufficient number of characters in order to uniquely identify each video. As a result, Google will not be able to make any concessions in this area. However, Google saved 15 characters by inventing the domain name YouTube. The relevance of this saving is easily understood by Twitter addicts!
How to reduce your Youtube link
Use AutoShare to connect your YouTube account to social media sites like Twitter and Google Reader to see this feature in action. Then, anytime you love a video on YouTube, for example, your network will see this reduced version of the video’s URL. Google cut shortens the URL of a video by 15 characters by launching the YouTube domain name. Take a look at the example below. It shows how a YouTube URL is 15 characters less than a YouTube.com counterpart. Take a URL like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdeioVndUhs and replace the “https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=” with “https://youtu.be/” to get: https://youtu.be/FdeioVndUhs. If you type that shorter URL into a browser, it will take you to that video.
