Shorty – Your Own TinyURL

Khoi Vinh recently announced an awesome utility for anyone who frequently passes long URLs out to contacts or site visitors. The service, known as Shorty, is a self-hosted alternative to URL shortening services like TinyURL or URL123. Shorty is self hosted. This means that any long URLs you pass through the utility will be prefixed with your own domain and whats more you don't have to worry about losing your urls if the service a like TinyURl goes down.

The critical difference between Shorty and TinyURL is that Shorty resides on your server. You install it (all you need is a MySQL database and PHP) and you then have the power of TinyURL and its ilk, but rather than being tied to a third party, it’s a part of your brand.

Seeing as though Shorty – a self hosted solution – was too enticing for me to leave, I quickly downloaded the latest public beta release for comparison.