It’s like saying, if Twitter, Facebook, Google and all the other sites can implement their own URL shorterner for sharing links why can’t YouTube have its own too? After all, YouTube videos are one of the most shared stuff on Facebook and Twitter. So, the YouTube folks joined the rage with its own YouTube URL shortener.
So now if you don’t trust unknown sites hosting videos being shared to you, with YouTube’s URL shortener you are sure that the links that you are clicking are actually YouTube videos. Of course, that’s beside another benefit which is saving you some precious character count, especially if you’re sharing video links on Twitter.
To use this feature, you must first activate the AutoShare feature on your YouTube account. This will link up your account to Twitter and Google Reader, so that the next time you found an cool video and favorite it, it will be automatically shared on your social networking accounts with the shortened version of the video’s YouTube URL appearing as link.
Alternatively, you can use YouTube’s URL shortener manually by replacing the part of a YouTube video’s URL that says – “https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=” with “http://youtu.be/”.
So for example I have this video URL –
“https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7__F5boLIk”
and I’ll just replace it with
“http://youtu.be/o7__F5boLIk“,
and the link is good to go. Cool.
