by Travis Scott, CEO at RainierDigital
This week Digg, the popular online content aggregator, launched DiggBar – a URL shortening tool that lets you shorten any URL without leaving the page you are viewing. It is a great tool! Nice work Digg! Gone are the days of copying a URL, opening a new tab or browser, navigating to a URL-shortening website such at bit.ly or tinyurl.com, shortening the link, copying it, opening Twitter and pasting it. Now you can shorten a URL without leaving the page you are viewing.
DiggBar gives you two ways to shorten the URL…the best way is to add the DiggBar button to your browser’s Bookmarks Bar. This is something you only have to do once. Once this button is in your browser’s bookmarks Bar, you simply press it whenever you find an article you want to share. DiggBar will then shorten the URL and the result will be shown in your browser’s address bar. Copy this and paste it into an email, your Twitter or Facebook status or any other service you use to share information with your peers.
The other way is a little more cumbersome, but still a great alternative to navigating to another website. If you find a link you want to share, simply type http://digg.com/ in your browser’s address bar in front of the URL you want to shorten. Press enter and voila! Shortened URL.
Here’s an example…say I just read an article on ESPN.com about Ichiro, the star player of my favorite baseball team, the Mariners and found out he will not be playing in the season opener next week. Now I want to share this story with my friends on Twitter and Facebook and need to shorten the original URL.
In my address bar, the original link is: http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/news/story?id=4039525
By simply typing http://digg.com/ in front of this URL in my browser’s address bar and pressing enter I now have the following URL I can use in Twitter or elsewhere: http://digg.com/u18ql
Sharing content is only going to get easier and this is one more step in that direction.
Get the DiggBar button for your Bookmarks Bar here: http://digg.com/tools/diggbar
I would love to hear what you think. Comment below with your thoughts on DiggBar.
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[...] thought this was a timely article, given my last post about Digg’s new URL shortening service, although it’s not one of the services [...]
[...] such as Bit.ly or tinurl.com. I prefer to use Digg’s new tool, which I cover in a previous blog post. I also recently posted an article I found on searchengineland.com titled “Analysis: [...]