Youtu.be: Because YouTube Needs Its Own URL Shortener Too

by admin December 22, 2009 at 2:40 pm

If anything dominated the social media world last week, it was URL shorteners. Both Facebook and Google launched URL shorteners, Fb.me and Goo.gl respectively.

Now Google subsidiary YouTube has joined the URL shortening bandwagon. It has just announced youtu.be, the official short link of the world’s largest video site.

The shortener is exclusive to YouTube links (no surprise). Its primary function is to share YouTube videos and channels with friends, mostly through YouTube’s AutoShare feature, which syndicates your activity on YouTube to Twitter, Facebook, and elsewhere. and just like Fb.me, you can manually add the video code to the end of youtu.be and get the appropriate video. Youtu.be/c6K9P58Yf7E, for example, leads to the video I recorded of how the SF Zoo uses Twitter.

Read more: mashable.com