YouTube Launches Youtu.be
YouTube today announced its very own URL shortener, joining the likes of TinyURL, bit.ly and even goo.gl.
In a blog post published this week, YouTube's Vijay Karunamurthy announced that the company was launching a URL shortener for users eager to cut those long, pesky links down to something more bite-sized and manageable.
You can use the feature via AutoShare, which links your YouTube account to the likes of Twitter and Google reader. Whenever you favorite a video, it'll show up on your network and your friends will see this shortened URL.
If you're not into spamming your friends with all your favorited videos, you use the feature manually too:
To use youtu.be manually, simply take a URL like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdeioVndUhs and replace the"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=" with "http://youtu.be/" to get: http://youtu.be/FdeioVndUhs Plug that shorter URL into a browser, and you'll see it redirects to that video.
In case you're interested, the example YouTube used is New Boy, a short film from Ireland that focuses on a young African boy moving to Dublin. I hadn't heard of the short – shocking, seeing as how it was nominated for an Oscar and us Micks tend to freak out and go nuts when something like that happens – but it's actually pretty good. Embedded below for those of you who have nothing better to do two days before Christmas as well as those who have an affinity for funny Irish accents.
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Ok
Am I missing something here? All that to save me from typing 3 letters??
Useless, stupid and confusing.
who actually types all that into a browser anyways though? Don't most of us just go to youtube.come and then browse around from there?
You shave off 'www', '.com' and '/watch?v='. Much more than 3 letters.
You don't necessarily have to type in 'www' and '/watch?v=' to get to their website. I use youtube.com and DNS resolves just fine.
We can nit-pick all day long but it only really saves me from typing 3 letters.
OpenDNS shortcut, I type "ut" and I get to YouTube, can't get much shorter then that
OpenDNS shortcut, I type "ut" and I get to YouTube, can't get much shorter then that
That didn't work for me and I use OpenDNS.
but will this new naming rename crysis to crys.is ?????
You don't necessarily have to type in 'www' and '/watch?v=' to get to their website. I use youtube.com and DNS resolves just fine.We can nit-pick all day long but it only really saves me from typing 3 letters.
Yes but you do need '/watch?v=' to get to a specific video... The whole point of the shortener. Stop trolling
wouldn't it just be quicker to copy and paste the link?
OpenDNS shortcut, I type "ut" and I get to YouTube, can't get much shorter then that
rofl, I go to university of texas.
You don't necessarily have to type in 'www' and '/watch?v=' to get to their website. I use youtube.com and DNS resolves just fine.We can nit-pick all day long but it only really saves me from typing 3 letters.
The whole point of this is to share videos. so you could tell your friends to go to youtube.com and then search "blah blah" and then select the third result and watch that...or you could send them this URL which goes directly to the video. So when sharing videos it does save a few steps or letters in the URL depending on which of the above methods you use. But then again I dont really think the old method of copying the full URL and pasting it in an IM or e-mail was too hard so i dont see the need for this....maybe with twitters small character limit but i dunno cause twitter is stupid and i dont use it
Convenient, I can now redirect my favorite porn site with the tiny url "" (blank). Just press enter! No more will I have to type fastidious letters and numbers to access the illicit delights of the internet.
Why can't you just put YT in the bookmark or quicklink? wtf, so lazy.
Did you know alot of people google "yahoo" just to go to yahoo mail? wtf use the damn fucking bookmark or go back to stone age!
wouldn't it just be quicker to copy and paste the link?
agreed, why not just copy and paste?
wow...great video....
This shortening URL stuff is crap. I use Firefox and just type 'Youtube' in the main line and it takes me straight to youtube.
If a URL gets too long then it is just easier for someone to send you the hyperlink and you click on it. All they have to do is copy/paste.
I can't even remember the last time I typed out a URL rather than search for it or click a hyperlink or bookmarked page.
In firefox I can type in just 'YOU' and I get Youtube.com.
type in just 'YO' and you get the Youtube login.
type 'YT' for youtube.com
type just 'Y' and I get Yahoo.com
That's a domain from Belgium, I wonder if their servers are in Belgium too, since Belgium is pretty tight around network traffic (they are still in the middle centuries with their 10GB/month limits).
Youtube is wasting their money. Nobody wants to type video's address. It's too complex and hard to remember, most importantly, it's TOO LONG to type in.
Everyone uses good ol' fashioned way - copying and pasting.
[quote]
hmmm, kinda dumb
This is just confusing. Change it back, NOW.
You guys are totally missing the point of this. It's not changed to help people type the URL in manually--it's to make the URL shorter so that it takes up less space when it's pasted somewhere, like in a Facebook post. Shortening a URL by 15 characters is a great improvement. Also, they're not getting rid of www.youtube.com, they're just offering this as an alternative way to link people to videos.
Now we have to remember where to put the period in youtu.be? versus just typing youtube.com the .com takes all of .5 seconds to type. This is retarded.
If you don´t want to use it DON´T!!! stop bitchin´, sheesh.
now go drink some egg nog
lol, maybe they added it so that us high schoolers might be able to get past the internet filter that our district has on our computers at school
You can get to the YouTube site without the '/watch?v=', but to go DIRECTLY to a SPECIFIC vid, you need either the '/watch?v=' or, this new way. But, I tried it with a vid, and it did NOT work. It got to YouTube, but with a 404 error.
If you want to use this feature, bookmark this stuff:
javascript:alert('http://youtu.be/' + /[\?\&]v=([a-zA-z0-9]+)/.exec(location.href)[1])
and then go to a youtube video and open the bookmark.
Press [ctrl+a] [ctrl+c] [enter]
and viola: you have a link in your clipboard