Many websites have quite long addresses to various pages. This is particularly the case if linking across to a blog (or like) since the addresses for such blog posts generally have the title included (to assist with identification of the site by search engines). While this is good from the perspective of previewing the content of the page before actually visiting the page, it makes it quite difficult to share the website with other people, particularly if you need to read the website address to someone over the phone (or need to retype the address, with the potential for errors). To help alleviate this issue there are many services which provide URL shortening. This will provide you with a new (much shorter) URL which redirects to the original website, making it much easier to share that shorter URL rather than the original (long) URL. Services which provide this functionality include bit.ly and tinyurl.com .