Many tools use tinyurl to shorten URLs, because it was the origin of this wonderful idea. TwitterFox is such an example.

I prefer TwitterFox to twhirl because as a Firefox add-on, the url can be inserted into the tweet with a single click (Besides, word “twhirl” is hard to remember ). But why didn’t it provide an option of URL shortener to use?

We can modify its source to achieve this, though. Open the file chrome/TwitterFox.jar!/content/twitternotifier.js and find the line where TINYURL_CREATE_API is defined. Change the constant value to “http://is.gd/api.php?longurl=”, which is the API of is.gd.

There are countless URL shorteners around the web. Just choose your favorite.