tinyurl

Mashable reader Ben Kerin has noticed an odd change on Facebook that began last night: those importing their Twitter feeds into the service no longer see their links as clickable.

Last month, Bit.ly surpassed TinyURL to become the Web’s most popular URL shortener.

This month, the story is about separating from the pack.

The URL shortening market has been experiencing a renaissance ever since Twitter’s 140 character limit spurred the necessity of shorter URLs.

Life moves pretty fast.

Sometimes it moves so fast we just don’t have time to stop and maintain all of our social networks individually.

Earlier today we mentioned that Digg.com appears to have changed the behavior of its short URLs so they no longer go to the source of the story for logged-out users: instead they direct visitors to a landing page on Digg.com.

The change has many negative implications for publishers, including the fact that readers who think they are creating a link to your content are actually just pushing traffic to Digg.

Tweetmeme, the popular aggregator of the most retweeted stories on Twitter, has just released a variety of new features, some of which we previewed earlier this month.

Do you remember Twitter one year ago?

It was 1/10th the size it is today and its default URL shortener was TinyURL, the most popular tool of its kind for years.

On July 14th, 2008 though, a new rival was born: Bit.ly, which not only shortened links (and had shorter URLs), but added deep analytics so you could know about who was clicking, how often, and from where.

We’ve had a weekend of Facebook spam and scams: yesterday “.be” domain names became the tool of choice for what appeared to be a phishing attack aimed at stealing your Facebook login details.

A growing number of URL shorteners - like bit.ly and TinyURL - have sprung up recently to make lengthy links more shareable; many also add toolbars, interim preview pages or statistics. But what if you could create a short URL and help a charity at the same time?