This week’s vein of online ore can be found at http://bit.ly

Bit.ly will take any web address and shorten it to exactly 20 characters. This is especially useful when you are making a short form post like a Twitter entry or a Facebook status update, were the total length of your post is limited. However, it is also handy whenever you encounter a site with a URL more than a line long.

In addition, bit.ly tracks statistics, letting you know how many people followed your links, and whether or not there are other bit.ly links leading to the same location.

Personally, I love that bit.ly lets me condense web addresses so that they do not clutter up my text only communications.  And I trust bit.ly more than most other URL truncation services because it has more than 500-billion unique addresses to assign, so it will be some time before they even think of recycling one of their links to go to a new site.

Tell us what you think of Bit.ly!

Online Ore is an ongoing feature at The Gold Mine featuring tools and resources from around the web and wider world. If you know a site we should prospect please e-mail Aaron Rubman at Marissa Berger Interactive.