Fwd4Me? What's that all about then??

Fwd4Me?

What's that all about then??

In a nutshell, http://fwd4.me is a URL shortening service.

To explain what a 'url shortening service' is, we'll use the following example:

Imagine you have a long url such as http://blogs.reuters.com/mediafile/2009/04/30/aols-tim-armstrongs-more-worried-about-main-st-than-wall-st/ that you wish to send to someone, well quite often an email program won't display a long url correctly at the recipients end.

What will usually happen is the email program (such as Outlook or Hotmail) will break up the long url on to several lines, so it will appear in the recipients InBox like this:

http://blogs.reuters.com/mediafile/2009/04
30/aols-tim-armstrongs-more-worried-abou
t-main-st-than-wall-st/

Clearly no good, that link doesn't work!

Also, with the ever-growing popularity of web sites like Twitter where space is a premium, a short (and working!) url is an absolute must.

To use our site and shorten your long url, simply head over to http://fwd4.me, paste in your long url and you'll instantly be given a short url.

Pasting our long url example above into http://fwd4.me returns a nice short url of just http://fwd4.me/nC

See the difference?

From a massive long url of http://blogs.reuters.com/mediafile/2009/04/30/aols-tim-armstrongs-more-worried-about-main-st-than-wall-st/ down to a tiny short url of http://fwd4.me/nC - much better!

Short in itself for "Forward For Me", the http://fwd4.me web site aims to offer as many features as possible, but with a lightening fast and easy to use web site.

Just some of the features we aim to offer over the coming months:

• Custom urls - Turn your free 'home page' url of something like http://homepage.ntlworld.com/robin.d.h.walker/cmtips/index.html into a short (and much nicer looking) url of http://fwd4.me/robin - The possibilities are endless with custom AND short urls!
  
• Stats on your links - See how popular the links you make are, you'll be able to tell exactly how many people have clicked on your short url
• Get a preview of the web site you're about to visit
• Add notes or comments to your short urls
  

We will develop the site to the best of our abilities but it will only ever be as good as the people who use it so if you've got a feature request, let us know!