Platform Edition

Let’s say you land on a web page that has tons of links but they are all encoded with services like tinyurl, ping.fm, bit.ly, is.gd, etc. so you have no clue about where those links may lead you to? The TinyURL service does offer a preview feature but most would agree that its too time consuming.

There are a few plugins like Long URL and Long URL Please that help you know where those shortened links really point to but the problem with this approach is that it works only with Firefox.

Bookmarklet Replaces Short URLs with Original Links

If you are not on Firefox or need a simple solution that requires no installation, just drag this Long URL Please bookmarklet from longurlplease.com to your browser bookmarks toolbar.

When you click this bookmarklet link in your browser, all short URLs on the current web page will be replaced with the original URLs so you don’t have to worry about getting into embarrassing situations anymore. The same solution will work in Google Chrome, IE, Firefox and other browsers.

Update: The upcoming FeedDemon 2.8 release includes a built-in short URL decoder - you can hover the mouse over any short URL and it show a balloon tip contains the long expanded URL very similar to FriendFeed.