Bites.

We experiment (okay, play) with all sorts of cool toys on the web. Some even make us mad for not inventing them first.

One service I've been playing around with lately is bit.ly. Bit.ly is "a simple url shortener."

So it turns this: http://www.elementcreative.com/pov/2009/01/bites.php

into this: http://bit.ly/giDN

Probably one of the first (if not the first) of this type of service was tinyurl.com, but since then, all sorts have popped up, a by-product of dealing with all those computer-generated, CMS-driven, unique-tracking URLs that have inundated our lives and emails and tweets and Facebook statuses. Bit.ly is a bit different, though. It has a really nice, simple API that lets you programmatically shorten URLs, letting you dynamically generate short, human-friendly links within your web application. And because you sign up for an account on bit.ly, it'll also keep track of the URLs you've shortened with it.

There's some nice browser bookmarklet tools that make it easy to quickly turn that 5-mile long New York Times link into something that won't break in your uncle's email client, as well as a relatively new feature that rolls your bit.ly history into an RSS feed. Good stuff.

The blowfish mascot is cool, too.