If you have been using twitter, you would often see people tweeting with a tiny URL which shortens the URL by encoding it into random characters. For eg. if you want to encode google.com into a tiny URL, then visit tinyurl.com and make it a tiny URL which would look something like tinyurl.com/2×6rgl. Now when this tiny URL is opened, it is redirected to google.com and so it works.
This tool has been very helpful for most of us but there have been cases where people have ended up in a embarrassing situation of sites they dint wanna see. Now to get rid of such a problem, you can preview the tiny URL before opening it.
How?
Go here : http://prevurl.com/
Type the tiny URL : tinyurl.com/2×6rgl
See the decoded URL along with a thumbnail preview.
How does Tiny URL work ?
The main objective of this application is to convert the actual URL into a 6 digit alpha-neumeric code with a re-direct command. Now in general, there are 26 letters and 10 numbers which could form the actual URL. For each character in the alias, tinyURL has upto 2,176,782,336 aliases to work with until they run out of codes. At this point of time, they would switch over to a 7 digit code instead of 6 and later to 8 digit code. TinyURL quoted that they have encoded upto 62 million links till now and it will take time for them to introduce the 7 digit series.
