Expanding shortened URLs

With Twitter attracting more and more people every day, you've probably noticed URL shortening services becoming popular again. These service turn a long URL into a shorter link, saving precious characters for micro-blogging services.

This doesn't affect Twitter alone, and shortened links can be used in any other place like forums, mailing lists, chats, etc.

The problem is, clicking on any of these shortened urls can become a potential security risk:

For instance, while most people would think twice before clicking on a link showing http://www.icantbetrusted.com most wouldn't have a problem clicking it if it were hiding behind a http://tinyurl.com/xyz URL. And that's a real problem...

Fortunately, you can do something about it using greasemonkey.

With this TinyURL decoder script, all those shortened links will reveal its true identity. The same thing can be accomplished with this other Psychic TinyURL script, which adds the expanded URL to the link title.

via [Webmonkey]