Shortening Google Maps Links

Yes, Google Maps are terrific, but unfortunately they got those nasty ol' giant URLs.

Sid Steward knew about TinyURL but he wanted a shorter URL that at least gives you some idea of where the URL is going (unlike TinyURL which could go anywhere) so he invented LookLeap, which is available at http://lookleap.com/site/ .

LookLeap runs on bookmarklets (what, no shorter-URL forms on the site itself? BUMMAH!) There are actually two types of links generated. The first, which looks like this:

http://lookleap.com/maps.google.com/a5

Takes you directly to the page that was lookleaped (and no, it's not teeny-tiny, but it's way smaller than a regular Google Maps URL.)

The second kind of URL, which looks like this:

http://lookleap.com/maps.google.com/a5/look

Takes you to an intermediate page that shows you a thumbnail of the shrunken URL, along with links to open, discuss, or e-mail the link. Nice idea.

Though the LookLeap page mentions Google Maps, it seems that this service would work with anything; the statistics page ( http://lookleap.com/site/statistics ) shows a huge number of URL types in addition to Google Maps.

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