A bunch of URL shortening services have been popping up everywhere recently, made popular by the advent of micro-blogging, each offering users the base functionality to take long urls and shorten them, with some adding some small yet interesting functionalities on the side.
Untiny is a new service that does the exact opposite, giving you the possibility to take a shortened URL and expand it to retrieve the original web address behind it.
There are a number of reasons why this comes in handy, as it solves the problem of obfuscation created by shortened URLs where the person provided the link doesn’t have any way to tell where it really points, and in some countries it solves the problem of any of those URL shortening services being blocked.
The user interface is as simple as you can imagine such a service should be, you’re presented with a simple textbox where you can paste the shortened URL, click on the retrieve button, and get the original URL.
A quicker shortcut is also provided by directly passing the shortened URL to their service in the address bar using the following syntax: http://untiny.com?url=SHORTENED URL
Untiny also provides the possibility to add the tool in the search engine textbox in Firefox to enable users to directly paste the shortened URL in and get on their way.
An API has also been created for the service to enable developers and other services to tap into the Untiny service to expand shortened URLs.
Among the developments currently underway for Untiny are a Firefox add-on, Greasemonkey script, Mac widget and Windows widget.
Untiny was launched in public beta on September 12th from Saudi Arabia by Saleh Al-Zaid.
# Untiny