When Twitter, Facebook, Google and other reputed social networking websites implemented their own URL shorteners for sharing links, how could YouTube, whose videos are amongst the most shared videos on Facebook and Twitter, stay behind? It has joined the league with its own YouTube URL shortener.

So now if you don’t want to take a risk clicking on links of videos of unknown websites, with YouTube’s URL shortener, at least you can distinguish the links of YouTube videos from the rest.

Of course, that’s beside another benefit of saving you some precious character count, which is, almost necessary, if you’re sharing video links on Twitter.

To use this feature (YouTube URL Shortener), you must first activate the Auto Share feature on your YouTube account. This will link your account to Twitter and Google Reader and help you get any YouTube video shared with your social networking site as soon as you mark it as favorite. The link will contain the shortened version of the video’s You Tube URL.

Alternatively, you can use You Tube’s URL shortener manually by replacing the part of a YouTube video’s URL that says – “http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=” with “http://youtu.be/”.

So for example I have this video URL -

“http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7__F5boLIk”

and I replace it simply with

“http://youtu.be/o7__F5boLIk“, the link is good to go.