Last month I blogged about
How to Preview Shortened URLs (TinyURL, bit.ly, is.gd, and more). Just this past week, I found out about a Firefox extension that allows you to preview the full URL when you hover your cursor over a shortened URL. This is even better than manually previewing URLs because it saves a lot of time, plus it also works with services that don't give you the option to manually preview the expanded URLs (such as cli.gs, tr.im, ow.ly, adjix.com, and tons more).
LongURL currently supports more than 180 known URL-shortening services and even some that the developer isn't aware of; the developer claims that it should support "pretty much every shortening service" because of the way it was designed.
You can get LongURL as a standard Firefox add-on or as a Greasemonkey script.
If you don't use Firefox, you can go to
LongURL's site Toolsvoid Unshorten URL and paste any shortened URL to see the expanded URL.
UPDATE, 3 Aug 2023: LongURL.org is no longer online, and Unshorten.it and its extension have apparently not been active developed since 2019, so I removed those links. As a general rule, I no longer recommend using browser extensions, with few exceptions. My preferred alternative short-URL expander site is
Toolsvoid Unshorten URL.
UPDATE, 6 May 2013: The LongURL Firefox add-on is no longer being developed and will not
work with current versions of Firefox. The best alternative I've been
able to find is
unshorten.it for Firefox and Chrome. See also my
How to Preview Shortened URLs (TinyURL, bit.ly, is.gd, and more) article which is updated much more frequently than this one.
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