Some not-so-nice person, some where, created a phishing site designed to trick innocent users in to providing their login details to a popular web site, or web service, such as Facebook.

That person then used our free URL shortening service to create a short URL pointing to their new fake site, and include it in an email worded to trick you in to visiting that address to rectify some problem, or validate your account. Often it’s worded as an urgent security notice, or an important upgrade. To make it harder to detect, they use a forged “from”address to make it look as if the email came from Facebook (or whatever site is being attacked).

Now, replace that person with a botnet to do the dirty work en masse, and it becomes easy to send millions of mails in the hope that just a handful of recipients will fall for the trick.

We work very hard on preventing the creation of such short URLs. We can quickly identify most botnet patterns and block them before they ever get a short URL, which they can send in an email. We prevent tens of thousands such requests every day. However, there are some clever tricks used that we can’t spot straight away, which means we only get to block the URL a couple of minutes, or hours, later. That’s too late to prevent the the short URLs being sent in an email, which means that by the time you get the email, the URL will likely have been blocked, leading to the blocked message on our website that you see.

So, it’s not that your Facebook/other site’s account is compromised, or blocked in any way. It’s just that someone tricked you in to thinking it was a legitimate email about your account, that led you to a URL created on our free service. However, that URL has since been blocked because it was identified as pointing to a fake/phishing website, which is why you see the message.

On one side, you can consider yourself lucky that we blocked the URL, so you didn’t hand over any personal details to the fake site. On the other hand we’re sorry it got to the stage that our service could be used in such a way in the first place. Most of our development effort is identifying patterns of such abuse to prevent it (rather than just relying on blocking it later). We think we fair well compared to our bigger competitors in this regard, if it’s of any consolation.

Always check what address you click, in an email; even if it appears to be from a friend/colleague.

We’ve done our testing, and are happy with the whole process. Our stats are using too much resources, however, so we’re battling with what to do here. While we chew on that, we’ll roll out simple stats and accounts for all, with detailed stats disabled for now. Reduced being the just the number of clicks / last click.

As of now, the beta program is closed. We’ll start to roll out “accounts for all” in the next few weeks. We have a bit of work to do on caching before we can flip the switch, but we’re nearly through all that!

You’ll need JavaScript enabled for full compatibility. It’ll still work without JavaScript, but anchors won’t work and some query strings might break.

So, type 00.ie/ before your URL, to get your shortened one (automatically linked to your URL.ie account, if you’re logged in at the time). That’s two zeroes, not two of the letter ‘o’! For example, to shorten the URL of this post, use 00.ie/http://blog.url.ie/2010/05/shorten-a-url-with-just-a-quick-prepend-to-any-url/#comments.

Here’s a video walk through of the text instructions below. Switch to full-screen and view in HD (720p) for best results.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1xLTCQ13Bk

Please be aware, though, that the API is very much in beta, and is quite likely to change in the future. That said, all you need to do is go in to TweetDeck preferences (the little wrench icon at the top right of the window). Click on Services and select “Other” from the drop down list “Select the service you wish to use to shorten URLs”. Once you select Other, a new text box becomes visible, called “Other URL Shortening Endpoint”. It’s in here you need to type the following.

If you do not have a URL.ie account, then use this: http://url.ie/site/api/tinyurl/create/?url=%@ (or copy the link).

If you do have a URL.ie account, then you’ll need to get your API key shown on the Account tab, once logged in. You’ll need to replace 2 values in this string, before using it in TweetDeck. YYYY  is your API key (a long random string, that you get from your Account page), and ZZZZ is your email address (the one you login to URL.ie with!). Here’s the URL to use, http://url.ie/site/api/tinyurl/create/?apikey=YYYY&email=ZZZZ&url=%@ (or copy the link). Don’t forget to replace ZZZZ and YYYY with your own details.

Type the URL above (which ever is the right one for you), in to that “Endpoint” text box in TweetDeck, and click “Save Settings” down at the bottom. Now, when you type a long URL in the compose message area of TweetDeck, it’ll automatically shorten it, with URL.ie, and notify you when it has done. Result!

If you’ve any trouble setting this up, or the above isn’t clear in some regard, please let us know, or leave a comment below!

I’m Cathal, and I’ll be introducing you to news and tips from the crew behind URL.ie over the next while. We’ve implemented some exciting features, and have more to come. Our biggest challenge is bringing new features but to a free service, so we can’t get to everything we’d like to.

Subscribe to the RSS feed for news on latest features, and some usage tips. We’ll also be adding help content for the existing features of URL.ie over the next few weeks, so check back when you can!

We’ll try to keep the number of posts low, and will continue to post service status updates to our Twitter account, rather than here.

If you’ve got URL.ie tips to share with other users, please let us know! Thanks for using URL.ie and, as always, we welcome your feedback!