Everybody these days is promising to make your URLs you share shorter, but not many are making them longer!  Longr.us is a simple web site that will make your web site addresses just a little longer.  For example it took:

• http://www.mitchelaneous.com/free-desktop-icons/

and turned it into:

• http://longr.us/mitchelaneous.com/free-desktop-icons

See, that has to be at least 10% longer!  All kidding aside, there is a purpose to this.  As you can see from the example above, it doesn’t give you a random mix of numbers and letters.  Instead if stays focused on explaining where the link came from and what it is about.  They also promise the long URLs are guaranteed to fit in 140 characters (for you Twitter users).  They even have easy access through a bookmarklet too.

Before you laugh it off as a goofy idea, give it a shot.  You might find longer is better (when it comes to sharing your links!).

They not only offer URL shortening services (taking your long URL and creating a shorter one that is easier to share).  They also offer e-mail address shortening and text shortening too.

Here are a few use suggestions for Kissa.be via their web site.

• Shorten web addresses for emails, forum posts, blogs etc. which cannot handle long URLs and might wrap them, making them unclickable
• Lower the character count when texting web addresses to a mobile phone
• Hide the real URLs of affiliate links from visitors to your site
• If you dislike a web site and have to mention it (e.g. when complaining about it), link via kissa.be so that your link does not help the site’s search engine positioning
• Clean up bookmarks for social bookmarking sites or sites with low character limits like Twitter
• Obscure your real email address from bots which harvest them to spam (enter an address like mailto:user.name@example.com)

Kissa.be is different in another way too.  They have opened themselves up, and put up their code on Google’s Code web site.  Kissa.be’s code has been released under the GNU General Public License v2.

To use, all you need to do is copy any text you have into the pastebin and then hit the submit button.  In return, you’ll be given a URL to get easy access to that text.  Think of it as TinyURL for just about anything text-based.  As if that wasn’t enough to love – they also have a Firefox extension too.