So URL shorteners are everywhere. In this age of incessant tweeting, they've become a necessity and a very handy tool in a whole host of other situations. But as people try to cram extra words in to that 140 character limit, the shorteners are getting shorter.

It started with TinyUrl, which set the ball rolling. But then came Bit.ly, which was shorter, and then Twitter made it its default shortnener, so it’s usage skyrocketed, and it’s now the most used one at the time of writing. Since then, I’ve been interested to see how far I can go with it, and I’ve gone through, from TinyUrl, to Bit.ly, then to Is.gd, then J.mp, and when I thought it could go no further, along comes 'to./'.

Yep, you read that right, a website with no extension. It's run by the people who own the .to domain, as in www.example.to, and it’s the only one I know of with nothing after the dot. Actually, it creeps me out a bit, it just looks wrong. But at the same time, it’s awesome. Until we get a one letter domain extension, it’s the shortest possible, but this creates a problem.

It generates 4 letter codes, to keep it truly short, for example ‘to./a1b2’, where each character can be any letter or number. This means you get 36 values each time, which gives a total of just over 3 million combinations, with the 4 characters. This may seem like a lot. But bit.ly gets used on average 6 million a day, which means if to./ ever got as big, it’d run out of URLs in half a day, and then, they'd have to get longer, to create more combinations. All this entirely defeats the point of the self-proclaimed 'Nanourl', so don’t go telling anyone, or this whole thing could die in less than a day. Ok, so if they added one character they would get over 100 million combinations, and a 9 letter URL is still pretty short. But even that would only last just over a couple of weeks.

So let’s keep it to ourselves. Because I love to./, and I’d hate to see it die. You see, it has very little else going for it: a horrible interface; no analytics of how many clicks your shortening has got ect, no custom codes, none of the numerous other frivolities of the other shorteners, and it needs it shortness to have any purpose. It’s so minimalistic, it does its job perfectly, and it really is the shortest it’s currently possible to achieve. So use it, love it, and please, keep it quiet.