Tiny Url is a great tool to shorten those long tedious Urls you may sometimes find while browsing the Web. You might need to share those long Urls at times with someone, and it becomes a pain to do so successfully (specially if you are trying to do it through a chat conversation or an email). You may also find it very useful if you want to Rick Roll someone, but the Url might give a hint to the person you are trying to trick.

Tiny Url provides a “service” to which you can send a simple HTTP GET request with one parameter (which would be the long Url you want shorter). The service will reply with (guess what) the Tiny Url!
So pretty much with close to zero effort you can transform a long Url into a much simple-easy-to-share Url.

The following code will show you how to use the Tiny Url service to convert those long Urls into real tiny ones. You can use this code if you have some sort of software that will generate an Url, but giving the actual Url would give away that it comes from your site, discouraging the person that will receive the Url to, in fact not visiting your link (i.e., http://lmgtfy.com/ let me google that for you).

using System;
using System.Text.RegularExpressions;
using System.Net;
using System.IO;

namespace TinyUrl
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            Console.WriteLine(convertUrl("http://www.google.com"));
            Console.ReadKey();
        }

        public static string convertUrl(string url)
        {
            Regex regx = new Regex("http://([\\w+?\\.\\w+])+([a-zA-Z0-9\\~\\!\\@\\#\\$\\%\\^\\&\\*\\(\\)_\\-\\=\\+\\\\\\/\\?\\.\\:\\;\\'\\,]*)?", RegexOptions.IgnoreCase);

            MatchCollection matches = regx.Matches(Url);

            foreach (Match match in matches)
            {
                string tURL = MakeTiny(match.Value);
                Url = Url.Replace(match.Value, tURL);
            }

            return Url;
        }

        public static string makeTiny(string url)
        {
            try
            {
                if (url.Length <= 12)
                {
                    return url;
                }

                if (!url.ToLower().StartsWith("http") && !url.ToLower().StartsWith("ftp"))
                {
                    url = "http://" + url;
                }

                WebClient webClient = new WebClient();

                //webClient.Proxy.Credentials = new NetworkCredential("username", "password"); //in case you need a proxy
                Stream stream = webClient.OpenRead("http://tinyurl.com/api-create.php?url=" + url);

                StreamReader sReader = new StreamReader(stream);
                string content = sReader.ReadToEnd();

                return content;
            }
            catch
            {
                //handle this if desired
                throw;
            }
        }
    }
}

The response will be plain text (text/plain mime type).

Have fun with your implementation!