I know every character count, like for me i used URL shortening services like bit.ly to reduce long URLs into small tiny forms. like Google launched its Goo.gl short URLs, and Youtube follows Goo.gl steps by introducing its URL shortener service, Youtu.be is exclusively used for Youtube Videos. besides saving some spaces it also help to reduce spamming activities.

Developers can take advantage of this feature by adding more new things such as show thumbnails, embed videos directly and do real time tracking on video spreading.

“Because the link contains the ID of the video you’re going to see, developers can do interesting things like show you thumbnails, embed the video directly, or track how a video is spreading in real-time”.

To use youtu.be manually, just take a URL such as http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdeioVndUhs and replace the “http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=” with “http://youtu.be/” to get: http://youtu.be/FdeioVndUhs Plug that shorter URL into a browser, and users will see it redirects to that video.