Long URL Please is a utility for revealing the real addresses behind short URLs. The utility is available as either a Firefox Extension or a JavaScript bookmarket.
Short URLs are bite-size links to web pages whose actual URLs are much longer. URL shortening services like the classic Tiny URL take a long url like http://www.ofzenandcomputing.com/zanswers/1907 and shrink it down to something like http://tinyurl.com/c4yf9b. The short URL can then be posted to sites like Twitter, where users are limited to entering very short messages in which the longer URL would take up too much space.
The problem with short URLs is that you have no idea what you are about to click. For example, every Tiny URL begins with http://tinyurl.com/ and ends with a few random letters and numbers. Long URL Please solves this problem by checking a web page for short URLs and replacing them with the actual addresses of the pages to which they link.
Long URL Please can be used as a Firefox extension or a JavaScript bookmarklet (the bookmarklet is on the front page of the site). The JavaScript bookmarklet requires you to drag the link to your bookmarks toolbar and click it each time you want to expand the short URLs on a web page. The Firefox extension is classified as “experimental ” at the time of this writing, meaning that it may have bugs. You must log into the Mozilla Add-ons site in order to install it.
Link via DeWitt Clinton on FriendFeed.
