One of the drawbacks of many microblogging networks is that a user is limited to 140 characters to say what they want to say. It’s easy enough to do two or three updates back to back if you’ve got longer text, but not everyone appreciates other users who clog up the pipeline. This is the target that TinyPaste is aimed at.

TinyPaste works on the same concept as TinyURL. Its sole purpose is to take a long input, store it in a database, and give you back a link that’s short. TinyPaste’s website is primarily a large textbox where a user can enter whatever they want. After submitting the “paste”, the user is given a link they can send to others. When you visit a paste, you have the option to copy it to clipboard, view it in full screen, or download it as a text file. TinyPaste also has a Firefox extension that adds an item to the right-click context menu and will return the URL to your paste.

In some worlds, the amount of characters available dicates what you say. TinyPaste is a way to remove the character restrictions at the cost of making people click a link to see it. My initial reaction to this service was “who’s actually going to use something like this?”. After further consideration, I thought it would be useful for archival purposes where you could store a list of your links, since hopefully TinyPaste won’t go away. All pastes are public record and are viewable by anyone, so this is not meant to be a private service.