Back in February, LiveSide exclusively revealed that a URL shortening service is coming to SkyDrive.com. However, interestingly we did not see this feature being added in the last major update which added paid storage plans and desktop sync apps. But don’t worry, because today over on the Inside SkyDrive, Hotmail, and Messenger blog Omar Shahine, Group Program Manager for SkyDrive.com, announced that they have made this feature available. Below is a summary of what was added and improved:
- We’ve shortened our regular URLs by 40%. Our previous URLs didn’t even fit inside a Tweet! Oh the shame!
- You can shorten them even further thanks to our new partnership with bitly and the new domain for shortened SkyDrive URLs: http://sdrv.ms
- We’ve added OpenGraph support to our URLs so that when you paste them into places like Facebook, a nice thumbnail preview gets generated
- Since bitly powers the shortener, you also get great power features. For example, you can add a ‘+’ to the end of any short URL to see statistics. You can also generate a QR code for that URL by appending ’.qrcode’ to that URL.
It’s great to see that Microsoft is constantly adding new features to SkyDrive, and is listening to customer’s feedback on what areas to improve on. Here we’re hoping Microsoft is busy working on the next update, and as part of it SkyDrive will address some of the suggestions that we, and many of our readers, made.