We see hundreds of TinyURLs posted everywhere; comments, blog posts, Twitter. Sometimes you don’t fully trust the source and you don’t want to click the TinyURL blindly. There is actually a way to see the complete web address behind any TinyURL without clicking on it.

It is simple. Just add the word preview between http:// and TinyURL and paste it in your address bar to see the webpage it is linking to. So http://tinyurl.com/xxx would become http://preview.tinyurl.com/xxx.

The preview feature is offered by the TinyURL application and can also be enabled ^[1] for your browser. Once enabled, you will be able to see the complete URL for any TinyURL by just clicking on it. If you don’t want it anymore, just disable ^[2] it. This feature is enabled and disabled for your browser by actually setting a cookie.