If you’re looking for a free URL shortening service (what’s that?), I highly recommend trying Mitey.Me – Free URL Shortening Service.

It’s completely free, anonymous and simple to use. No registration required. Go to the website, enter your full / long URL, and click “Submit”. Mitey.Me will then return a shortened, 15-character URL you can use and share anywhere. Paste it onto Twitter or Facebook, or even IM conversations. You can also track the number of people clicking or using your link. Mitey.Me also provides an API allowing you to easily integrate it with your own or existing applications, such as Twitter for iPhone

In summary, it’s probably one of the simplest URL shortening services around – no fancy gadgets and pages covered in advertisements. If you’re looking for a quick, and easy to use URL shortening service with simple usage tracking, look no further.

If you’re looking for a place to host your images or photos online, and you need to do so quickly, check out Image Exchange (http://www.imgxc.com).

Image Exchange is a free image hosting service that allows you to easily upload and share images online. Each uploaded image is assigned a unique URL which you can send and share with anyone. For example, if you have photos from a recent family dinner and you want to send them out to all of your relatives, your first instinct would be to throw them in as an attachment to the email. But this may cause problems – many email providers place limits on the size and number of attachments one can receive.

This is where Image Exchange comes in. You upload your photos to the website, get the unique URL, and send this URL to all your relatives. If you have more than one photo, you can upload it as a ZIP file and Imgxc will create a photo album for you. The whole photo album itself is given a unique URL, as well as each individual photo. Images can be JPEGs, GIFs, or PNGs, and each individual image can be a maximum of 2MB – which is plenty for most users.

After you’ve uploaded your image(s), Image Exchange also offers a set of tools that easily allow you to share your image(s) on other websites such as Facebook, Digg, Reddit, etc.

But what makes Image Exchange so special is that you can upload and share an image without the need to register an account first. So this allows for a quick “get the job done” service, as well as complete anonymity. You can even tag photos as “Adult / Private” which means no one will know the image exists unless you tell them. More specifically, your image will not appear on the website’s latest images, random image or image tag cloud page, and it won’t appear on Image Exchange’s Twitter – which Imgxc uses to post site updates and cool or popular images that have been recently uploaded. You can upload anything you want, as long as it isn’t illegal. Each image page also has a “report” link which allows users to report illegal images.

Managing your images, without the need for an account is also incredibly simple. When uploading an image, Image Exchange allows you to specify a “deletion key” (or have one generated for you), which you can use to delete any images you have uploaded. You can also ask the system to email you your image URL and deletion key, so you don’t lose it. A dead image or one that has not been viewed in over a year will be automatically deleted. A thumbnail for your image or photo is also generated, alongside image statistics such as view count, and HTML / forum codes are generated so you can easily share your images on the relevant website.

Uploaded images can also be “hotlinked”, so if you have bandwidth limits on your current web host, you can easily offload some of your images to Image Exchange.

Image Exchange even offers a mobile website, and image email uploads. You don’t even need to go to their website to upload an image – just send an email with your image attachment and Image Exchange will upload it for you, and reply with your unique Image URL.

Image Exchange definitely stands out from the crowd – if you don’t like having to create an account and registering all your details with the likes of Photobucket and ImageShack, Imgxc is for you. Similarly, if you’re fed up with the number of limits other hosts impose on you, look no further; I’ve yet to find a more convenient image host.

Clicking through, I was taken to this article:

Now hang on a second, Google can’t even crawl the latest news properly anymore? Surely it’s smart enough to carry out a date check?

Alison DeLauzon thought the snapshots and home videos of her infant son were gone for good when she lost her digital camera while on vacation in Florida.

Then a funny thing happened: her camera “phoned home.”

Equipped with a special memory card with wireless Internet capability, DeLauzon’s camera had not only automatically sent her holiday pictures to her computer, but had even uploaded photos of the miscreants who swiped her equipment bag after she accidentally left it behind at a restaurant.

“I opened up the Eye-Fi manager on the computer and, lo and behold, there are the guys that stole our cameras,” said DeLauzon, a native of New York’s Long Island suburb. “Not only is it the guy who stole our camera … but the guy took a picture of (his accomplice) holding our other camera.”

DeLauzon received the Eye-Fi, a 2-gigabyte SD memory card that fits into millions of digital cameras, as a holiday gift to go with her Canon camera.

Priced at about $100, the card automatically uploads pictures to a home computer or online photosharing service as soon as the user is linked to a familiar wireless network.

Luckily, the culprits passed by an unsecured network, whose factory-installed setting matched that of DeLauzon’s home system, and the Eye-Fi automatically shipped the photos: first baby pictures, then the snap-happy scoundrels.

Her experience reflects the rise of technology that empowers everyday gadgets to protect themselves or the priceless personal data — from family phone numbers to business budgets — that consumers keep on portable electronics devices.

Cameras are perhaps the most common home-phoning gadget used to thwart criminals.

An eerie case occurred last month, when a Japanese man set up a hidden camera because food was disappearing from his kitchen. While he was out, the camera sent pictures to his mobile phone of the intruder — an unknown woman living secretly in his closet.