URLzen is a URL shorten-er in the same vein as the default TinyURL and increasingly popular is.gd (is good) and ow.ly. These shortening sites just recently became useful due to Twitter, which only allows 140 characters to be sent per message.
But unlike the similar competitors, URLzen is unique in two distinct ways: A) It was created as a side project to help track the statistics of the original URL and B) it was produced locally here in the Nashville area.
Local developer and genius mind of the best iPhone game that hasn’t been released, Jackson Miller created the shorten-er while working on Statzen — a site that promises to offer up blogger specific web statistics with a beautiful user interface. (I’ve seen screen shots. The Statzen team is going to deliver).
From the Statzen blog:
“A few months ago we decided to experiment with Google App Engine. We also wanted to scratch an itch that we had. So, in the course of about six hours we created Urlzen.com.”
Now many people will still probably say, “well URLzen is too many characters” and that is true compared to is.gd. But, consider this fellow Nashvillians: We often talk about the city’s potential as the technology capital of the south, but what are each of us doing to help it along?
Jackson is one of the people that will help us achieve that future. TinyURL will not. So do us all a favor and switch to URLzen.
Thanks to Chuck Bryant for alerting me to URLzen months ago and also to Erin Cubert who indirectly gave me the idea to post something about it on this site. You guys rock!
Tom Cheredar 
What would it take to get URLzen included as one of the shorten-er options in Tweetdeck?
That’s the billion dollar question! I would like to see URLzen as an option in Tweetdeck!
Yeah, see, that’s my problem. I love to support urlzen when I remember to, but when I’m doing a quick post from Twitterfox or some other client, using urlzen requires several extra steps and I don’t think to do that most of the time. Whereas when I paste the long URL into one of my clients, it automatically spits out a tinyurl. If there was a way to integrate zen into existing clients, I’d be all over that shit.