URL shortener gives some of its profits to charity

URLs, which provide the location of a file on the Internet, can be awfully long and cumbersome in the age of Twitter, which takes only 140 characters. So URL shorteners are popular these days. Some estimates place their number at more than 1,300.

Add one more: Deer Park computer programmer Bill Purkins launched a shortener July 4 - OneCent.us. Purkins, 55, saw articles on the Internet that search engine Yahoo was considering buying bit.ly, one of the most popular of the URL shorteners, for $100 million.

Purkins thinks his shortener is worth "twice as much," he said.

For the uninitiated a URL shortener is just that: it shortens those long URLS into a code, which while meaningless to the user, brings that user to a site. Long URLS eat up the Twitter space quickly.

Purkins says that today he is selling ads on OneCent.us for anywhere between one and three cents a day. He said 90 percent of his profits go to a charity, such as the American Red Cross. That, he says, makes his site different from the rest.

Purkins says his site is making progress, and he is making donations. "At the end of each month, based on the user votes selecting their favorite charity using a drop-down on the website, we take a percentage and divide up 90 percent of the revenue and we publish the figures so everyone knows what we're giving."