We all do it... we spend hours on YouTube, watching pointless video clips that drive us to tears of laughter, or for the serious types, enlighten and educate us.

But sharing your favourite video find has never been a simple task, especially with those longwinded and hard to decipher links. Welcome the newest addition to the URL shortener crowd, Youtu.be.

URL shorteners are specialises scripts that allow a user to turn an ugly long URL link (such as; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErMWX--UJZ4) into a short and simple one (such us: http://youtu.be/ErMWX--UJZ4). This makes for sharing your links on services such as Twitter and Facebook so much easier.

The shortener is exclusive to YouTube links (no surprise). Its primary function is to share YouTube videos and channels with friends, mostly through YouTube’s AutoShare feature, which syndicates your activity on YouTube to Twitter Facebook, and elsewhere. and just like Fb.me, you can manually add the video code to the end of youtu.be and get the appropriate video.

Read more about the new Youtu.be shortner here.