TinyPaste is a tool that does for blocks of text what TinyURL does for URLs: Give you a nice, short, URL to pass along, rather than the full-length one for the page. (A TinyURL example: http://tinyurl.com/3f94fe is much shorter than the full URL for the page you get to.)

So TinyPaste lets you copy a block of text, paste it into a form at tinypaste.com, and get a similarly short URL in return. See http://tinypaste.com/5172c -- which is the entire text of this blog post. There is also a Firefox extension that makes TinyPaste available from the right-click menu, so any text you see in your browser can be highlighted and turned into a TinyPaste URL.

TinyPaste is handy for getting long blocks of text into services like Twitter or a Facebook status (by putting in the TinyPaste URL rather than the full text), but it comes with several drawbacks. All formatting (other than line breaks) disappears completely. So do links. And most disturbing, to me, is the utter lack of indication of where the original came from. In the web page version it is, of course, possible to manually insert the URL or other attribution into the text before creating the TinyURL. For the Firefox plugin, though, this can -- and I think should -- be automatic.