anyways Tinyurl asks you to not scrape their site and to use their API
from their HTML:

/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
///// DON'T SCREEN-SCRAPE, PLEASE CONTACT US TO FIND OUT HOW TO USE OUR API /////
/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

so you would think to honor their wishes one would use their API
unless one wants to be a prick, and disregard their wishes an scrape their main site.

a few comments above I had made an example using their API.
API link: http://tinyurl.com/api-create.php?url=
so as a test link it would look like this
http://tinyurl.com/api-create.php?url=http://www.hawkee.com/snippet/8401/

Also @ Conscious it's good to see you grasping sockets now.
Keep at it...