Tim Heuer a program manager for Microsoft Silverlight and published author, has just created a new accelerator (formerly known as an “activity”) for IE8 Beta 2: the TinyURL Accelerator. His accelerator will be especially handy for anyone who makes use of this popular URL-shortening service.

In case you’re unfamiliar, TinyURL is a service that takes a long, unwieldy URL and shrinks it down to a more manageable size in the format of http://tinyurl.com/xxyyzz. This service and others like it have gained in popularity since the rise of micro-blogging tools like Twitter (and other similar services) which limit the amount of text you can type in for each update.

Tim’s TinyURL accelerator, as you may have guessed, integrates with IE8 Beta 2 to shrink down URLs. To use it, you highlight the hyperlinked text and right-click (or choose the accelerator icon in IE8) then choose the “Shrink URL” option. The accelerator will then automatically send the link to TinyURL for you. If you want to see it in action, check out the quick screencast he made and posted to his blog.

If you’re running the IE8 Beta, you can install the TinyURL Accelerator by clicking here.

Nick.