URL Shortening

From a strictly engineering sense, URL shortening really is bad (even if you are using a character-limited service) because it

1. Obscures the real resource (so you don't know where you're going until you get there),
2. Increases the number of DNS lookups, HTTP requests, etc. (i.e. it's inefficient),
3. Creates bottlenecks in a network that was designed to be distributed.

From a marketing perspective, I recognize there is some appeal - short URLs tend to look better in a sentence than long ones. (Isn't that what an <a> tag is for? Can't everyone just share their links the way I do?)

Maybe we should just get away from URLs entirely. They're only necessary because the network is unaware of the data it contains. If the network was content aware, URL's wouldn't be necessary.

*sigh*. Even I have to recognize that kind of change is a long way off. I guess I can always use Cooliris and pretend we're already there.