This is really very extremely selfish way to look at it. Really, what is the value of knowing that someone went to some page because they clicked on your shortened url to it. How much lazier can a content producer be, they aren't even producing content.

It's so short term focused it makes me want to puke my guts out. People with no vision create products for people with no vision and then people with vision get harmed by it. The future of the internet is getting harmed by it.

URL Shorteners should be outlawed for the sake of humanity.

Short urls = short focus, while the Internet = vision

I don't think I'm being overly dramatic here. Shortened urls reduce future generations' ability to find information. Information and access to it will simply Vaporize!

the value is mostly found in marketing activities. to know where traffic is coming from allows you to get a better idea of where to focus and what provides best results.

i'm curious to know why you think that shortened urls will reduce future generations' ability to find information. especially since, for the most part, their usage is restricted to the social web.

"Wow, @fermat says he's proved something amazing! Damn, it's too short to fit in 140 characters. Oh wait... there's this bit.ly link... oh yeah, bit.ly went out of business and took their URL map with them."

It's a bit hyperbolic but that's the basic problem, I think.

That nails it right there, noodle. In large systems, the more weak points in the system, the more likely the system as a whole is to fail.

you could say that about almost anything online, though. whoops, wikipedia went out of business and now we've lost a lot of information. oh darn, wordpress went down for good and took all its hosted blogs and the infinite wisdom found within their content.

that is an issue with the internet at large, not just with url shorteners. in addition, the only externally meaningful thing that would be lost is the bitly connection on twitter that connects that tweet to the content. whatever brilliance he linked to would still exist outside that scope and be accessible. unless his bitly link was to bitly itself.

Except arbitrary URL shortening services are far more likely to shutdown than Wikipedia, Google, or Twitter itself. It's another level of indirection through another party which provides a service in a fast-changing, simple market.

Are all the URLs in your tweets going to be broken in 2 years? More likely than a Wikipedia or Google URL.

so are the twitter image hosts. or arbitrary S3 file hosts. or a wordpress mu blog network. or any number of other smaller alternatives for services that we deem useful.

i suppose the root of my problem with this line of thought is that it basically is saying that if you want to start a value-added service, go big or go home. no room for little guys, because if you fail you might somehow be destroying some of the fabric of the web.

i find this disagreeable. seems not very hacker-like.

It's questionable how valuable those metrics are, considering that a number of Twitter clients follow the shortened links to get the real URLs for their users, which means a hit doesn't necessarily translate into a view.

And don't forget that you have to know the location of an url to access its content.

I was just using tr.im metrics today. I wanted to see what kind of other services my users might want to use, so I created a shuffled list of links to services that don't exist yet, and then observed through tr.im metrics which one got clicked the most.

Bit.ly alone doesn't compensate for all the other pointless link shorteners out there.

just because there exist bad implementations of an idea doesn't necessarily mean the concept itself is bad.

The HTTP Referer header suffices for all the uses you just described.