I guess I still don't understand the purpose of URL shortners. Isn't this what markup is for?

Hey, check out this <a href='http;//www.example.com/foo/bar/foo/?param1=foo&param2=bar&key=foo&page=bar&something&something&something'> page!</a>

I get it that twitter has the 140 character limit, but isn't this something twitter should have solved themselves?

Why do these news articles seem to pop up every other day? Why is bit.ly offering a "pro" service?

As ubercore mentioned, some email clients will still break up links.

Further, not everything supports html - they are valuable for formats that primarily rely on text:

Text-based emails are a lot easier/better with a url-shortener. IRC conversations are better with a url-shortener. Etc.

On the other hand, they don't seem to be the big deal that everyone is making them out to be.

I've seen them used for a couple of other reasons:

- Some email clients break wrapped urls

- Physically printing a long url -- takes less space, and easier for users to type

I only use them for Twitter, which is why I don't get the proliferation of six-character domains like bit.ly and goo.gl when bit.ly already offers j.mp. Why would anyone choose anything but the absolute shortest domain, if j.mp won't go under unless bit.ly goes under? And why wouldn't Google wait until they had a four-character domain instead of their six-char one? Is brand ID really more important here than an optimal product?

Especially when they are trivially easy to create. [shameless plug] I created an appengine variant ( http://symlinkd.com ) in about a day, including a simple update api and per-handle history [/shameless plug]

That's funny - I was thinking about setting up an appengine to archive the URL shorteners, to minimize fallout when they fall over.

only for google products at the moment

Not quite. From Google's PR: "Google URL shortener is not a stand-alone service; you can't use it to shorten links directly. Currently, Google URL Shortener is only available from the Google Toolbar and FeedBurner. If the service proves useful, we may eventually make it available for a wider audience in the future."

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/making-urls-shorter-f...

Eventually they might open it up for the public. I'm not sure why anyone cares if google uses a url shortener for their own services. To each their own.