Does anyone else feel that the decision to implement of a URL shortener shouldn't be taken so lightly? I mean, when you decide to take your URL shortening service down, all those links your service generated are effectively dead. There's no way to figure out where they pointed at.
I would guess that this is aimed more at people who are creating their own 'vanity' url shorteners for their own use than those creating services to compete with Bitly (or Google's).