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PS: Can anyone see what's the point of this service?
This scripts [1] searchs for links in the user timeline and replaces shortned URLs with the original (stored in the data-expanded-url attribute). [1] http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/186801
Userscripts has been down for months, as far as I know.
Not all link shorteners are evil and are destroying the web. Here are some scenarios in which I like link shorteners: 1) Removal of the referrer (the anonymising redirect) 2) Redirects within a site when content moves, but the redirect service offers a permalink shortened URL. As only they can generate the URL you can trust that the destination is as safe as the source (the intra-site trusted redirect with vanity URL…
1, 3 and 4 almost never happen in real life. 2 is the only thing remotely useful.
(but there's no reason to do shortening)
Why doesn't t.co (and, in fact, any URL shortener) follow the redirect chain first, before shortening the URL?
My favourite link shortener was mug.gd, which could also manipulate the page it was being sent. I remember seeing a version of a PG essay trumpeting the benefits of learning Visual Basic over Lisp :). It's dead now, demonstrating another problem with URL shorteners.
If you use and host your own, you've got things covered for as long as you need.
If I want to send you a link to a washingtonpost.com article the link looks like:http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ej-dionne-jr-the-root...
The same url could just as easily be user readable, and something that I could tell me office-mate verbally from 10 feet away. Most people just expect bad URLs now and have given up trying to remember the name of the page they want to see. I used to love NBC.com because they would let me type things like nbc.com/parks to get to http://www.nbc.com/parks-and-recreation, but that is no longer true. Now everyone just assumes that they need to google something to find it, and they can't even imagine that apple.com/ipad would be the page they are looking for.
As for some sites having extremely long required URLs: Sometimes they are necessary, e.g. parametric searches, but many other times they could've been better designed to be either shorter or more informative. Whatever the form, I don't think link shorteners should be used to hide them, if there is enough space available to hold the full URL.
Why link shorteners do this is a completely different question with completely different answers.
Why doesn't t.co (and, in fact, any URL shortener) follow the redirect chain first, before shortening the URL?
http://breakingcode.wordpress.com/2010/01/11/having-fun-with...
(The infinite loop in that example unfortunately seems to have broken, illustrating another downside to URL shorteners - they can go away rather quickly.)