I think url-shortening is just a really bad idea in general. Certainly giving normal people the ability to track who clicks on their links is a good idea, but you don't need to obfuscate the url to do that. You could create a nice tracking service using urls like: http://digg.com/www.mysite.com/interesting-blog-post. The real cause of obfuscation is twitter's character limit, right? What does twitter gain by including anchor text in their 140 characters?
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I think url-shortening is just a really bad idea in general. Certainly giving normal people the ability to track who clicks on their links is a good idea, but you don't need to obfuscate the url to do that. You could create a nice tracking service using urls like: http://digg.com/www.mysite.com/interesting-blog-post. The real cause of obfuscation is twitter's character limit, right? What does twitter gain by including anchor text in their 140 characters?
The ability to follow links embedded in SMS messages. The whole thing is really a problem with the SMS protocol.