I totally agree with Jeff Atwood. URL shorteners services do more harm than good in adding another layer of indirection where the control is delegated to an untrusted 3rd party.

Every tiny URL is another baby step towards destroying the web as we know it. Which is exactly what you’d want to do if you’re attempting to build a business on top of the ruins. Personally, I’d prefer to see the big, objective search engines who naturally sit at the center of the web offer their own URL shortening services. Who better to generate short hashes of every possible URL than the companies who already have cached copies of every URL on the internet, anyway?