You see shortened URLs everywhere, especially on Twitter. There's more than a dozen shortening services that will happily take your URL, generate a short one, and redirect the new URL to yours. It makes sense if you desperately want your URLs to be small, and the service works very well. It's an interesting example of a simple web-based application that does one simple thing well.

But I do have one big problem and one small problem with these. The small problem is that you have to trust the URL shortening service to do the redirects for you, without going out of business or changing your URL. This is mostly OK if you want to communicate a quick link to someone; it's definitely not a good idea if you use the shortened URL as part of the fabric of links that makes up the World Wide Web.

The big problem is about semantics. When you read a URL you immediately have some information about what you might find there. You might recognise the domain name, you might see an article title in the form of a slug, or the path components might give some context. That's why many people insist on having simple, meaningful URLs on their web sites. All this richness is lost if you pass the URL through a shortening service. Sure, you can control the last part of the shortened link, but that doesn't come close to what a vanilla URL provides.

Update: HA! Grabbed the http://tinyurl.com/considered-evil link!