Lots has been written about whether they are a good thing or not (you can read Erik Schonfeld’s summary of the matter on Tech Crunch) and I’m not going to go into details – but the main positive is obvious – shorter urls use up less characters in Twitter! The negatives are almost as obvious – if the company you use vanishes then so does your link, if a site that the short URL is pointing to vanishes then there are dead links floating around the interweb and also they add another layer to the whole browsing experience.

That all being said – I think they are useful and this is why I have set up my own. I figure that if I control the service then I can remove any dead links (or indeed any old links that I don’t want to highlight anymore) and the truth be told if I vanish then pretty much all the sites I am pointing my Short URL service to will vanish too so that won’t matter too much.

One thing I am going to do though is offer my Short URL service up to anyone who has a website hosted by me – it’s not as comprehensive as Diggbar in the old stats department (only telling you how many clicks your link has recieved) but then it doesn’t wrap anything in a frame like Diggbar either which is probably a good thing. The other negative is that my service doesn’t tie in to the likes of TwitDeck etc so there’s no easy shortening on the fly. The script is provided by yourls.org and is hosted right here on hostingland. Drop me a line if you want to use it.