Right now, people communicating on microblogging services end up having three things that need to be working for them to get through:
1. The µblog 2. The URL shortener 3. The original site
Various URL shorteners might fall over for a bit, or any other number of stupid things.
In the wordpress example, they registered wp.me so they could shorten the URLs sanely: http://images.scripting.com/archiveScriptingCom/2009/08/16/m...
If you support shortening, you reduce a dependency. You can still use tinyurl or bit.ly or whatever in this model, but if you don't, it'll be done for you.
Remember, twitter is an SMS mailing list. You want to be able to send that data in a way it can be picked up from simple mechanisms like SMS messages.
Limiting a service on the internet because 0.1% of the users want SMS notification on decade old phones is stupid and backwards.
Right now, people communicating on microblogging services end up having three things that need to be working for them to get through:
1. The µblog 2. The URL shortener 3. The original site
Various URL shorteners might fall over for a bit, or any other number of stupid things.
In the wordpress example, they registered wp.me so they could shorten the URLs sanely: http://images.scripting.com/archiveScriptingCom/2009/08/16/m...
If you support shortening, you reduce a dependency. You can still use tinyurl or bit.ly or whatever in this model, but if you don't, it'll be done for you.