How integral are URL shortening sites? Do we really need them as we Tweet, Blog and IM with one another? Farhad Manjoo writes an interesting piece in Slate debating the usefulness of such services. With no real way to make money Bit.ly, the most popular, has raised $2M in venture capital, but how will it keep investors happy with revenue? One option is to charge for their analytics service, which is currently free and provides a simple break down of clicks to a particular link. The link shortening sites are very popular on Twitter, which counts the url address characters towards the 140 character limit. What if Twitter didn't do this and we were able to provide longer links?


Short Shelf LifeDo we really need link-shortening services like Tr.im and Bit.ly?