Ever since the rise of twitter, when URL shortening services got an extremely big popularity boost because twitter chose to shorten their URLs for technical reasons while ignoring user experience, the web has been polluted with shortened links.

  • I want to be able to see where a link goes before I click it.
  • I want to be sure that my links continue to work indefinitely.
  • I don’t want random companies to track my internet usage.

URL shortening services interferes with all of my above statements. So please. Do. Not. Use. Them.

Let’s just hope that the upcoming release of annotations for tweets functionality could help decrease the use of these horrible services.

How ever, there is a GreaseMonkey script that I’ve been using, called TinyURL Decoder, that changes URL shortened links into the real URL that they point to. It just solves one of the problems with URL shortening, but at least you can see where the links go.