[jsean]

Your point of view is surely valid. Though what I get from posted article is the fact that url shorteners don't always shorten urls. Thus proving that the philosophy behind the service is either not "to shorten urls" or simply bugged.

I can imagine an url shortener service, which actally at heart wants to shorten urls, already from first line of implementation has something like if(entered_url.length <= generated_url.length) return entered_url