[aditya]

Generic shortened URLs are becoming a plague upon the web and are marginally useful at best outside of Twitter

Marginally useful at best outside of Twitter? Care to explain? Less than 1% of bitly's traffic is coming from twtitter, so obviously there are other people that find value in trackable URLs... I'm curious why you think it isn't useful?

[india]

URL shortners break the web in many ways.

Link rot, link hijack, it takes longer to reach the page, additional point of failure and domain based algorithms break. In other words, plague.

[jamesbritt]

Well, OK.

But being able to pop in a nice terse URL where a long one would break in some E-mail client is handy.

[jules]

Join us in the 21st century and use HTML emails. You can use any text on a link, amazing huh?

[jamesbritt]

When you send HTML email, it guarantees that all recipients are rendering it as HTML too?

[jules]

For those that also live in the 21st century, yes. Which mail clients don't render HTML? Perhaps the users who still use ancient mail clients should consider switching, or endure reading HTML. I'm not going optimize for the minority by making web sites in plain text either for the few users who refuse to use a web browser.

[viraptor]

You can put in both. Full one, so that you don't look like a scammer and the short one in case the first one is broken by the client.

[kristiandupont]

Yes, they are popular among people who send links, but annoying to people who click on them. I hate clicking on a link that I can't see the domain of.