[dingaling]

Which raises the question of the purpose of link shorteners anyway.

They are usually so obscure and jumbled that reading them out loud to someone would be slow and awkward ( "that's goo dot gl, no e" ). So what is the use-case?

[manigandham]

They're still shorter, and less likely to line-wrap and break older clients. They also help to obfuscate certain tracking info and/or protect them from tampering.

Also you can set a custom shortname in almost all of them, if it's available.

[manquer]

SMS is one case where we use them. Shorter links mean we could fit notifications into typical 140 characters limit for single sms

[anarazel]

> So what is the use-case?

They allow tracking.