[somat]

I always figured most of the real value of these url hashing services was as an marketing tracking metric. That is, sort of equivalent to the "share with" widgets provided that conveniently also dump tons of analytics to the services.

I will be honest I was never in an environment that would benefit from link shortening, so I don't really know if any end users actually wanted them (my guess twitter mainly) and always viewed these hashed links with extreme suspicion.