[dagobart]

Wasn't it services like learn.to, beam.to and similar that came first? With the intend to have freely pickable shorthand URLs, where the shortness of them was just a byproduct?

I'm not sure of this, but iirc the learn.to/beam.to etc services were around in the early web already, mid-90s, while tinyurl and friends came later.

[nimbix]

Those services were different because they were meant to provide an alternative URL for your website, not someone else's. Also, they required you to go through a signup process and I remember some of them displaying ads.

And of course, there was no Twitter back in those days to create an artificial need for short URLs.