[Cthulhu_]

While this is pretty neat, is there still a market for URL shorteners? It's been mentioned in this discussion already that Twitter does it automatically already - iirc, that was the main use case for shortened URLs. The other use case is gathering statistics (how many people clicked on my link), but the URL doesn't need to be short for that, a simpler redirect service would work just fine for that.

The final one is simple printable URLs which people can enter easily. That's also a valid use case I think, but mainly if you can create your own URL, i.e. shorturl.com/hackernews; a random collection of numbers and letters is hard to type in on a cell phone and easy to mistype.

[r0muald]

Printable URLs are a good use case, but printed material has the annoying characteristic of lasting longer than your average web service, including URL shorteners. For printed stuff QR codes are still the most practical option IMHO.

[normloman]

The click through rate on QR codes is terrible. The two biggest mobile OSes don't have a qr reader installed, ordinary people don't know to download the reader and decode them, and even people with QR readers don't bother to open the app when they can just type the address.

Besides, most QR codes just point to a bit.ly URL anyway (It's a cheap way to track QR usage separately from direct traffic).

[sspiff]

They also have the annoying characteristic of lasting longer than the content they link to more often than not!

[taf2]

Yes - for example text message marketing and informational messages that want to include a URL is a growing market.