BuddyPress.org

URL shortening is a cancer on the web, and I wish people would just stop it already.

Using them obfuscates destinations, provides cover for malicious linking, and when the companies that provide these ‘services’ eventually wither up and blow away, every single link made using them rots, and pieces of the internet break.

Thanks to the idiotic success of Twitter and its artificial 140 character limit, we have to put up with a profusion of this stuff.

Yeah, I know, I sound like a ranting lunatic about his particular hobbyhorse of mine, but goddamnit, people are breaking one of the fundamental building blocks of the web — that the U in URL means ‘universal’ — because some freakishly popular glorified chat site has somehow captured everyone’s imagination for the last 5 minutes.

Now get off my lawn!