Shortened urls break the web! Don’t use them unless you absolutely have to.
A while ago I posted how tinyurls bug me and people use them way too much. If you don’t know why tinyurls are evil please go and read that post or check out some other links.
And yet the number of url shortening services continues to proliferate and people continue to use them in inappropriate places. (Appropriate user are where space is restricted e.g. twitter messages or the link is so long it wraps over multiple lines in an email. Otherwise don’t shorten it).
Fighting back
So the scourge of shortened urls continues to spread. How can we stop this? Spread the word about why they are bad. And if they bug you like they bug me, you can head over to http://www.longurlplease.com/ where you can get a firefox extension that will automatically replace these nasty little urchins with real proper urls.