Are URL Shortening Services Really Required In HTML World?

I had never really given much thought to URL shortening services, like TinyURL. But I had to be sitting under a rock to miss the recent outage, that caused the blogosphere to flutter vigorously. But I wonder if this was only because of one single big client it has - the Twitter.

Why did I never personally use it? I have used thousands of web sites, developed hundreds and perhaps read about a millions of them, but hardly ever I felt the need of URL shortening services. Not surprisingly, the URLs do not consume a lot of space in the HTML view. The link text, or the one that we write between the <a> and </a> consumes the view space. So I do not think the URL itself contributes a lot to the readability and usability.

As a web developer, URL design is one of the important steps from a usability perspective. The modern URLs are supposed to be easy to remember and provide a context. Which means that we want to use those URLs, without shortening them. The newer applications are always going to have the usable and intuitive URLs. So here too, the shortening services do not provide much value. Additionally, the shortened URLs suffer from being ugly and incomprehensible.

But Twitter did find a use for it. And I think because it has a non-HTML interface - the SMS. Any non-HTML interaction dealing with URLs will benefit from them. And yes, the legacy applications which still cannot do away with long, winding and meaningless URLs will need them. But like Dave Winer says, they are perhaps better off doing it themselves instead of delegating it to another service. If Twitter went commercial, it would be better if it just buys TinyURL and takes over it.

I think URL shortening services will be valuable essentially to non-HTML interfaces. They are not going to help a lot by serving the web sites.