URL shorteners will some day bit.ly you in the ass

Years ago we began using tinyurl.com to create redirect aliases with neat, short little URLs to include in emails or on web forums.
 
Enter Twitter with its 140-character limit, and URL shortening services sprouted up everywhere. And now that it's a PR necessity to publish news via multiple channels, once the bit.ly or snip.url or tr.im link has been created it is often used not only in a tweet, but also in Facebook notes, forum posts, and email newsletters ... used, in fact, absolutely everywhere the link is published.
 
This is a big mistake! What's the big problem? Here's a scenario:
 

• your company spends a lot of money to create an informational web page about your product or service
• you tweet and FB-post and blog and email out a shortened url
• two months later the URL shortening service you used disappears off the face of the map
• three months later a potential customer comes across your blog post and clicks the link, ending up on a 404 page. You may have just lost a good prospect!

 
Apparently I am not the only one who has mused over this scenario as we watch the use of short url's proliferate in all channels. This morning I clicked through a series of linkback posts that brought me finally to Joshua Schachter's thoughts on the topic. He presents a number of reasons why short URLs suck.
 
Use them for Twitter, sure. But when putting out news via any channel other than such a severely character-limited channel, use the full URL if it's not too messy, or create a "friendly URL"  that YOU control, such as a line in your site's .htacess file, or aDrupal URL alias entry.