The ideal situation for URL shorteners (in my opinion) is for the short URLs to be provided by the content publisher AND the short URLs should easily translate

The ideal situation for URL shorteners (in my opinion) is for the short URLs to be provided by the content publisher AND the short URLs should easily translate to their long URLs.[1] Look at how YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lC9Ss4dguu4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lC9Ss4dguu4 is shortened to http://youtu.be/lC9Ss4dguu4 http://youtu.be/lC9Ss4dguu4) or Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/Kindle-Wireless-Reader-Wifi-Graphite/dp/B002Y27P3M http://www.amazon.com/Kindle-Wireless-Reader-Wifi-Graphite/d... translates to http://amzn.com/B002Y27P3M http://amzn.com/B002Y27P3M) does it, for a good example. They aren't the shortest possible URLs, but they clearly show the content provider in the URL, which is great. I actually created a web app and API (hosted on Google App Engine) to generate these publisher-provided short URLs, but never published it. I'll polish it off a bit tonight and post it here. [1] This is my personal ideal. Being provided by the content publisher should be enough, in my opinion.