The problem isn't just the opacity, it's that url shorteners add an extra, and extremely flaky point of failure in the web request cycle. The web is patchy eno

The problem isn't just the opacity, it's that url shorteners add an extra, and extremely flaky point of failure in the web request cycle. The web is patchy enough already w/ domains expiring and sites rearranging their content (w/o a way to update 3rd party links elsewhere). Add to this another service that may or may not be around in 5 years to the opacity and you've got scads of links going dead if one service/domain goes dead. If perhaps there was a common shared standard for how the hashes mapped to urls, that was reversible, then it'd be less of a problem, since then you just stick the hash into another service that supports minified urls, and you're fine. It'd be a good project for google :P