I occasionally find them useful outside of Twitter. In my experience, some applications (email clients, etc) don't handle/parse really long links (Google Maps l

I occasionally find them useful outside of Twitter. In my experience, some applications (email clients, etc) don't handle/parse really long links (Google Maps links or ugly eBay auction URLs, for example) very well, so giving someone an is.gd link to a hideously long and complicated URL is usually easier for me.