URL shortening services have been around for a long time, with the recognition that they weren't permanent. The recent issue with URL shorteners is because Twit

URL shortening services have been around for a long time, with the recognition that they weren't permanent. The recent issue with URL shorteners is because Twitter has created a false need for them. What twitter ought to do is assign a fixed character length to all urls. So if you place any url in your tweet, you get docked 16 characters (that's a reasonable length since a URL shortening service would shorten the URL to about that length). Then just stick the actual URL in the href, and have some generic URL text that is visible. Now, this might not work for mobile devices that receive tweets. Perhaps twitter should buy one of the URL shortening services, so that if it dies, then all the tweets die, and we no longer care if the links are valid anymore. The need for permanent shortened URLs is a false need.