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Granted, I was searching for Erlang and Perl stuff, but that's still a change vs. two months ago. Average users, which I will define as "Googlers", will probably get there soon.

(I'm assuming you're not talking about "my grandmother", who will never know what Stack Overflow is. But that would be a very silly standard to apply, so I'm assuming that's not what you're getting at.)

It's so short term focused it makes me want to puke my guts out. People with no vision create products for people with no vision and then people with vision get harmed by it. The future of the internet is getting harmed by it.

URL Shorteners should be outlawed for the sake of humanity.

Short urls = short focus, while the Internet = vision

I don't think I'm being overly dramatic here. Shortened urls reduce future generations' ability to find information. Information and access to it will simply Vaporize!

This is dangerous territory we're veering into now, as Joshua Schachter explains.

So there are clear benefits for both the service (low cost of entry, potentially easy profit) and the linker (the quick rush of popularity). But URL shorteners are bad for the rest of us.

The worst problem is that shortening services add another layer of indirection to an already creaky system. A regular hyperlink implicates a browser, its DNS resolver, the publisher's DNS server, and the publisher's website. With a shortening service, you're adding something that acts like a third DNS resolver, except one that is assembled out of unvetted PHP and MySQL, without the benevolent oversight of luminaries like Dan Kaminsky and St. Postel.