Craig Mod recently questioned the need for short URLs in an age in which all URLs are equal – at least for Twitter. Justin Reese’s reply, taking longevity in account, confirmed my own thinking on the matter:
Best justification these days: short URLs are harder to mangle, protect against crummy wrapping and poor URL pattern matching.
Inspired by indieweb POSSE principles, I purchased a ‘short’ domain last year and have happily been generating my own short URLs until changes in hover.com’s backend meant that they suddenly ceased to work. Struggling to get a fix in place I’ve now returned to Twitter’s truncations.