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    URL shorteners are here to stay. Just like tr.im never shut down and broke (and obfuscated to no good) thousands of links. Commented Dec 18, 2009 at 13:43
  • And google created an url shortening service. What do you think it's really going to happen, all url shortening services are ceasing to exist, or are they going to improve? I have a lot of old bookmarks without url shortening services that are broken. As every action you do on the internet, you have to choose a reliable service. We can't predict what's is going to happen with url shortners in a long term. And trim still exists. blog.tr.im/post/160697842/tr-im-resurrected. Are we going to be all paranoid or just try to get advantage of these services since they are here to stay? Commented Dec 18, 2009 at 15:05
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    If you're trying to track the clicks through a link you post on SOFU, that sounds like you're spamming. Commented Dec 18, 2009 at 16:13
  • You can't say I'm spamming because I just want to know how many people are clicking in provided links. If I wanted to track clicks from websites I own, I would just use google analytics. bit.ly is useful to tracking links out of my control. It's silly to say that a useful link to an answer, just because it's using a url shortening service that gives statistics, is spamming. Commented Dec 18, 2009 at 18:50
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    You already have a measure of the impact and usefulness of your answers: the voting score. For what purpose do you want the additional tracking? Commented Mar 24, 2010 at 18:37
  • I don't use bit.ly links in SO. What I'm saying is that I can see a reason in someone using bit.ly links. I don't know why someone wants to track down some links, and I cant judge someone as a spammer just because she wants to track something. Seriously, you people are overeacting to something so simple. If you don't like url shortening services, just don't use. But don't judge people that uses them. It's the same as judging someone based on tools she uses. Commented Mar 25, 2010 at 19:38
  • To extend on @random's comment a bit: tr.im has now announced they completely would like to shut down the API and redirection service by the end of 2010. Thanks a lot, not. (Even their own blog.tr.im is no longer there.) Commented Jun 5, 2010 at 11:50
  • (I guess I'll have some editing to do: it seems just 39 posts on SO are using tr.im.) Commented Jun 5, 2010 at 12:46
  • I changed my mind. It's doing more harm than good having url shorteners in a system like SO, it really doesn't make sense to have these links here. And now that twitter created it's own url shortening services (help.twitter.com/entries/109623), we can expect a lot of third party services to die too. Commented Jun 19, 2010 at 4:30