URL Shortening
Many people have commented on URL shortening services lately, mainly because of the rise of Twitter and its 140 character limit. There are a lot of problems with shortening services but the biggest problem I find is you don't know where the URL will take you.
As a regular user I find this frustrating. Getting people to follow links to unsavoury sites is a time honoured tradition with hilarious consequences if you're really lucky, or, more likely, an opening for any number of phishing attacks. Services such as icanhaz.com help to some extent by allowing you to specify the form your shortened link takes. This still isn't ideal.
As a site owner I would rather my domain name was immediately visible to the user. Spreading the name of the site is as important as spreading links to the site. The domain shouldn't be something a reader stumbles upon if they remember to look at the address bar.
With both of these points in mind I built a URL shortening service directly into this blog. It's not a general URL shortening service for the public but each article has a short link based on its database ID as well as a search engine friendly URL based on its title. The short URL is displayed at the bottom of the page and automatically redirects to the main article URL.