the value is mostly found in marketing activities. to know where traffic is coming from allows you to get a better idea of where to focus and what provides best results.
i'm curious to know why you think that shortened urls will reduce future generations' ability to find information. especially since, for the most part, their usage is restricted to the social web.
"Wow, @fermat says he's proved something amazing! Damn, it's too short to fit in 140 characters. Oh wait... there's this bit.ly link... oh yeah, bit.ly went out of business and took their URL map with them."
It's a bit hyperbolic but that's the basic problem, I think.
you could say that about almost anything online, though. whoops, wikipedia went out of business and now we've lost a lot of information. oh darn, wordpress went down for good and took all its hosted blogs and the infinite wisdom found within their content.
that is an issue with the internet at large, not just with url shorteners. in addition, the only externally meaningful thing that would be lost is the bitly connection on twitter that connects that tweet to the content. whatever brilliance he linked to would still exist outside that scope and be accessible. unless his bitly link was to bitly itself.
Except arbitrary URL shortening services are far more likely to shutdown than Wikipedia, Google, or Twitter itself. It's another level of indirection through another party which provides a service in a fast-changing, simple market.
Are all the URLs in your tweets going to be broken in 2 years? More likely than a Wikipedia or Google URL.
so are the twitter image hosts. or arbitrary S3 file hosts. or a wordpress mu blog network. or any number of other smaller alternatives for services that we deem useful.
i suppose the root of my problem with this line of thought is that it basically is saying that if you want to start a value-added service, go big or go home. no room for little guys, because if you fail you might somehow be destroying some of the fabric of the web.
i find this disagreeable. seems not very hacker-like.
It's questionable how valuable those metrics are, considering that a number of Twitter clients follow the shortened links to get the real URLs for their users, which means a hit doesn't necessarily translate into a view.
i'm curious to know why you think that shortened urls will reduce future generations' ability to find information. especially since, for the most part, their usage is restricted to the social web.