And yet, there are still good reasons to want shorter URLs. Twitter’s 140 character limit isn’t going away any time soon, so brevity in all things is absolutely necessary there; Twitter itself shortens many with bit.ly as they pass through. Some instant messaging networks and all SMS (phone text messaging) services have similar limits. In email, any URL longer than about 70 characters runs a very real risk of being chopped off in recipients’ mail software, either on first viewing or when they reply or forward. This isn’t confined to classic text-based mail readers like Pine; I see it all the time in the latest build of Microsoft Entourage 2008.