Does anyone else think that the shortened URL business is somewhat artificial and limited? I understand the benefit of fitting the URL into a tweet, but full length URLs have a lot of advantages: you can make a judgement on the likely interest or usefulness of the link before you click on it. And there are some links that I normally wouldn't touch with someone else's ten foot cattle prod, which I might click on because I can't do reverse-hashing in my head. (Obviously some of the more mathematically talented HN readers probably can :-)

If Twitter introduces a new way of inserting links then these businesses could disappear overnight.