When you have to fit Twitter messages into 140 characters, URL shortening services such as TinyURL and is.gd are handy, but I hate seeing tweets likes this:

This is hilarious: http://is.gd/kSyL

Typical URLs do include information that provides context, starting with the domain name. If someone points to a "great article on [whatever]", the fact that it's on nytimes.com versus someguy.wordpress.com gives me a clue about how much I want to read it, so if the description with the URL doesn't give any meaningful context, I'm not going to follow the link.

Firefox plug-in to the rescue: I recently learned from a @kasthomas about the LongURL expander, which displays the real destination of a URL when you mouse over the shortened version.

Thanks, Sean Murphy, for writing it!