Having your own domain and server is a really fun thing. You can keep a blog, store files, post photos. All good ole down-home interwebz fun you can dream up. With the advent of micro-blogging, everyone now has an audience they need to communicate with in the briefest fashion.
Short links have become the norm for sharing, but with a huge price. Short links break the interconnectedness of the Internet. Search results that depend on the count of links become incorrect. Some services try to reconnect links between domains by using some DNS trickery. But the issue remains that there is a middleman that can’t help make the connection.
Unless, of course, that middleman is the search engine. Google’s recently announced URL shortener could solve many of the problems inherent with URL shorteners. By being the middleman, Google would have all the necessary information to put the pieces back together. It’s easy enough to set up, provided you have a Google Apps account. It does not currently have an API, but here’s hoping.