Any question answered...

URL shorteners are the devil's work, a slightly useful idea which has been co-opted by the twats who ruined the internet as a way to monetise very fucking click, and in the meantime turn every simple request into a string of ten separate redirects.

Including the one used on this site, which makes it very easy to mess around with people:-

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news (does not go where you expect it to, is perfectly safe though...)

URL shorteners without a way to preview are especially annoying.