The other day I got this newsletter via emai about some new conference in UX. Reading through the newsletter, I got to a few sections that used a few of those shorted URLs, such as created by websites like tinyurl.com. While I think shortened URLs are great for interfaces that have a restriction on characters, such as Twitter or SharePoint, I fail to see the good of a shortened URL in a newsletter. There are already gobs of text swimming around, what are a few extral characters in a URL going to do? I mean, if you’re going to take the time to write out an entire newsletter, I’d much rather see a longer and more meaningful URL than some shortened one that tells me nothing about the destination.