Tools for shortening URLs have become very popular in the age of microblogging, but shortening a URL to incomprehensible code makes it impossible to know what you’re clicking on.
The now quintessential microblogging service is Twitter, which limits messages sent to a group of followers to 140 characters. This makes it difficult to post URLs with long set of parameters that follow. The necessity to shorten those URLs gave rise to services like tinyurl, is.gd, ping.fm, bit.ly, tweetburner and others.