Masking Twitter links

I have noticed on Twitter and some other social networking sites, numerous individuals mask links to their blogs or other sites using a URL shortening site (like tinyurl). I can see the rationale for doing this with affiliate links, but I'm hard pushed to find a good reason to do it for linking to, say, blog posts or other "regular" links. Anyone have any ideas why they do this?

 

Twitter has a word limit of 140 characters. 'SEO friendly' URLs tend to become long and hence URL shortening becomes a default choice for posting messages on twitter.

 

use www.cli.gs to track the links ppl are clicking

 

Ditto what Loco.M said. If you register an account at cli.gs you can track the number of click-throughs that items get.

 

Good idea, and thanks for the info guys.

As the owner of the target blog, I can use the httpd logs to get the clickthrough data

 

oh , i was wondering why short urls

thanks friends.

 

i'm using bit.ly for my shortening, and it also has link-tracking

also if you have a size limitation, like in these forum links, you can use URL-shorteners to fit in subpages as links

 

Sometimes, people use software for twittering (like Twhirl) that automatically short any URL.