There’s an internet startup creating a website for almost anything out there. Or almost anything. There are websites to aggregate your Twitter followers, blog feeds, contact lists, and instant messages, to name just a few. They are meant to help you with consuming and utilizing all the web 2.0 data that takes way more than you have time for.

Some inventions are less important. Shortening urls is more aesthetic than critical for comprehension. A long url in an instant message or email can be overwhelming when viewing on a small screen. An email message could slice the url in half leaving the link destination appearing invalid when it is just missing a few more parameters.

The short urls are very popular due to many sites using them because of their short length. Twitter, with it’s 160 character limit, converts most urls into short urls to fit more content into each tweet. A tweet to a Google map location would probably take that many characters alone.

One website, longurlplease.com, is the opposite of these short urls. The founder dislikes these short urls as they provide little knowledge of where the url really leads to. It’s a mask that could hide a malicious website with a virus, a valid point.

The website provides an api and Firefox plugin that expands the short urls on a page you’re viewing into the urls they point to. You can see where the links go to, and as the founder stated, you can see if you’ve visited the page before.

With new technology that is suppose to help simplify our lives, there is new technology that counters those efforts, for the good and for the bad. In this case a short url has a good meaning, to clean up long urls, and a bad, to see that long url, and both are right in their own worlds. It all depends on what you like more.