Twitter and the use of URL shorteners

Interesting post from David Pogue at The New York Times. He talked about using the UL shorteners in posts and most commonly used at Twitter. If you aren’t sure where the link is going to take you then are you putting yourself at risk? Here is the first part of the article -

Hi David, Why do people (including yourself) use URL shorteners in anything other than Twitter? I think it’s an unnecessary and unpleasant layer of opacity between you and your readers. I don’t know where the link goes to and I don’t like getting in the habit of clicking these things. Why not just do it the regular way of a link with text? I can see at the bottom of my browser window where it really goes.

There are usually some useful comments at Pogue’s column.