Roll Your Own URL Shortener with Wordpress in less than One Hour — KevinDonahue.com

Great article, I did all of this, got a new domain (4kw.us), set up the WordPress, got twitter and statistics working. Now I don’t have to add value to some other persons URL shortener site by giving them my data. All in under an hour.

If you think about it, the proliferation of URL shorteners is just a game to get a ton of subscribers, analyze all the related data on who uses the links. You’ve then got a valuable commodity you can sell. Using URL shorteners is potentially making THEM money. Did you really want to do that, given how little value they are adding, and that they’re not paying you for your data? Didn’t think so.