Or: Why McAfee’s URL shortener is worse for the internet than all the other URL shorteners.

Yesterday, under the pretence of something about making everything secure, McAfee went and launched the beta of its own URL shortner, McAf.ee. Here I am going to explain why this is a terrible idea for numerous reasons.

So there’s news around on tech blogs about Bit.ly getting a re-design and some new features.

If you can call them “features”, that is. Here’s a selection:

One of my favourite features of the recently-launched Tweetie 2 (as a geeky developer, at least) is the ability to use your own custom URL shortening service when you shrink the URLs in your tweets.

Fortunately, the API for our short URL service Retwt.me is out-of-the-box compatible with Tweetie 2. Here’s how to enable Retwt.me for shortening on your iPhone.