I'm a little late to the game, but until recently, there hasn't been much need for URL Shorteners. With Twitter and to a lesser extent, Facebook, sharing short links are a necessity. URL Shorteners provide a simple function: shrink a long URL that you can use in your post, tweet, status update or web articles. It is easy and handy to use a shortened URL once you find the right tool.
In April, Netflix sent me an e-mail advertising a Wii disc to stream movies to my TV. It sounded pretty cool, so I decided to give it a try. A month and a half later, my Wii has become an awesome little a streaming device!
In technical terms, we are all choosing to communicate with a piece of middleware to aggregate our relationship and efficiently share it with the masses. I'm not sure if people believe they are no longer capable of keeping friendships with a large number of people on their own or if it truly is just the technology that masks our senses. Its not hard to draw similarities with The Matrix.
