I’m with Stowe Boyd, in one of the points he makes when writing about the announced failure of URL shortening service Cli.qs:

Short URLs are a feature, and are definitely not a business on their own.

Yep. That’s why I like the shortening feature in WordPress.com since it’s tied directly to the publishing platform, one that’s not as likely to disappear as one of the third party services that are out there. I can’t wait for that functionality to come to the self-hosted WordPress software.