URL Shortening is a must in the age of 140 character micro blogging. Many have come to learn that it is really an art form to get peoples attention, get them to read your 140 character snippet and click your link to get more. This challenge can be made a little easier with the URL shortener http://bit.ly, the 5 reasons for this are:

1. Tidy’s up large URL’s and makes them much more compact.
2. Provides you with robust statistics on not only who clicks your link but other bit.ly links
3. Allows you to share your links on Twitter
4. Provides conversational data from Friend Feed and Twitter
5. Provides api key for other content aggregation sites such as twitterfeed.com

Check out my screen-cast for a detailed demonstration: