Not that it is terribly important, I came to a realization while reading about how Digg has (for the moment) hijacked their url shortener. These many sites: bit.ly, tiny.url, tr.im, is.gd, etc., all pretty much grew from twitter. The most remarkable thing though, is that just over 3 years ago Twitter didn't exist. In fact, it didn't gain popularity until late '08, and these services sprang up and multiplied shortly thereafter. No one could have predicted their prosperity, because without twitter and its 140 character limitation, they're pretty much useless when compared to just plain Copy+Paste.
I'm not going anywhere in particular with this one, but I thought it was interesting food for thought.