TinyURL may be of poor use if you're making it a permanent link on a web page. However, TinyURL is made to good use if you have a really long URL, and you want to email it to someone. Often time, the URL can be broken while reading it in the email client, and TinyURL helps prevent that.

What if you permantently store your mails, e.g. with a Gmail archive? Even in emails, the TinyURL link may break after a while. If you use <h t t p long url etc.> (enclosed in brackets) it should work even with longer URLs.

Unfortunately, the <brackets> format breaks the URL some email readers, so you can't win.

Here's a summary of URL shortening services from notlong.com:

http://notlong.com/links/