Google's link shortener is officially dead
androidpolice.comGood. Now hopefully others follow suit.
There's no legitimate reason to use URL shorteners. It's only if you want to hide malware, tracking links, referral links, etc - none of which benefit the user.
Curious: any idea how much would it cost to run a year?
Probably not that much, there's not much processing power involved nor bandwidth used (it's really just serving 301 redirects). A bare-metal dedicated server should handle quite a bit of traffic and remain cost effective (compared to their "cloud" equivalents).