Yes, this is
not a URL shortener per se, although it can obviously be used as such.
Sad story, but I worked for a company named Netword exactly two decades ago that was going to do this in a big way, even got one of the major SV investment firms, Hambrecht & Quist, very interested (and their in with Netscape, who they helped take public, would have been important), as in, we launched, and they came to us....
But it was killed by devil investors who due to previous resource misallocations and bad risk management (MPV, MPV, MVP!!!) had gotten their hooks into the company about the time I started there. Weird and nasty denouncement, 13 of us resigned in masse one day from our lawyer's office, we had to fight to get our last paychecks (something state government enforcement agencies have no humor about at all), etc. etc.
It a very good idea, I think, and who knows, maybe it's time has come. Mr. rsync (who I'm a very happy customer of (http://www.ancell-ent.com/1715_Rex_Ave_127B_Joplin/images/ )), you're welcome to drop me an email check my info) for what we figured out in that effort.
Note that we were going to do "Networds(TM)", as in "Intel annual report", obviously one thing that made this less important was the increasing quality of search engines. This isn't quite the same thing....