ewencp

Right, it isn't that surprising. I was originally motivated by the general question of how many URL shorteners you have to hop through to get to sites from Twitter. What this doesn't show is as interesting as what it does: other URL shorteners seem to be behaving well since they haven't increased the rate of re-wrapping already short URLs, including services like Facebook where you might expect they would do so for the same reasons Twitter does.

But to really answer your question, I didn't intend to make a particular point -- I collected the data to answer a question and then dug in a bit more to see if I could find anything else interesting.

I think there are other reasons as well (e.g. analytics, as mentioned in the post, when links are consumed through third party clients), but I don't buy this one. Wouldn't this only be useful in breaking spam links when they are spread beyond Twitter? On Twitter itself, they don't need a URL shortener, they just need to remove the offending tweets. It might be a nice side effect, but I doubt it's the real motivation for shortening everything.

Not exactly what you're suggesting, but https://github.com/jterrace/js.js is in a similar vein: SpiderMonkey -> LLVM -> emscripten -> JS to run a JS within JS.