I'm tiny, I'm little, but I am also dangerous

Most blogs and social networks like to compress Uniform Resource Locators (URL) to outbound web addresses. One company that offer this service is TinyURL.  Services such as these take a long url like "somedomain.com/something/somethingelse/somepage.html" and turn it into "tinyurl.com/9a456". This might seem ideal, look neater and save disk space, but is it safe?   

I'm tiny, but I could contain a link to a malicious site!

How does it work?  It takes the actual URL and stores it with a key, then the service returns the "tiny url" which is then displayed instead of the real URL.  The problem with this, is that there is no way to tell where you will be taken to once you click on the tiny url.  Clicking on the minified version, brings you to the "tiny" site, this site looks up the url (whatever it might be) and redirects you.  What if it is a porn site, or malware site?  This is the risk we all take by clicking on, but with more and more kids on the internet, we are suppose to be making the internet safer and more accessible, not masking the identity of site.  I would much rather see the address of a site and know where I will be taken before I click on anything - this is part of web security 101.

So why is this so acceptable? Mostly because social sites like Twitter use it and people either assume it's ok, don't care or maybe it is because they have no other option if they want to use the given service.  Either way - it's a bad idea.