How to convert long urls into shorter ones

kissa.be is a service that shortens URLs, emails, text, and images. According to the website, this free service can:

• shorten web addresses for emails, forum posts, blogs etc., which cannot handle long URLs and might wrap them, making them unclickable;
• lower the character count when texting web addresses to a mobile phone;
• hide the real URLs of affiliate links from visitors to your site;
• clean up bookmarks for social bookmarking sites or sites with low character limits like Twitter; and
  
• obscure your real email address from bots which harvest them to spam (enter an address like mailto:user.name@example.com).