What is a URL shortening and redirection service

used for? I tried to download something and it asked to click a service, or link (safeurl.eu).

A picture is worth a thousand words so the saying goes..... tinyurl link

Interesting. However, I never considered an url as being "too large" or onerous to copy+paste, but I'll back out of this discussion as I know not much about programing.

There are some URLs that are ridiculously long and shorteners make sense. However, the REAL reason that shorteners even came into existence is because of Twitter..

They're also useful if you want people to be able to type them in by hand. I used a URL shortner to create an easy URL to type in for a flyer I was producing.

It just shortens your long url, if you have a really long URL and it doesn't seem right to use it in your post , article then you can use a short URL instead to save the space and it will also look better. There are plenty of URL shortening services out there like bitly.com , tinyurl.com etc...