Phurl could really be useful and should be enabled. With phurl, you can create short keywords to embed in markup fields, which are transformed into links by the remarkup rendering engine. It's a nice abstraction for managing reusable links in phabricator:

• It's great for sharing links to things like saved searches, custom forms, or other hard to remember phabricator URLs.
• It allows the destination URL to be changed without tracking down and editing every place where that URL was referenced. This alone could save a ton of time when reorganizing documentation or other similar tasks.

I think phurl is much preferable to using a 3rd party URL shortener, and here are a few reasons:

• Most of these services produce short but not very memorable URLs.
• The links are opaque, giving no indication of where they will redirect you to.
• Operated by 3rd parties which could have vulnerabilities that lead to phishing or other undesirable outcomes.
• These services have the ability to (and often actually do) track users browsing activity.

So phurl has potential to be really useful, at least for internal links to phabricator as well as links to documentation on wikimedia.org and other technical resources. I don't think we should operate a generic URL shortener for external use, there are already many of them and very little need for another but I do think phurl can prove very useful for it's intended, very limited use-cases that benefit from the way in which the functionality is integrated into phabricator.