Q:

If short URls are such good practice, why don't big sites like Amazon or Facebook implement them?

Short, near urls (Such as on this site) are a much talked about good practice in web development for the purpose of good SEO (and probably other reasons too).
If this is so, then how comes so many big sites like Amazon and Facebook still have ridiculously long URLs in their pages (like the about section, etc)?
Is there an engineering issue with implementing this functionality to a very large, live site? (I would assume so as it's best to plan and factor these sort of things in first).
Thanks

A:

Because it's not a priority to them. Normal users don't care about URLs. 
This site was built as an MVC app which has at its core, simple URLs.
My apps don't always have elegant URLs because my customers have never said, "I wish the URLs were shorter".
I agree with you that there is some value in a clean URL, but unless you start with it as a goal, it difficult to work in later and more difficult still to justify.

