Google+ has reached 10 million profiles and is expected to reach 20 million by the end of next week. With all of these new accounts being created so quickly, people want to share their profiles with their friends or publicly to simplify getting connected. The URL for your profile in G+ is not pretty. Gplus.to provides a URL shortener that provides you with a vanity shortened URL that links to your profile.
You look at your profile, grab the ID from the URL, paste it into Gplus.to, and come up with your nick name. Presto-chango, you have a way to link to your profile that looks like http://gplus.to/CaptAwesome.