The danger of shortened urls – Internet Archive to the rescue
By Paul Biba
Many of us are using shortened urls, especially in connection with services such as Twitter. I do a tweet of almost every post here and it is a nice, quick overview of what’s gone on during the day. Of course, each tweet contains a short url and I’ve been using Tinyurl along withTweetdeck.
However, if the url shortening service goes under then you have lost all your links. They become useless. Now, the Internet Archive, along with 301works.org, has come to an agreement with 20 url shortening services to get dumps of their links and thus preserve them if something happens to the service itself. You can find all the details here, including those services that agreed to participate.
I notice that Tinyurl is not among their members, so I just changed my Tweetdeck settings to use Twurl which is. Now my Twitter links will be preserved.
November 14th, 2009 at 9:28 am
You’d think the e-book community (and a few others), having had the experience of buying from a web vendor and losing your purchase when the site made a change or went out of business, would be more leery of services like this. IMO, better off to just buy a real URL, even if it isn’t ideal in name, than to risk losing a horde of tiny URLs down the line.
November 14th, 2009 at 11:02 pm
I agree wholeheartedly with Steve here: it’s too risky to trust these services with URLs that I might want to see a few years from now.
Here is an article (from July 2008) comparing “URL truncators” … how many of them are still in business ?
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/short-url-truncators/
Also, with the full link, at one glance I can get more information. For example, if I see anywhere in the link:
teleread.org
then I know I will be clicking to a source that is interesting, reliable, authoritative and trustworthy.
If I see only
http://preview.tinyurl.com/yaoymqo
then I don’t know where I’m heading. Clicking on that mysterious link might take me to an unsavory web site, where I would have a lot of ’splainin’ to do.
All that said: if you must use a shortened URL, then the 301works.org project looks like a very good idea.
Michael Pastore
50 Benefits of Ebooks