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URL Shorteners Get Some Backup

Posted by kdawson on Saturday November 14, @05:28PM
from the keeping-it-real-short dept.
The Internet
URL shorteners are problematical, as everybody knows, but with the rise of Twitter and its ilk they seem to be a necessary part of the landscape. Some of the biggest questions around services such as bit.ly, TinyURL, and is.gd is what happens when they go out of business (as tr.im did last August). Now a group of such companies, organized under the auspices of the Internet Archive, has formed a non-profit entity to hold URL-shortening databases in escrow, with the intent of continuing to resolve a member company's links should it get out of the business. At announcement, the 301Works organization has 21 URL-shortener members, including the largest, bit.ly. Many others are not (yet) on board. The members have agreed to cede control of their domain names to 301Works.org should they exit the field, and to back up their URL mappings regularly to the organization.
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  • Problematical (Score:5, Funny)

    by Kagura (843695) on Saturday November 14, @05:33PM (#30101446)

    URL shorteners are problematical, as everybody knows, but with the rise of Twitter and its ilk they seem to be a necessary part of the landscape.

    Seriously?? I know editors frequently get grief for this sort of thing, but come on... the word is problematicalic, for crying out loud. ;)

  • I have a great proof why this won't work, but it's too long to fit in into a URL :(

  • THIS IS SERIOUS BUSINESS (Score:5, Funny)

    by gazbo (517111) on Saturday November 14, @05:36PM (#30101482)
    Sorry, I mean srs bsns.

  • Hopefully bit.ly's commitment will force the other common players (tinyurl, tr.im, etc) to join as well. Bit.ly was the only main player on their list so far. A great next-step would be to get the twitter image sites (twitpic, img.ly, etc) on board as well.

  • Why bother? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by RiotingPacifist (1228016) on Saturday November 14, @05:42PM (#30101542)

    URL shortners only server for twitter posts and other place where you need to count characters, these links become pointless within days of a post (some think they become useless even earlier than that), so why bother preserving them after that? let alone when a provider goes bankrupt.

    p.s I'm only posting this so i can get some karma to go troll apple ;)

  • Will it really (Score:5, Interesting)

    by TorKlingberg (599697) on Saturday November 14, @05:46PM (#30101562)

    If one of these companies goes bankrupt, their creditors will demand the only valuable asset: the domain name. Does their agreement with 301Works overrule the creditors claims?

    • Re:Will it really (Score:4, Interesting)

      by roju (193642) on Saturday November 14, @05:54PM (#30101630) Homepage

      That's a really good point. They could probably set up a structure to deal with it though. Create up a third company (say URL Inc) and transfer ownership of the domain to it. Give archive.org ownership of URL Inc but have them contract out operation perpetually to the url-shortening company (say bit.ly Inc). Put non-assumability language in the contract, so that a transfer of ownership of bit.ly Inc would terminate the agreement.

    • Re:Will it really (Score:5, Informative)

      by mysidia (191772) on Saturday November 14, @07:21PM (#30102314)

      Unless they are going bankrupt already, or the creditors have a secured debt, and the domain name is the collateral/security for that debt,

      If they don't, then 301works' claim to the domain would be a prior claim, since they have secured an agreement that requires the URL shortening service to continue working, and a specific asset is named in securing that agreement is the domain name.

      In other words: it depends on the terms of the agreement with 301works.

      In a bankruptcy preceding, the party with the prior claim is normally the one they signed an agreement to deliver the asset to.

      For example: if I buy something from an online retailer or mail order catalog, and they enter into bankruptcy after they received my payment for the item, but before they shipped the product... their creditors' don't get to repossess the item I have purchased, my claim comes before theirs, since my payment to purchase the item is a prior claim that I have.

      And they have to send me the item, or a refund before they pay other creditors whose debts they defaulted on after my claim was raised.

      The key difference: creditors that have a claim to a specific prior claim to a certain asset are at an advantage to the ones that don't.

      Since specific cash to pay for the item in exchange for a certain service was provided by me, I have the prior claim to that cash.

      Banks and investors that provided unsecured loans, or weren't a trading partner, have to wait in line, according to the priority of creditors.

  • How does one go out of business... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by KalvinB (205500) on Saturday November 14, @05:47PM (#30101576) Homepage

    running these things?

    $6.99 a year for the domain with free standard hosting from GoDaddy and you're set.

    It's not like it's a particularly difficult task to create and run these types of sites. With a simple cron script to clear out links which haven't been clicked in X amount of days you won't even have to worry about your DB ballooning out of control.

    Throw up Google AdSense on the user facing side to draw in funds and point both GoDaddy and Google at the same bank account. Google giveth and GoDaddy taketh away. Throw in a hundred to start and you're good to go for a decade.

  • bit.ly (Score:3, Interesting)

    by palpatine (94) on Saturday November 14, @06:43PM (#30102032) Homepage

    Does anyone else find it odd that the White House's twitter page uses bit.ly urls when .ly is the top-level domain code for Libya?

  • Some websites are to blame too (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Yvan256 (722131) on Saturday November 14, @07:23PM (#30102328) Homepage Journal

    Some websites have user-friendly URLs, such as "www.apple.com/macmini/". You don't even need to click that link to know what it's about.

    Other websites have dumb, half-friendly URLs, where they add the backend technology inside the URL, such as "http://www.logitech.com/index.cfm/mice_pointers/" (what's with the "index.cfm" in the URL?). If they fix that problem, all the links pointing to the current URL will break. If they ever change technology, it's also going to break the links from other websites.

    And then we have the URLs designed by web monkeys, such as the link for Dell's new Adamo laptop: "www.dell.com/content/topics/topic.aspx/global/products/adamo/topics/en/us/adamo-onyx?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs". What the HELL is that thing? Even if we forget the parameters at the end, look at the path of that thing! I don't care how your crap is organized on the server, the URL should be much simpler than that!

    And last, we have completely brain-dead URLs that seem to be created for computers only, without any chance of figuring out what kind of content is waiting for us on the other side of that link. Crap like "http://www.sonystyle.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/CategoryDisplay?catalogId=10551&storeId=10151&langId=-1&categoryId=16154&SR=nav:electronics:computers:notebook_computers:shop_compare:ss". We're lucky to see "notebook_computers" in the parameters, sometimes it's just a database reference number.

    But even with crap URLs like that, unless you have to spell it, write it down or read it on a (paper) page, such links can be hidden behind simple anchor text such as Sony Laptops [sonystyle.com].

    Twitter is its own problem, they should be the ones to fix their own mess. Someone could start a service similar to Twitter but without counting HTML code as being part of the X characters limit, which seems to be what the fuss is all about.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by novakreo (598689)

      Other websites have dumb, half-friendly URLs, where they add the backend technology inside the URL, such as "http://www.logitech.com/index.cfm/mice_pointers/" (what's with the "index.cfm" in the URL?). If they fix that problem, all the links pointing to the current URL will break. If they ever change technology, it's also going to break the links from other websites.

      There's no reason why Logitech couldn't issue HTTP 301 redirects from http://www.logitech.com/index.cfm/mice_pointers/ [logitech.com] to a newer, friendlier URL.

    • I completely agree, but I have two comments:

      1. For those who don't know, removing the "/index.cfm/*", "/index.aspx/*", "index.php/*", etc is a simple mod_rewrite rule on any Apache server, and I'm certain there are easy fixes on other servers.

        Any decent web dev should be setting that up first, before even thinking about developing a website. Then you can easily change technologies later while maintaining your URLs.

        You should never be able to see the technology of a website in the URL. At a minimum, rew

  • Does the solve the "little guy" problem? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by dmomo (256005) on Saturday November 14, @08:03PM (#30102618) Homepage

    One reason the link-rot threat is very real is the little guy.

    I run a url-shortner (ish) service because it's fun and I can.

    While, I would love to defend url shortners, my advice to a friend would be : don't use these for anything important. They are not to be used in place of bookmarks. If you have a site or a blog.. just use the real URL in the href. You can beautify it any way you would like inside the "Anchor" tag itself. We've been doing that for two decades now.

    Also, the link-rot threat is quite real. SoCuteUrl is simply a fun way to send an otherwise cumbersome link. It's more memorable.. easy to write down, text, etc.

    I run the site because it costs very very little to do so and is a very easy to thing to have set up. And, it's fairly easy to maintain.

    This is where the problem lies. These are so easy to engineer that virtually anyone can do it. Yes, even slackers like myself with a tendency to flake out on personal projects.

    301Works Looks like a decent solution. I will be evaluating it for my own site (socuteurl.com).

    However, the membership fee, which does not exist now could prove problematic. My site makes no money. $1,000 a year may not be a lot of money for a site that makes some kind of profit, but it's a lot to support a hobby.
    I think 301works may have to come up with a better way to support their costs. Since the biggest threat to link rot.. are the sites that don't make money! I think the membership fee if instated should be optional, and donations should be accepted. Or, perhaps the membership fee can be scaled down for sites with small dbs to upload.

  • Slashdot covered the benefits of using url-shorteners to reduce bandwidth waste only last March! Everyone is so eager to prove how sophisticated they are and toss hate on an admittedly stupid fad (twitter) that they're prepared to pretend there are absolutely no benefits to using the types of services talked about in the article. I thought this was supposed to be a geek site, not some silly MMORPG where the only thing that counts is how high your comments get rated?

    Remember this [o3magazine.com]?

    There's a reason why people use url-shorteners, and that reason is because they have a benefit to their use! Many of the more savvy tech sites have begun using them internally to save that 'as much as 75MBit/sec of bandwidth [slashdot.org]' mentioned in the Slashdot headline. If there is a group getting together to ensure this usage can continue to live on even after the death of the individual services, so much the better! This should be seen as good news...

    Instead you half-wits decided to forsake any semblance of geek cred you may have had to whine about Twitter... stuff like this and I wonder why I even come here any more!

    --bornagainpenguin

  • And... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Puppet Master (19479) on Saturday November 14, @11:21PM (#30103694) Homepage
    What happens when 301works.org goes belly up?

    It's not difficult to write your own. I did it (not going to link to it because my server probably won't handle the /. effect.)

    They can't even decide on the name. In their Terms of Participation, they refer to
    themselves as 310works, not 301works. Later they refer to themselves as 201works.
    This does not appear to me to be a very professional company if they can't even proofread their own page...

    And this part gets me:

    Participating companies will be encouraged to place a ‘301Works’ badge on their websites, indicating that they are operating in accordance with these terms of participation. We will generate these badges so they will include the 301works logo and the company’s logo.

    They get free advertising on all of these sites. And last section says they *MAY* impose a fee later, like a $1000/year....

    I'm providing my services for free, no guarantees, warranties or promises. If I go belly up, well, to bad... But with their proofreading "skilz" and free advertising, and possibly charging a fee later on, I think I'll pass.

  • e44.us runs on Google App Engine (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ozzee (612196) on Sunday November 15, @12:54AM (#30104180)
    I've been using e44.us [e44.us] running on Google App Engine. I think it will be around for a while as it custs nothing except registration fees to run atm.

    The source code is available on e44.us/1 [e44.us].

    You can "log in" with your gmail account so one day you can edit your short links.

    Anyhow, it's a simple app for now but if there is interest in a "community" OSS project, we can add cool features like, make personalized forms of the app (urls like e44.us/fred/1) or even your own domain (which you can do now with a Google Apps account), optimize it for mobile phones, validate access to URL's etc etc. If you're interested, let me know.

  • A more sensible alternative solution (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Bertie (87778) on Sunday November 15, @07:55AM (#30105054)

    How's about Twitter just stops imposing a stupid arbitrary limit on post size, and then we wouldn't need these horrible services?

    The SMS message length is a red herring - when was the last time you saw a phone that couldn't handle multiple messages strung together? And I know it has the side benefit of encouraging brevity and stopping people using it like a full-blown blog, but honestly, there's no need - Facebook status messages don't have a length limit (that I've hit, anyway) and I don't see anybody knocking out War And Peace in there, because it's just not the medium for that sort of thing.

  • Reversible compression algorithm? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by brucmack (572780) on Monday November 16, @02:44AM (#30112830)

    Why can't someone build a purpose-built compression algorithm for URLs, so we can skip the URL shortener providers entirely? URLs contain lots of oft-occurring constructs, so I would think a reasonably good compression ratio could be attained.

    Take a URL like http://is.gd/XXXXX [is.gd] - that's 18 characters where only 5 are being used to reference the URL. Couldn't a generic URL compressor do a better job on most URLs of reasonable length? Then we could build inflate support directly into the browser and skip the URL shortener entirely.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Kagura (843695)
      You'll never get rid of "link rot", only mitigate it. Even archiving services have a non-zero chance of going under.

      • You read my mind. Even if this "301Works.org" succeeds, they could go bankrupt as well, and then you still have the same problem.

        Furthermore, what does it matter if http://tinyurl.com/e10zz [tinyurl.com] stops working ten years from now? Nobody cares. Odds are good the link wouldn't work even if the TinyURL was preserved, due to the natural tendency of websites to rearrance their directories. (Note: Remove the last z if you want to see naked women.)

        • (Note: Remove the last z if you want to see naked women.)

          This is why I love slashdot. And why I kind of want to start messing with link-finding regexes to leave the last character out of the href.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Jurily (900488)

      A governing body should not have to step up to preserve these databases.

      Wtf? There is an unbelievably simple way to deal with this. Make the URL shorter, not the link it points to.

      "http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/11/14/184256/URL-Shorteners-Get-Some-Backup?art_pos=1" could become

      "tech.slashdot.org/story/..."

      in the text, but with keeping the long link it points to, so you can still see it when you hover the mouse over it. This is what StackOverflow does in the comments, and it works perfectly.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by CarpetShark (865376)

      Twitter et al are generally of the "look at the cool article/video clip

      Seriously? You've NEVER looked at someone's post from 2--5 years ago, saw a link about something happening at the time, and wanted to follow it to see more? History should still be preserved for others, even if you think it's only of passing interest to you. In fact, most things are more interesting much later as culture changes and new facts are revealed than they are at the time, when the details of most things could be guessed at f

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Afforess (1310263)
      I find bit.ly very useful when I link to a download of some mod or custom content for a game. Adding a "+" symbol in front of the URL easily lets me know how many people have downloaded it, and what countries they were from, which is fairly useful information.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by CarpetShark (865376)

      You would (and DO) call it a Uniform Resource Name, or URN [wikipedia.org].

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by istartedi (132515)

        You're right. I'd read about URNs years ago while reading some other spec. It just seemed to get tucked away in the back of my mind with a lot of other RFC arcana. The people who come up with URL shorteners may or may not known about URNs. If they knew about them, they probably decided to just go ahead with their proprietary version rather than apply to... ummm... wherever you'd apply. That seems like a weakness to the URN scheme. Who has time to jump through whatever beurocratic hoops you'd need to ju

    • These private URL shortening sites shouldn't exist anyway. They're just a hack to support long urls on mediums that can't handle proper html-style linked text (aka hypertext). Those mediums are buggy should be upgraded (if only by footnote style guidelines).

      Could you clarify this? How does what you're suggesting help me read a long URL over the phone? Or type one from memory? Or paste one into an IM or IRC chat window?

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by BinaryOpty (736955)
      The count is actually imposed by the inventors of SMS [wikipedia.org] who decided to make a 140 byte maximum per message. Well I guess you could argue that it's still self-imposed since it was Twitter who decided they wanted to build everything around that limiting system, but they can't just ignore HTML characters for the count as someone other than them is doing the count.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by argent (18001)

      Because releasing the link database doesn't keep the links working?

      You need to maintain the link database AND make sure that the TLD stays with someone that maintains the redirection service. In this case, they're exchanging the link database for that maintenance.

      There might also be data mining issues if you just release the database.

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