URL Shorteners Get Some Backup 224
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.
Problematical (Score:5, Funny)
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. ;)
Re:Problematical (Score:5, Funny)
Problematical [reference.com] is a perfectly cromulent word.
Re:Problematical (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Problematical (Score:5, Funny)
That's ironical, isn't it?
Re:Problematical (Score:4, Funny)
Actually, that's sartastical.
Re: (Score:2)
And this thread has become farcical.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Problematical (Score:4, Funny)
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. ;)
The proper word is problematicalistic
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
If you say it loud enough you'll always sound precocious!
This will never work (Score:5, Funny)
I have a great proof why this won't work, but it's too long to fit in into a URL :(
Re: (Score:2)
Here you go:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&c2coff=1&rls=GGLG%2CGGLG%3A2005-26%2CGGLG%3Aen&q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2Fsearch%3Fhl%3Den%26lr%3D%26c2coff%3D1%26rls%3DGGLG%252CGGLG%253A2005-26%252CGGLG%253Aen%26q%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fwww.google.com%252Fsearch%253Fhl%253Den%2526lr%253D%2526c2coff%253D1%2526rls%253DGGLG%25252CGGLG%25253A2005-26%25252CGGLG%25253Aen%2526q%253Dhttp%25253A%25252F%25252Fwww.google.com%25252Fsearch%25253Fsourceid%25253Dnavclient%252526ie%25253DUTF-8%252526r [google.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Longest name for a website?
http://www.gooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooogle.com/ [gooooooooo...ooogle.com]
Or? http://llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.co.uk/ [llanfairpw...goch.co.uk]
THIS IS SERIOUS BUSINESS (Score:5, Funny)
awesome of bit.ly to join (Score:2)
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)
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 ;)
Re:Why bother? (Score:4, Insightful)
URLs longer than 80 characters might split in multiple lines in emails. IRC topics also benefit from url shorteners. Nobody will be missing the rickrolls, however
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
And paper media where you can't just Ctrl+C Ctrl-V but have to manually type out the entire address making no mistakes in the process.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You forgot about the critical function they perform in trolling and rickrolling.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Mod parent "-1, Proved self wrong".
(Yes, I knew I had it coming when I clicked the link)
Re: (Score:2)
Only time I use url shortening services is when I need to paste a url with cyrillic or non-ascii characters and the program or website doesn't support them. For example Steam breaks the link and cant show characters, so you have a non-working link. Same thing here on Slashdot. For that kind of thing it works ok.
(tho arguably programs/websites should just fix their goddamn utf-8 support)
Will it really (Score:5, Interesting)
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)
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: (Score:2)
That would only be effective if they had done that in the first place.
If they tried to do that now their creditors would cry foul and have the CEO replaced.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
For someone trying to resolve one of the shortened urls, having a working mechanism present on the domain is a lot less important than having the database (for instance, say bit.ly shut down, Twitter could put in place a mechanism where users could press a button and some program would go through their spew and replace all the bit.ly references with something else, having the service running on bit.ly isn't real important for things like that).
Re:Will it really (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Slashdot comment shortener (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
How does one go out of business... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:How does one go out of business... (Score:4, Insightful)
If your own URL shortener becomes popular (it won't), it will have to serve at least a million clicks per day. bit.ly is currently at around 4-5 per day, I think.
You can just perform simple redirects, without logging anything... But then you don't have anything even remotely interesting. The natural urge is to log every visit and let people view logs of their links (if you don't, users won't like your shortener). DB storage quickly piles up. A little bit of AdSense won't help you pay the servers, storage and bandwidth.
Re:How does one go out of business... (Score:4, Funny)
If your own URL shortener becomes popular (it won't), it will have to serve at least a million clicks per day. bit.ly is currently at around 4-5 per day, I think.
I don't know why bit.ly is even up for discussion though. A site that only gets 4 hits per day is obscure by any standard.
Re:How does one go out of business... (Score:5, Funny)
And, according to TFS, it is the biggest of them. :)
Bit.ly is Twitter Approved (Score:3, Informative)
Bit.ly is currently the number one URL shortener because Twitter automatically uses them when a non-shortened URL is sent.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The correct way to do this should be an RFC which would define a standard URL shortening function that can be implemented by all the browsers. Such a shortening function has to be like a hash, but easily reversible. There's certainly no need for a database or list of URLs or a cron script.
Moreover, when the browser can decode the shortened URL, it won't burden the network with all those useless lookups.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Great idea.
Now please take this url:
http://example.com/insert_hexadecimal_dump_blueray_disc_image_here [example.com]
and run it through your shortening function.
Who needs bittorrent!
Re: (Score:2)
There are other examples of hash functions, such as those used in hashtables, whose most important property isn't being hard to reverse at all, but rather being uniformly distributed in the required range and having low collision probability.
No hash is actually unreversible (except for collisions), since one can simply try all possibilities, but that would be grossly inefficient and only theoretically interesting.
Finally,
Re: (Score:2)
How do they generate the shortened link without going to the site? The problem is that a shortened link is in perpetuity and you don't recoup those bandwidth and service costs through simple adsense on creation. A cron to remove links over a year old would be a better idea.
Re: (Score:2)
So I guess that's how they go out of business, by suicide.
Bit.ly? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
bit.ly is huge on twitter. It has mostly replaced tinyurl there. It became the default url shortener for twitter earlier in the year [readwriteweb.com].
Re: (Score:2)
This all could be solved by creating a new .gTLD. Say, .lnk or .url; and selling one letter domains with the requisite that they (the buyers of those) share/backup their databases somewhat like this proposed organization.
Simple and moderately clean.
Re: (Score:2)
I feel like this race to the bottom would be helped if people came up with a widely accepted shorthand for "http://", which with j.mp domains is like 1/3 of the length of the url. Something like "@username" for urls. "//"?
Who wants 'em? (Score:2)
URL shorteners are a scourge. As someone else pointed out, they're only really useful for Twitter, with its artificial post-length constraint. Anyone who links to a tinyurl on an actual Web site (such as Slashdot) should automatically be assumed to be a troll, because the only reason to use an URL shortener is to conceal what you're actually linking to.
Re: (Score:2)
No, the only reason to use them is on systems that can't handle an html anchor tag or similar, because any decent web-enabled system can handle <a href="somelonglink">a short description</a>.
Re: (Score:2)
Concealing links is a common use.
Which links are more likely to be clicked by the people who might be offended/get in trouble by viewing it:
http://teensex.com/video/Hardcore-Fucking-13300.html [teensex.com]
http://tiny.cc/FJU5j [tiny.cc]
Re: (Score:2)
My point is that BOTH of these links are broken. They're supposed to be descriptive human-readable text that go to a url when clicked. You're not supposed to actually see the link at all. Whether people lie in their descriptions is another matter.
Re: (Score:2)
But even when you do that you see it when hovering over the link, and there's a group of people who won't click the first but will click the second. Sites like this one of course include the domain name without having to hover...
Re: (Score:2)
No, I'm bitching about people trying to bitch about problems that aren't problems for anyone who uses the technology properly.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
They are handy in /. signature blocks, which also have an artificial limit on length.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
because the only reason that I can think of to use an URL shortener is to conceal what you're actually linking to.
FTFY. There are a lot of situations in which it's simply easier to use a short URL - the simplest example that comes to mind is when there's a URL you have to type manually or recite by voice - in both cases a short URL is much easier to understand and use.
So? (Score:2)
But can someone enlighten me why it would be "problematic" if such a service would go out of business?
All they do is redirect to the original url. So where is the loss?
The original url is still there. If no one is able to find it without using the shortened url chances are pretty big it isn't much interresting anyway.
Re: (Score:2)
One simple example:
- You search through your e-mail messages for a link you need (for whatever reason) that some friend of yours sent you.
- You find the message.
- The link in the message is actually using a shortened URL.
- The company that made the redirection is out of business.
- You are screwed.
Re: (Score:2)
One simple example:
- You search through your e-mail messages for a link you need (for whatever reason) that some friend of yours sent you.
- You find the message.
- The link in the message is actually using a shortened URL.
- The company that made the redirection is out of business.
- You are screwed.
Why would anyone send an email with a shortened URL? Tweets, sure, text messages, IMs, okay, but email?
bit.ly (Score:3, Interesting)
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?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Some websites are to blame too (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I completely agree, but I have two comments:
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
Maybe we could just issue unique IDs (Score:2)
Maybe we could just issue unique IDs for everything on the Internet. I'm not sure how many would be enough. It could be 64-bits, or perhaps even 128, although you can be sure that if we did that some comittee would probably come up with a reason to gobble up bits. Then of course you'd need some bits for private URLs.
I'm not sure what you call it, but plainly some protocol is needed for all these URLs on the Internet. A kind of... "Internet Protocol", or IP for short. Yeah, that's it. Is anybody workin
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
You would (and DO) call it a Uniform Resource Name, or URN [wikipedia.org].
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Does the solve the "little guy" problem? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
I cannot believe I passed up the opportunity to misspell "problematic" in my own post. :(
Am I the only one who remembers what I read here? (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Are you serious? HTTP is a text based protocol. If you really want to optimize that much forget about shortening your urls and turn on compression.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
So do it internally. There's no reason slashdot couldn't turn all the URL's on their own page into
http://slashdot/a [slashdot]
a-z 0-9, then add 2 digits, then 3, then 4. That should last you a while.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
And... (Score:4, Interesting)
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)
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)
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)
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)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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.)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
(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)
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:2, Informative)
Plus, there are times when you can't copy/paste a link, and would prefer a shorter one to have to type.
Re: (Score:2)
Character limits and no copy/paste... I thought this was the 21st century?
Re:Wish these services would just go away already (Score:4, Insightful)
Those of us who still participate in discussion forums via Email or Usenet have a ~70 character character limit on URLs. If it exceeds that amount it will break across multiple lines and no longer function. Although readers could just copy-n-paste all the piece together, the TinyURL provides a way to convenient way to avoid that.
And as a plus (Score:4, Insightful)
They also give you a way to send people to places they would normally have the good sense not to.
Cool!
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Still, there's no reason that Slashdot couldn't have slashdot.org/184265 link to the same page. Thinkgeek does this - when you browse around, you get thinkgeek.com/category/subcategory/id, but linking to thinkgeek.com/id works perfectly. Slashdot, not so much (that links to the home page for whatever reason).
It's still not as short as j.mp/f00b4r, but it eliminates an additional point of failure. Of course, most of the links that people are sending over twitter et al that bit.ly is shortening are so trans
Re: (Score:2)
How about the website owners make the URLs shorter. It would be really fun if I wanted to, say, send that link to someone in SMS or post on a website from my cellphone .......
83322244177775552777744366681666777411111111111111177778666777999
(if you can't tell, my example is "tech.slashdot.org/story"
Instead of going to tinyurl or a similar site and getting a shorter url. A similar problem is when you need to print the url (for example in a magazine). Printing it isn;t difficult, but when someone wants to go t
Re: (Score:2)
Why don't they use zip compression on the URL text? Just post the compressed string instead.
Re: (Score:2)
But, I just don't understand how that cutens ANYTHING!
Re: (Score:2)
Participating companies will provide regular backups of their URL mappings to the 301Works.org service. In the event of the closure of a participating organization, technical control of the shortening service domain will be transferred to 301Works.org in order to continue redirecting existing shortened URLs to their intended destinations.
Proper handling of the final destination of these links is the responsibility of webmasters operating the targeted sites. Competent operators use HTTP redirection to correctly handle outdated inbound links. Failure to do so in the case of shortened URLs causes no additional problems beyond those caused by people attempting to use the original links.
Re: (Score:2)
It's not any different than the link rot you get from expired domains. The number of dead links on the internet are massive. I find myself popping onto webpages that haven't been updated in several years. and all the Geocities links are dead. Internet Archive tries to mirror what it can, but it's more of a band-aid over the real problem.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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:2)
Re: (Score:2)
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).
Have fun upgrading SMS in the network back end, all the handsets that support it, and how it's billed across all carriers globally.
Re: (Score:2)
Not that the web should downgraded to support inferior systems, but mobile does have full web support these days, and there is such a thing as MMS these days.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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.