Inspired by ZeroBin I started to wonder whether you could create a pastebin service with no server side component. Shortly (yeah I'm not really sure what is with the name) is the result of that.

Data is compressed using the deflate algorithm, then base64 encoded to ensure it can be stored safely in a URL. It is then set as the window.location.hash of the current page. Testing with various URL shorteners has shown that they don't care about long URLs generated by this. I still need to add checks to ensure that the URL isn't too long (I'm looking at you IE), but as a quick proof-of-concept I'm happy with what I've come up with. I'm wondering whether the same idea could be used to share data in other formats...