Google URL Shortener links will no longer be available
developers.googleblog.com
developers.googleblog.com
> While most features of goo.gl will eventually sunset, all existing links will continue to redirect to the intended destination.
And
> After March 30, 2019, all links will continue to redirect to the intended destination.
[Emphasis in original, in bold!]
It is hard to read this as anything but saying the continued serving of redirects will _not_ eventually sunset, right? While most features will eventually sunset, all existing links are not most features, and will continue to redirect.
Clearly they changed their mind. I mean, it's not shocking, especially from Google.
It would be decent and transparent of them to admit it though. Yeah, we said that we were going to continue to redirect existing links, we changed our mind, sorry about that.
This is Google we’re talking about. I think at this point they are institutionally committed to the notion that their users ought not trust them to keep services going and if they do, then shame on the user.
If I open the mobile app, click a pin, and press share, I get a maps.app.goo.gl link
Will this break every map ever shared?
Am I underestimating the complexity of this at Google's scale?
I've been the maintainer for production services left orphaned by departing ex-Googlers. They usually go down within 3-6 months of their previous maintainer departing - either there's some PCR because the cluster they're homed in is going down for maintenance or transferring to another datacenter, or their dependencies migrate to a new RPC format, or somebody sticks a new quota on internal requests for a service, or your PA loses machine budgets, or your RPC deadlines are now more than the average latency for that service. It's stupid stuff like that - assumptions that worked a few years ago don't work anymore when the infrastructure is a moving target.
Google's code is immensely complex, so once the institutional knowledge goes out the door, debugging and fixing problems becomes very difficult. Your maintainer, once the original author has left, is probably doing this as an unfunded 20% project; she will get zero credit on her performance review for making sure that a service her VP doesn't care about stays up. So it's usually easier to do nothing and just let it start failing. Announcing a turndown is actually a courtesy in this case.
We clicked the appeal process on those alerts. You could tell from their response that this was a novel concept.
How complex can a static (since there's no new URLs being added) URL shortener get? If it's really that bad just rewrite it to something simpler in an afternoon and be done with it. It must be a better option than the bad will of sunsetting something like this will generate no?
Throw a few dollars at the Internet Archive [1], ask ArchiveTeam to add the Google link shortener to the Warrior archiver [2] [3], understand why to avoid Google in the future.
[1] https://archive.org/donate
[2] https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Warrior_projects
[3] https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/URLTeam
(Google DGAF about anything that doesn't make money anymore; support public goods that actually GAF)
I loathe all the "safelinks" and similar crap in emails. Absolutely awful practice with long-lasting effects.
Also, how many "few more" years? It's already been six.
I do think this sucks more than other shutdowns, because there's no practical way to off board.
on url shorteners -- joshua schachter's blog http://joshua.schachter.org/2009/04/on-url-shorteners
Print publishers might have a case for URL shorteners but they should own and maintain their own instead of a 3rd party service they can’t control or prevent from disappearing.
Plenty of articles in the Communications of the ACM magazine use 3rd party shortened URLs and it’s unacceptable. They should know better and should host their own link shortener via their digital library system.
This is back when the main UI of Twitter was via texts.
additionally we should tar and feather whoever came up with akams
Would be happy to know if there is a way to access goo.gl links created while logged in with my account.
My dumb architecture suggestion for long term resilience: replace it all with absolutely static HTML files with a redirect in them in meta tags and Javascript (and HTML). Ugly but can be served forever on anything that can serve a web page.
Just making a whole slew of links across the whole internet dead. Another cancelled google service on the pile, I guess.
And since we're all obsessed about money, one could put a 5 second ad before doing the actual redirect, and offer a pro subscription for redirects for many bucks a month...
Would ads on a service like this even pay the $5/mo VPS bill? Serious question.
G-Suite is kind of sad that way because there was some cool technology and initial goodwill but they just kind of coasted and slowly gave the market away to Microsoft, I think because the fountain of ad dollars meant nobody was worried about their bonus being cancelled or their shares going down significantly.