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Comment by ubernostrum | Hacker News Reader

The argument against URL shorteners is specious, and taken to its logical conclusion is an argument against anyone ever linking to anything: any URL might turn up gone in the future, and you have no way of knowing or predicting which ones will last. Amazingly, the web's managed to survive this.

But if you're genuinely concerned that this poses some sort of threat to the web, start an archiving service which preserves mappings of short -> long URLs, or talk to the archive.org folks to see if they'd be interested.

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Straw man fallacy. A is like B and B is bad. Try again.

The argument is that it makes things MORE fragile, by interposing another party into the resolution chain. Given that it is both easy to do (thus there will be lots of competitors) and hard to profit at means that this party is more than usually vulnerable.

Anyway if the content dissapears, then it is gone. A url shortner failing means the failure could occur even if the content is still available.

Therefore, by definition, it is worse than the other situation.

You're presuming that URL shorteners don't provide any benefits that may justify the cost of a more fragile system. E.g., bit.ly gives you nice analytics, and many links are otherwise impossible to pass via Twitter.

Your argument against shorteners (extra indirection -> more fragile -> bad) works just as well against DNS. The reason why we tolerate the extra indirection of DNS is because there's a substantial benefit to be gained.

DNS servers co-operate and the system has lots of built-in redundancy, whereas URL shortners have none of these properties. It's not just the indirection that makes them fragile.

So if there existed some sort of federated url shortening protocol, all the complaints about shorteners would go away?

Probably not. The only place they're really warranted is on Twitter, so if Twitter did it themselves that would go a long way. There is the whole URL masking annoyance as well, so ideally Twitter would support long URLs, but that might not happen because of the 140 character SMS restriction.

A federated protocol seems a little much for this one service which can handle the issue themselves, IMO.

For plenty of fora they're handy as well, then there's IRC

Another good reason to have them is to be able to spell them for somebody over a phone line.

I've also noticed a local free paper (Metro) using tinyurl links in its web section.

Twitter should really, really provide a separate field for URLs. This would solve this whole thing.

What is the point of an SMS with a shortened URL if you have no internet access? To be able to access the web page you need web access. If you have web access then you can get at the longer URL in the web interface or via Twitteriffic etc.

The inability to pass (some) links via twitter is the fault of twitter (or the "features" thereof), a fault that doesn't suddenly disappear because someone else provides what amounts to a workaround.

That idea in the second paragraph of your comment is good. Someone ought to do that.

As far as the first, though, I think that you've got it wrong. It's not the same as any old site breaking. Say a person, over time, links to eight sites in his forum comments, and one goes down. Seven links are still valid. If he uses a shortener service that collapses, none of his links are valid.

Say a person links to a series of articles, and the site which hosted them goes down. Now all the links are invalid, and this is nothing more than what we deal with every day.

The alarmist rants I've seen against URL shorteners are simply making this argument without realizing that there is no "new" problem in need of solving, only an old one that we already handle fairly well. Though given the level of irrational rhetoric I've been seeing in these discussions (example here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=713998) I'm not sure there's any point trying to argue with it.

The problem with URL shorteners is that you now have two servers which can go down.

Not only that, but if it's an "original" URL that's broken but at least well formatted you at least have a hint of where to look, for example in the Google cache, archive.org, or elsewhere on the original domain.

Shortened URLs give you no hints as to where the original document was located.

Dude, you keep saying that "it's the same problem we've always had", but it simply isn't. You seem like a smart guy otherwise, so I don't know why you persist in making this assertion. The difference is simple: url shorteners introduce a middle man, another point of failure or abuse, and one that can't be fixed by the person who made the link (because they may forget the original target and not know who to contact) or the person who manages the target (because they can't set up a redirect from the old url).

Adding a link to a chain, any chain will make a it weaker:

Either the link is as strong as all the other links then you have a new element that can fail, which is bad, or your link is weaker than the other links in the existing chain and now the whole chain is weakened to the strength of the new link.

Unshort.me is doing it. Look at the following post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=577457

[Hi, Billy Mays here for..] TheRealUrl does it too, with JSON/P support and returning page titles as well! ;)

http://therealurl.appspot.com/

(it runs on Google App Engine, so I expect to keep it up as long as GAE exists. I didn't get TLD for it, to keep maintainance/costs at zero. And it memcaches everything, so feel free to query it as much as you like)

http://permanize.org/ too.

Nice one :) I was thinking of adding a downloadable list too - how did you get so many archived URLs? Do you have a cron running on Twitter/etc?

No, it's really not.

Please explain why this (my last tweet):

"3x recommended dose of Vitamin D slashes cancer risk by 77%: http://is.gd/28Nbq

is better than this:

"3x recommended dose of Vitamin D slashes cancer risk by 77%: <a href="url">2005 Academic Study</a>"

I can see why you'd URL shorten when pushing to SMS, but an actual anchor/href gives me the ability to mouse-over and see the target URL and the link isn't dependent on a 3rd party to work. No one can frameset the url without the linkers permission or shove ads into the experience.

"There's a plugin for that." http://url.ly/app/tools [real URL!]

I find the shorteners an annoyance. You can't fix the dependency problem.

I wonder how they could increase SMS limits past 160 chars?

I wonder how they could increase SMS limits past 160 chars?

That can't be done unless you change the underlying cellular protocol (e.g. the upcoming 3GPP LTE protocols). The length of an SMS is based on the capacity of one GSM frame.

It's taken to a conclusion but not a logical one. A further conclusion based on that 'logic' would be that nothing at all should be made as anything might turn up gone in the future heat death of the universe.

Joshua Schachter has a nice summary of the arguments against that you may have seen before: http://joshua.schachter.org/2009/04/on-url-shorteners.html

Summary of the summary - URL shorteners have poor usability, providing little, often zero value at the cost of adding further centralized points of fragility.

So let's promote the URL shorteners that are open and provided as free services, instead of those who try and sell click information.

http://ur1.ca is free software and provides a text format download of all its mappings right on its home page. Not a fan of shorteners, but that's the one I'd use for posting services with char length restrictions.

That was the problem they have had though, if they can't make any money then there is little point in their continued development work.

They can't make any money because it is not a unique proposition and it does not have any obvious hooks on how you could monetize it.

Conclusion, as an independent business it has very little chance of being viable.

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