URL shortener Tr.im gets cut off
news.cnet.com
news.cnet.com
I hope the future URL shorteners will think twice whether it is clever to even start it.
And running a url shortener costs very little money. If you do it without a plan it's pretty irresponsible.
I'd be happy to take over their business and keep it running for free, future continuity guaranteed.
I've been in business for well over a decade now and I don't think a couple of tens of megabits and a few machines are going to break the bank here.
In fact, I think I'm going to write them a note.
EDIT: ok, sent Eric Woodward an email with an offer to continue to run tr.im as a public service, not-for-profit (I fail to see how you could run it for profit anyway...).
Ofcourse, on twitter you often have no choice, but I blame twitter for not solving that problem.
You could be in a position 10 years from now going through your old Twitter feed for something and it is completely unusable beyond a certain date due to Tinyurl or Bitly having closed down.
Maybe an opportunity for some startup to begin spidering and recording all shortened URLs into some big historical index.
It would be a goldmine if one of the big ones ever closed down.
Hardly any webpage lives that long, in spite of the 'urls should never die' recommendation. In practice urls live a couple of years at best, go find all those good things you found on geocities or myspace a couple of years ago...
The web is like any society, things have a life-cycle, links have one (where the content gets moved or the short url dies), pages have one, and websites have one too.
Routinely universities wipe the 'students' directory when the new year starts, companies will remove entire product lines from their websites (including all the documentation) when their support for the product ends. The web is very much 'current affairs', preservation of the past is not the biggest priority. Archive.org tries to combat this but it's a losing battle, they can't buy drives fast enough to keep up.
Bookmark collections need periodic maintenance because of this anyway.
Worst case there is always your printer. And storage is cheap, for the little bit of content that you come across that you really wish to preserve. A USH stick will hold a surprisiingly large amount of webpages.
1) Link shorteners are used mainly by the Twitter crowd 2) None of them have anything important or interesting to say anyway
I don't see what the problem is.
That was my favorite bit of the article, ignoring the fact that URL Shorteners are all essentially open source already. (There are technologies that can put up a working version with a dozen lines of code.)
The humorous part was the assumption that "open source" is this magic concept that can fix anything. Got a service with crippling server and bandwith costs? Open source it so that... um... you can run it on the open source servers? Do they have those?
I think what is actually meant is a volunteer community service. People could donate time, money or servers towards running the service. Tr.im seems like a good candidate, as it's an unfortunately critical service that simply holds your links hostage.