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Today's URL shorteners are yesterday's redirect links. Used to be that we hated redirects and avoided them if we could; now Twitter has suddenly made them cool. If you get people to use your redirects/shortener you gain access to all those delicious traffic analytics on where the eyeballs are going today. Hence the land grab by google and fb in what used to be bitly's private domain.

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> land grab by google

If anyone else was confused by this, I believe it is in reference to http://goo.gl

I had not heard of that project until just now. It's nice to see they're giving it some thought rather than just slapping something together, but I'd love to see "longevity" added to the project goals.

They might join something like http://301works.org, which aims to archive short URLs even after the company goes away.

Although I'm not sure why people are so terrified of short links breaking; long URLs are constantly disappearing.

Long URLs constantly disappear, but only one root at a time. If Wikipedia disappeared tomorrow, all the Wikipedia links would break, but URL shorteners consolidate roots. If bit.ly disappeared tomorrow, it's not just one site that is affected. Furthermore, the use of a redirect breaks traditional mirroring systems. You can't just prepend somemirror.com to the path and expect it to work.

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