As with any such service, these things are entirely at the whims of the people involved. tr.im recently declared they were closing up shop because of decisions on the Twitter side of things so in all likelihood, the answer is your mileage may vary. On the other hand tr.im is releasing their source code into open source so if you run (or can run) Ruby on Rails, you could setup your own shorting server and be in charge of your own destiny. Another route is a persistent ID service like DOI although PID systems tend to generate a URL that's still pretty long. The California Digital Library is also spearheading a resolver service (n2t.info) for pointing to a digital object.
Tim -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Tim Au Yeung Manager, Digital Object Repository Technology Libraries and Cultural Resources University of Calgary ytau(at)ucalgary.ca 403.220.8975 Proctor, Nancy wrote: > Does anyone know or have experience of the life span of compressed > URLs from the various services? (tiny, bit.ly, is.gd, etc.) I know > what they promise, but... > > I may need to use them in txt message replies that visitors can get as > a sort of bookmark or aide memoire when taking our new cellphone tour. > Links to related info for objects in the collection would be useful > and space is short, but I don't want to txt out URLs that will expire > too quickly. > > Nor do I know how quickly is too quickly. Some earlier research with > 'bookmark' emails in Tate Modern's multimedia tour by Silvia Filippini > Fantoni showed that people will keep the info they've emailed > themselves for months in their in-boxes. What's the half-life of a txt > message? > > I started a blog thread on the topic on the Museum Mobile wiki: > http://wiki.museummobile.info/archives/645 > > Thanks for any insights you have! > > Nancy > _______________________________________________ > You are currently subscribed to mcn-l, the listserv of the Museum Computer > Network (http://www.mcn.edu) > > To post to this list, send messages to: mcn-l at mcn.edu > > To unsubscribe or change mcn-l delivery options visit: > http://toronto.mediatrope.com/mailman/listinfo/mcn-l > > The MCN-L archives can be found at: > http://toronto.mediatrope.com/pipermail/mcn-l/ > > >
