At the risk of failing to lament Caesar's passing with sufficient grief and a plea of moderate ignorance about all the features of bit.ly, let me just say that I have concerns that URL shortening is a Bad Thing For the Internet (tm).
The beauty of the Uniform Resource Locator is that it was a Uniform address for Locating Resources. What does a URL shortener do? It gives you a URI to a re-direct. If the URL shortener goes away, you have null pointers, internet black holes. Pragmatically I understand the URL shortener, it helps with byte counts in limited buffers so that you can share your wit + the picture of the panda sneezing in < 140 characters. Yet when I use a shortener I not relying that someday in the future people will not go to bit.ly/ fu.c12 to see my beautiful missive on dancing with the stars as communist allegory. If we become an internet whose history of links are enmeshed in shortened URLs bit.ly personae, I believe that we're doing a Bad Thing. Is no one else concerned with this, or is there some feature of bit.ly that creates "permalinks?" I see something on bit.ly's blog about a wayback machine ... but still I feel like this is not entirely in line with building web of data that benefits humans as well as machines. Steven On Aug 10, 2009, at 12:10 PM, [email protected] wrote: > > According to TechCrunch there is a reason why Twitter switched to > bit.ly > > http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/06/url-shortening-wars-twitter-ditches-tinyurl-for-bitly/ > > For me url shortening was purely for url shortening so I've been using > is.gd since it seemed to generate short urls and it was supported by > TweetDeck. It's quite possible that I might have been using tr.im if > they listed it higher on their list of supported services. > > Considering the Twitterspace, unless you're backed by a VC or intend > it to be a loss leader the competition seems pretty wide which > apparently doesn't seem to be the case for tr.im. They mention they > looked into getting bought. They might have a great service, but > unless there's a feasible revenue model associated with it, I suspect > potential buyers are going to be very limited. If they were hoping to > be acquired by Twitter, I wouldn't have hoped on that, given that > Twitter is not generating revenue as far as I know. As far as I can > tell, it doesn't look like they had a realistic business plan in place > given the landscape. > > tr.im does seem to be a good name, but for me short urls are > unreadible when I look at it in whole. I still don't know what I'm > clicking on per se, so whether it starts with http://tr.im/ or http://bit.ly/ > I really don't see one being superior over another name-wise. If > anything, I'd probably chose which one generated the shortest url so > as to save space in my tweet. Furthermore, what the url shortening > service is branded seems less important when you consider how it will > be primarily used. Once integrated with an app, visibility of the > brand is probably going to be negligible. A lot of Twitter apps > provide url shortening either via a built in tool or automagically. > > I haven't been using it, but as I've mentioned, I could care less what > the service was called. And if TechCrunch's research is correct, > Twitter picked bit.ly because of several factors. > > - > Warren > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ Our Web site: http://www.RefreshAustin.org/ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Refresh Austin" group. [ Posting ] To post to this group, send email to [email protected] Job-related postings should follow http://tr.im/refreshaustinjobspolicy We do not accept job posts from recruiters. [ Unsubscribe ] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] [ More Info ] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/Refresh-Austin -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
