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URL Shortener tr.im To Go Community-Owned, Open Source
Death Metal sends word that the owners of URL-shortening service tr.im are in the process of releasing the project's source code and moving it into the public domain. This comes after reports that the service may shut down and that they were entertaining offers from prospective buyers. From a post on the site's blog: "It is our hope that tr.im, being an excellent URL shortener in its own right, can now begin to stand in contrast to the closed twitter/bit.ly walled garden: it will become a completely open solution owned and operated by the community for the benefit of the entire community." They plan to complete the transition by September 15th, and the code will be released under the MIT license. In addition, "tr.im will offer all link-map data associated with tr.im URLs to anyone that wants it in real-time. This will involve a variety of time-based snapshots of aggregated destination URLs, the number of tr.im URLs created for any given destination URL, and aggregate click data."
They serve no purpose other than giving people a way to distribute malicious links. The Idea was to save some bandwidth, but now it uses more because people are having to write scripts that allow mouseovers to see where the link actually goes which now just causes a few lookups of the same url to happen anyways per person rather than just sitting on a post somewhere.
In most cases the URL itself is less than 1% of the size of the content of a web page so exactly who or what they're saving is unclear.
So, they are going open. How is this going to solve issues that make shorteners evil ( http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/06/are-url-shorteners-a-necessary-evil-or-just-evil/ )?
transparency loss (great, there is db that can resolve links. Are browsers supposed to querry 'shortener like' urls and display proper ones?)
rot & reliability loss (tr.im claims they will be forever open and totally not sell domain to highest bidder and whatnot, but domain is still weakest link - it goes broken and tons of links get broken too)
pointless proxy (great, so it is now pointless 'open' proxy. yay).
-- Technology for the sake of technology is as pathetic as eschewing technology because it's technology.
Death Metal sends word that the owners of URL-shortening service tr.im are in the process of releasing the project's source code and moving it into the public domain.
So?
Life is about being a Phoenix!
I used to live there it is a Protectorate of The Crown pretty much like Jersey, Guernsey & Gibraltar except the weather is not as good
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
Damn that blows out the Cook Islands then [Insert Inuendo].co.ck
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
Maybe I'm being too literal here, but MIT-licensed source code is not in the public domain.
I've had a beef with URL shorteners for a long while now for reasons that have been covered ad nauseam (not the least of which being that in addition to adding significant overhead - typically hundreds of milliseconds per request - they are just plain evil). IMO the best solution is to let webmasters create and advertise their own short links using the "shortlink" link relation (e.g. rel="shortlink" in the HTTP headers and/or HTML HEAD) such that they can be auto-detected by clients who then no longer need to generate their own using 3rd party services. I wrote the shortlink specification a few months ago (based on similar work done by others), released it into the public domain using CC Zero and went about soliciting feedback. The standard got a big shot in the arm last week when WordPress.com announced support for rel=shortlink on over 100 million pages. I've since requested support be introduced into the top 20 Twitter clients (representing over 80% of Twitter usage) and have had only positive feedback so far. A number of other high profile sites like PHP.net and Ars Technica have also jumped on board. Anyway if you, like me, are sick of URL shorteners then you're welcome to give me a hand making them go away...
Sam
t.im
?
Check out my sysadmin blog!
I prefer www.socuteurl.com. It's just, irresistable. There. I said it. I've made the first step toward recovery.
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What about if you linked to your private pictures?
What are you doing with those links? If you're sending them via email, why not send the whole link? If you're posting them to Twitter or Facebook, then they're effectively public anyway and anyone could see your private pictures just by clinking the shortened links. It's not like they're password protected.
Help me understand this. What's a plausible use case where a shortened URL could potentially increase privacy?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Oh I entirely understand the absurd niche that it started through. However not only do most people use Twitter through mechanisms not at all bound by the SMS limit, are we to believe that someone posting a tweet from SMS first went to a URL shortener on their mobile device, got a shortened URL, and tweeted that? It doesn't happen.
URL shortening + SMS = a ridiculous combination.
No, but I never made that claim.
I don't think so. Presumably, the reason URL shorteners exist is because there are some things that can't handle long URLs well. As I stated elsewhere, broken e-mail clients that wrap long URLs funny was the raison d'etre for URL-shorteners. However, since SMS also can't handle long URLs, it would seem a legitimate reason to use a URL-shortener for SMS.
While nobody would send an SMS message containing a shortened URL from a mobile device, those who choose to receive SMS messages to a mobile device can benefit from shortened URLs. A trivial example would be links to news stories from a Google-Alert-type service.
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.