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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."
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.
The original use of URL shortening services was to prevent link breakage in e-mail and nntp clients that linebreak after 80 characters. They still work great for this. http://tr.im/wGhA works a lot better in e-mail than http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=1600+pennsylvania+ave,+dc&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=49.624204,58.359375&ie=UTF8&ll=38.898732,-77.038515&spn=0.012007,0.014248&z=16 . I've also heard shortened links used to good effect on internet radio, where it's easier to direct listeners to a tinyurl than a long forum URL, when there's discussion about a certain thread.
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
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