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URL Shorteners Get Some Backup
URL shorteners are problematical, as everybody knows, but with the rise of Twitter and its ilk they seem to be a necessary part of the landscape. Some of the biggest questions around services such as bit.ly, TinyURL, and is.gd is what happens when they go out of business (as tr.im did last August). Now a group of such companies, organized under the auspices of the Internet Archive, has formed a non-profit entity to hold URL-shortening databases in escrow, with the intent of continuing to resolve a member company's links should it get out of the business. At announcement, the 301Works organization has 21 URL-shortener members, including the largest, bit.ly. Many others are not (yet) on board. The members have agreed to cede control of their domain names to 301Works.org should they exit the field, and to back up their URL mappings regularly to the organization.
bit.ly is huge on twitter. It has mostly replaced tinyurl there. It became the default url shortener for twitter earlier in the year.
You've apparently missed the point completely. Twitter and similar sites have a character limit on messages. That includes all HTML markup.
Plus, there are times when you can't copy/paste a link, and would prefer a shorter one to have to type.
Considering that sending messages from A to B was and still is possible without Twitter, I'd say that means that url-shorteners serve no purpose at all.
Unless they are going bankrupt already, or the creditors have a secured debt, and the domain name is the collateral/security for that debt,
If they don't, then 301works' claim to the domain would be a prior claim, since they have secured an agreement that requires the URL shortening service to continue working, and a specific asset is named in securing that agreement is the domain name.
In other words: it depends on the terms of the agreement with 301works.
In a bankruptcy preceding, the party with the prior claim is normally the one they signed an agreement to deliver the asset to.
For example: if I buy something from an online retailer or mail order catalog, and they enter into bankruptcy after they received my payment for the item, but before they shipped the product... their creditors' don't get to repossess the item I have purchased, my claim comes before theirs, since my payment to purchase the item is a prior claim that I have.
And they have to send me the item, or a refund before they pay other creditors whose debts they defaulted on after my claim was raised.
The key difference: creditors that have a claim to a specific prior claim to a certain asset are at an advantage to the ones that don't.
Since specific cash to pay for the item in exchange for a certain service was provided by me, I have the prior claim to that cash.
Banks and investors that provided unsecured loans, or weren't a trading partner, have to wait in line, according to the priority of creditors.
You would (and DO) call it a Uniform Resource Name, or URN.
These private URL shortening sites shouldn't exist anyway. They're just a hack to support long urls on mediums that can't handle proper html-style linked text (aka hypertext). Those mediums are buggy should be upgraded (if only by footnote style guidelines).
Could you clarify this? How does what you're suggesting help me read a long URL over the phone? Or type one from memory? Or paste one into an IM or IRC chat window?
I completely agree, but I have two comments:
For those who don't know, removing the "/index.cfm/*", "/index.aspx/*", "index.php/*", etc is a simple mod_rewrite rule on any Apache server, and I'm certain there are easy fixes on other servers.
Any decent web dev should be setting that up first, before even thinking about developing a website. Then you can easily change technologies later while maintaining your URLs.
You should never be able to see the technology of a website in the URL. At a minimum, rewrite blah.html to your actual server technology.
<rant>Of course, I can't stand Twitter or the twats that use it, but at least I can usually just ignore it.</rant>
Also, as a joke, this is the current URL I am at:
tech.slashdot.org/story/09/11/14/184256/URL-Shorteners-Get-Some-Backup?from=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Slashdot%2Fslashdot+%28Slashdot%29&utm_content=Google+Reader
niiice... :-)
The count is actually imposed by the inventors of SMS who decided to make a 140 byte maximum per message. Well I guess you could argue that it's still self-imposed since it was Twitter who decided they wanted to build everything around that limiting system, but they can't just ignore HTML characters for the count as someone other than them is doing the count.
Bit.ly is currently the number one URL shortener because Twitter automatically uses them when a non-shortened URL is sent.
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