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.

Comments

Will it really

[TorKlingberg]

If one of these companies goes bankrupt, their creditors will demand the only valuable asset: the domain name. Does their agreement with 301Works overrule the creditors claims?

Re:Will it really

[roju]

That's a really good point. They could probably set up a structure to deal with it though. Create up a third company (say URL Inc) and transfer ownership of the domain to it. Give archive.org ownership of URL Inc but have them contract out operation perpetually to the url-shortening company (say bit.ly Inc). Put non-assumability language in the contract, so that a transfer of ownership of bit.ly Inc would terminate the agreement.

How does one go out of business...

[KalvinB]

running these things?

$6.99 a year for the domain with free standard hosting from GoDaddy and you're set.

It's not like it's a particularly difficult task to create and run these types of sites. With a simple cron script to clear out links which haven't been clicked in X amount of days you won't even have to worry about your DB ballooning out of control.

Throw up Google AdSense on the user facing side to draw in funds and point both GoDaddy and Google at the same bank account. Google giveth and GoDaddy taketh away. Throw in a hundred to start and you're good to go for a decade.

bit.ly

[palpatine]

Does anyone else find it odd that the White House's twitter page uses bit.ly urls when .ly is the top-level domain code for Libya?

Does the solve the "little guy" problem?

[dmomo]

One reason the link-rot threat is very real is the little guy.

I run a url-shortner (ish) service because it's fun and I can.

While, I would love to defend url shortners, my advice to a friend would be : don't use these for anything important. They are not to be used in place of bookmarks. If you have a site or a blog.. just use the real URL in the href. You can beautify it any way you would like inside the "Anchor" tag itself. We've been doing that for two decades now.

Also, the link-rot threat is quite real. SoCuteUrl is simply a fun way to send an otherwise cumbersome link. It's more memorable.. easy to write down, text, etc.

I run the site because it costs very very little to do so and is a very easy to thing to have set up. And, it's fairly easy to maintain.

This is where the problem lies. These are so easy to engineer that virtually anyone can do it. Yes, even slackers like myself with a tendency to flake out on personal projects.

301Works Looks like a decent solution. I will be evaluating it for my own site (socuteurl.com).

However, the membership fee, which does not exist now could prove problematic. My site makes no money. $1,000 a year may not be a lot of money for a site that makes some kind of profit, but it's a lot to support a hobby.
I think 301works may have to come up with a better way to support their costs. Since the biggest threat to link rot.. are the sites that don't make money! I think the membership fee if instated should be optional, and donations should be accepted. Or, perhaps the membership fee can be scaled down for sites with small dbs to upload.

And...

[Puppet Master]

What happens when 301works.org goes belly up?

It's not difficult to write your own. I did it (not going to link to it because my server probably won't handle the /. effect.)

They can't even decide on the name. In their Terms of Participation, they refer to
themselves as 310works, not 301works. Later they refer to themselves as 201works.
This does not appear to me to be a very professional company if they can't even proofread their own page...

And this part gets me:

Participating companies will be encouraged to place a ‘301Works’ badge on their websites, indicating that they are operating in accordance with these terms of participation. We will generate these badges so they will include the 301works logo and the company’s logo.

They get free advertising on all of these sites. And last section says they *MAY* impose a fee later, like a $1000/year....

I'm providing my services for free, no guarantees, warranties or promises. If I go belly up, well, to bad... But with their proofreading "skilz" and free advertising, and possibly charging a fee later on, I think I'll pass.