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

Problematical

[Kagura]

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.

Seriously?? I know editors frequently get grief for this sort of thing, but come on... the word is problematicalic, for crying out loud. ;)

Re:Problematical

[Anonymous Coward]

Problematical is a perfectly cromulent word.

Re:Problematical

[Kagura]

It embiggens even the poorest writers among us.

Re:Problematical

[value_added]

That's ironical, isn't it?

This will never work

[jonaskoelker]

I have a great proof why this won't work, but it's too long to fit in into a URL :(

THIS IS SERIOUS BUSINESS

[gazbo]

Sorry, I mean srs bsns.

Why bother?

[RiotingPacifist]

URL shortners only server for twitter posts and other place where you need to count characters, these links become pointless within days of a post (some think they become useless even earlier than that), so why bother preserving them after that? let alone when a provider goes bankrupt.

p.s I'm only posting this so i can get some karma to go troll apple ;)

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

[mysidia]

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.

Re:How does one go out of business...

[Tellarin]

And, according to TFS, it is the biggest of them. :)

Some websites are to blame too

[Yvan256]

Some websites have user-friendly URLs, such as "www.apple.com/macmini/". You don't even need to click that link to know what it's about.

Other websites have dumb, half-friendly URLs, where they add the backend technology inside the URL, such as "http://www.logitech.com/index.cfm/mice_pointers/" (what's with the "index.cfm" in the URL?). If they fix that problem, all the links pointing to the current URL will break. If they ever change technology, it's also going to break the links from other websites.

And then we have the URLs designed by web monkeys, such as the link for Dell's new Adamo laptop: "www.dell.com/content/topics/topic.aspx/global/products/adamo/topics/en/us/adamo-onyx?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs". What the HELL is that thing? Even if we forget the parameters at the end, look at the path of that thing! I don't care how your crap is organized on the server, the URL should be much simpler than that!

And last, we have completely brain-dead URLs that seem to be created for computers only, without any chance of figuring out what kind of content is waiting for us on the other side of that link. Crap like "http://www.sonystyle.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/CategoryDisplay?catalogId=10551&storeId=10151&langId=-1&categoryId=16154&SR=nav:electronics:computers:notebook_computers:shop_compare:ss". We're lucky to see "notebook_computers" in the parameters, sometimes it's just a database reference number.

But even with crap URLs like that, unless you have to spell it, write it down or read it on a (paper) page, such links can be hidden behind simple anchor text such as Sony Laptops.

Twitter is its own problem, they should be the ones to fix their own mess. Someone could start a service similar to Twitter but without counting HTML code as being part of the X characters limit, which seems to be what the fuss is all about.