
Bit.ly was down - kmfrk
http://isitup.org/bit.ly
======
frankdenbow
In general, url shorteners seem bad for the web. Something so critical to the
structure of the web as links should not have a single point of failure like
this.

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jhund
As far as I can tell, the two primary reasons for using URL shorteners are the
ability to

a) share long URLs via twitter and

b) track clicks on shared links.

The downsides to URL shorteners are:

a) single point of failure for links. This one is very significant, more
below.

b) obscurity of a link's destination. This is mostly annoying and enables
spammers to obfuscate their spam URLs.

We can't overestimate the seriousness of having a single point of failure on
web links: URL shorteners are a man-in-the-middle, or a choke point for the
connection to a web page. All traffic has to go through the server that hosts
the shortened link. And if that man-in-the-middle for some reason doesn't want
to, or can't redirect to the next destination, your link is broken. And nobody
can tell where it pointed to. So not only is the link broken for as long as
the man-in-the-middle is not available, but nobody can find out where it led
to originally. There is no workaround! So why would the man-in-the-middle not
redirect the link? Here are a few reasons:

* the server is down for technical reasons. This happens all the time, most recently with bit.ly.

* the company that runs the server goes out of business. What do you know about the financial situation of your link shortening service provider? How can you be sure that they will still be paying for and looking after their servers in a month, a year, in 10 years?

* somebody who doesn't like what you are linking to makes sure that your links are not being redirected. The incredible democratic power of the internet is being subverted by installing choke points on the internet that allow selective disabling of certain locations on the internet. And how convenient would be the ability to disable all links that point (via a choke point) to an unwanted URL. Not only could somebody break those links, but they could also destroy the information about the location of that unwanted URL with an encrypted string like "bit.ly/SDJHGe65sef". Nobody would know where the link pointed to without access to bit.ly's database.

* the URL shortening service's DNS stops working. Bit.ly is registered in Libya. Who knows what regime will be in power there in a few months. Will they continue to allow Western companies to use '.ly' TLDs?

By sharing shortened links on twitter, you're not dealing with one man-in-the-
middle, but two: Your own shortening service and Twitter's t.co shortener. So
you have two single points of failure in series. You just doubled the
probability of your links being broken.

It seems to me that the disadvantages and risks far outweigh the benefits of
using shorteners (at least for links that I hope to be around for a while).

So what are the alternatives to using shorteners? Twitter already
distinguishes between displayed and expanded URLs, so there is really no need
to apply choke-point shortening. The click tracking is a bit more complex. If
you share links on a platform you control, you could do something similar to
what google does with their search results click tracking. Or, if you want to
share your links on somebody else's platform, make sure that the platform can
provide you with non-invasive click analytics.

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matb33
Does a URL shortener service exist that compresses the URL instead? It
wouldn't be as short of course, but then you could recover the original URL
yourself if the service is down. A browser could, should this become a popular
enough method, be capable of detecting such compressed URLs and doing the
decompression and redirect

~~~
kmfrk
Depending on how obscure your links are, you can use .htaccess to go from
mysite.com/blog/2012/05/05/somethingsomethingsomething to mysite.com/s/1231,
assuming it's not a static website.

Stack Overflow do the same for instance.

~~~
pavel_lishin
I think he's talking about something that shortens any arbitrary link.

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kmfrk
That was my impression, too, but I just wanted to cover a - comparably - dead-
simple solution, since we sometimes forget the old-school approaches to an
agonizing problem.

With .htaccess, there isn't really anything external - a new point of failure
- to screw up the redirects.

------
kmfrk
Status link: <http://status.bit.ly>.

EDIT: This link is much better: <http://status.bit.ly/10527/137769/bit.ly>.

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LogicX
"Update: bitly links are working again, but we are continuing to work through
getting <http://bitly.com> back up."

<https://twitter.com/bitly/status/290459711881502722>

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sjs382
I created a little webapp/api that uses _publisher provided_ short URLs when
available. This helps avoid the problem posed by the shortener being down
because (presumably) if the shortener is down, the content will be too.
<http://isshort.com>

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egeozcan
A business idea: Service to query the long urls for bit.ly and other shortener
links which will also provide caching and history (if redirection changed, we
would get to see when and from where)

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soult
Check out urlte.am, it is a bit similar to what you have described.
(Disclaimer: I am a member of that team).

The history option sounds very interesting. For example, the owners of
"ethical" URL shortener is.gd do just change shorturls if they like a
particual shorturl (e.g is.gd/td leads to tweetdownload.net, a site owned by
the same company as is.gd. I know for a fact it previously led to a different
URL.)

~~~
egeozcan
I just wanted to thank you for being awesome. This is great!

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wanghq
what service level agreement (SLA) does bit.ly provide? I can't find it.

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the1
i was using bit.ly as key val storage ugh.

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stesch
Something wrong in Libya?

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wanghq
when bit.ly is down, you start to know there are so many short urls are
actually using bit.ly even they look different, e.g. btl.st/ZWP3Rv

~~~
keesj
Yep, Beta List uses Bit.ly

Anyone can set up their own short URL domain with them. They also allow you to
export* your short-url/long-url pairs so it's possible to switch to your own
shortener at a later stage if you wanted to.

* The export feature might be available to Enterprise customers only. Not sure.

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shocks
It's worth noting that existing bit.ly links still work.

Check out <http://bit.ly/>, the water is awesome!

~~~
jyap
Maybe you have things cached in your browser? No links work for me.

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shocks
Negative, I just picked a random link and it worked.

I am in the UK, perhaps it works for me?

From their website:

>> Sorry, but bitly is getting a quick site refresh - try again in just a
minute. As always, all your existing bitly links will continue to work.

