
The Downside of Permanent (links and url shortening) - tortilla
http://garrettdimon.com/archives/2009/4/13/the_downside_of_permanent/
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pj
I agree. I think URL shortening is a bad practice. More convenient, but very
short term and it adds one more breaking point to the Internet. How many URL
shorteners are there and how many of them will bite the dust?

When they do, all the links behind their shortened urls will be gone forever!
Regardless of whether or not the link it pointed to still exists.

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vorador
People use shortened urls as a throwaway resource. I doubt that they attach
much importance about their permanence.

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pj
There are no more throw away resources. A lot of the shortened urls are going
to twitter, of course, but those tweets are copy/pasted into blogs and those
are copy pasted...

Those blogs could be around for ever and ever. Do you think Google will just
stop hosting blogger and all the companies with blogs will stop hosting the
content? The companies may be around forever too. The web archive catches as
much as it can.

I don't really know if anything on the internet will ever go away anymore
forever.

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vorador
Well, content rots and disappears, as after a certain period of time it is not
accessible from the first five pages of google.

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joshu
i think the point is not about permanence per se but who gets to decide.
shorteners add another party to the mix (clicker, transit, shortener,
publisher) that gets to decide when to break links.

