

Twitter ditches TinyURL for bit.ly - aditya
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/06/url-shortening-wars-twitter-ditches-tinyurl-for-bitly/

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falsestprophet
_Which obviously prompts this inevatible question: does the move signal
Twitter paving the way for an outright acquisition of the URL shortening
service provider?_

Or they could just buy a domain name.

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silentbicycle
Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't all of those links become useless when the
domain name shortener goes down for any reason?

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Semiapies
Yup.

They also become useless when the link points to a site on a server that has
gone down for any reason - or that just throws a 404 back to you.

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silentbicycle
Well, right, but the shortener is adding another layer of unreliability into
the transaction.

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Semiapies
It does add another party to the transaction, but the question is which is
more likely to fail. I've made many TinyURL links over the years, and while
TinyURL is (and those links are) still around, quite a few of them point to
pages that no longer exist.

My suspicion is that the very sites that tend to produce absurdly long,
semantically unhelpful URIs - the ones people want to shorten - are the sorts
of sites often not designed around guaranteeing the permanence of an URI.
Smaller news-media sites are a good example of both behaviors.

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silentbicycle
I suspect you're right, but...something about the arrangement makes my inner
archivist/historian cringe.

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Semiapies
Oh, in theory _you're_ absolutely right. And in the long run, CMSs with long,
obtuse, and volatile URLs will (one hopes) fade into obscurity. Practice is
just lagging at the moment, giving the more stable shorteners the edge.

