The Ecosystem Argument

The argument started with a , creator of social bookmarking site Delicious. Schachter described URL shorteners as being generally bad for most of the online "ecosystem," claiming they weigh down the Web by adding "another layer of indirection" and allowing for spam-oriented links or worse malware links to be masked. The part of his post that particularly strikes a chord with me now, though, is his stance on the potential problems with reliability.

"A new and potentially unreliable middleman now sits between the link and its destination," Schachter says. "The long-term archivability of the hyperlink now depends on the health of a third party. The shortener may decide a link is a terms of service violation and delete it. If the shortener accidentally erases a database, forgets to renew its domain, or just disappears, the link will break."

Error Alert

Those scenarios may seem hypothetical, but I got a small taste of what could happen -- make that, two small tastes of what could happen -- in the past few days. I've been using tr.im for URL shortening on Twitter, and I've generally been pleased with their service. Tuesday, though, I opened my tr.im control panel only to find a "500 Internal Server Error," and nothing more. Sure enough, every single URL within the tr.im domain returned the same code and failed to redirect to its appropriate target.