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In my previous posts about short urls one of the primary pitfalls to using services such as bit.ly and TinyURL is the possibility that these companies can go out of business, and the short url’s that you have published will no longer work.

A coalition of url shortening services has been formed to try and help alleviate this possibility:

301Works.org arose as a working group of URL shortening services in response to concerns about the longevity of shortened URLs. As of October 2009, the Internet Archive agreed to manage 301Works.org to archive and redirect shortened URLs.

(see: http://www.301works.org/post/240736199/url-shorteners-working-with-internet-archive-for)

This is good news. The use of shorteners (and the growth of shortening services) has increased greatly with the growth of sites such as Twitter which can automatically convert your long url to use one of the shortening services. Now maybe your short urls are safe.

I still maintain that the best shortener is your own. It presents your site professionally and builds branding. In a business email shorter urls can help prevent a link from breaking and your domain url looks a lot more professional. And what if a shortening service does not join the movement? One more thing to check into.
Resources:
http://tech.slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&type=story&sid=09/11/14/184256
http://www.301works.org/
Google it
http://joshua.schachter.org/2009/04/on-url-shorteners.html
tr.im shuts down

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Tags: short url, Twitter
Categories: Twitter, Web sites, short url

This entry was posted on Monday, November 16th, 2009 at 12:31 pm and is filed under Twitter, Web sites, short url. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.