[Web Informant] 1 December 2008: Has TinyURL gotten too big

[David Strom]

Web Informant, 1 December 2008: Has TinyURL gotten too big?

If you use a service to shorten Web links such as TinyURL, you might
want to rethink your strategy and perhaps look to another service
provider. Why? Because lately TinyURL has gotten too popular, thanks
to Twitter using the service to condense long links into more
manageable lengths that can fit into their 140 character limits, among
other uses. As with many things on the Interwebs, the price of
popularity is outages, what some would call being Slashdotted, after
the Web site that can direct thousands of readers towards an article
in a click of a mouse. And apparently TinyURL has suffered from a
regular series of outages, whether due to popularity or poor IT
planning, I can't say.

TinyURL isn't the only URL shortener, but perhaps the oldest and most
well known. In an informal survey of people on my LinkedIn group, it
was by far the one of choice. Most people were not aware of any
downtime with the service, which isn't surprising because unlike IM or
email services that we pretty much depend on throughout the day, URL
shorteners don't report their status immediately, and usually not to
the people who have created and posted the shorter links. The only way
someone would find out if it wasn't working was to click on all of
their shortened links and make sure that they are directed to the
appropriate page.

So there are several issues here. First is the usage of these services
from a general sense: they can obscure malware or exploits and they
create a dependency that can increase link rot if they break. One of
my correspondents alternates his shortened links with two different
services, to at least cover the possibility of a single point of
failure.

But the second issue is that why should anyone continue using an
unreliable service, and one that will continue to get more popular as
more people get comfortable with Twitter and similar services? It
seems like now is a good time to consider alternatives to TinyURL,
which is the subject of an article last week in by Marshall
Kirkpatrtick in the ReadWriteWeb. There are probably thousands of such
services, and here is a link to a series of them from Chris Messina:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/factoryjoe/sets/72157602178338004/

The service notlong has a list of others, along with a more detailed
comparison of their own (at notlong.com/links). What is interesting
about their service is that you can have a subdomain, such as
webinformant.notlong.com, that will point to your link.

Marshall recommends the bit.ly service, which was also mentioned by
some of my correspondents. The only issue I have with it is the dot
"ly" domain belongs to Libya, and while the relationship between any
domain owner and the Libyan government is small to none, it still
makes me somewhat uncomfortable to work with someone that may get
themselves on the State Department watch list. Another service that
has come highly recommended is SNURL.com, which is also easy to
remember and has some nice features. Google has a service call shorter
that you can load on your own Web site, provided you have php support
(code.google.com/p/shorter).

Good luck with whatever service you use, and let me know your
recommendations or better yet, post them to my Strominator.com blog
entry.