Link Shortening Craze: Good or Bad?
Link shortening services have been around for a long time. But only in the last couple years has it truly blown up, largely due to Twitter’s 140 character limit for posts. Bit.ly has appeared to have won the battle to become the de facto shortening service, but to the average user, many new url services have popped up, such as goo.gl, fb.me, nyt.ms, tcrn.ch, etc… (Bit.ly is actually the engine that powers many of these). While this is incredibly convenient and makes everyone’s tweets prettier, what are the drawbacks of all these link shorteners? What happens when bit.ly goes down? What if the New York Times stops using the convention, re-architectures their site and tens of thousands of links are pointing to nowhere?
Linkrot is an issue that has plagued the internet since the very beginning. There is nothing more frustrating than being unable to find an article’s source, or being email-ed a bogus link. The Internet Archive recently announced a project to archive all links to offer an ultimate solution to the linkrot problem. Tr.im, a shortening service, scared us all when it announced that it would be shutting down permanently (I found the link to this announcement, ironically, to be a dead link), but then decided to stay for good. What if bit.ly shuts down if they have trouble making money?
URL shortening services have one major drawback. They can disappear in the blink of an eye. While this is incredibly inconvenient, it is actually a good thing that there are custom URLs now, because by separating themselves, if one such service falls out of vogue or shuts down, all of their links go with them. Yes, there will be a bunch of dead links left behind, but maybe this situation is less frustrating. But would it be better to keep it uniform and leave them all as bit.ly links? Wouldn’t it be ideal for there to be a convention in front-end development whereby a certain hashing function (MD5, for example) was always used and, therefore, no link would ever have to die? URL shortening is great, and completely necessary in making the web easier to understand, but we are still a ways off from an ideal and conventional technique.
