Re:URL Shorteners – the herpes of the web
by knowtheory on Sunday April 19, 2009 @11:27PM
(#570138)
The problem isn't just the opacity, it's that url shorteners add an extra, and extremely flaky point of failure in the web request cycle.
The web is patchy enough already w/ domains expiring and sites rearranging their content (w/o a way to update 3rd party links elsewhere). Add to this another service that may or may not be around in 5 years to the opacity and you've got scads of links going dead if one service/domain goes dead.
If perhaps there was a common shared standard for how the hashes mapped to urls, that was reversible, then it'd be less of a problem, since then you just stick the hash into another service that supports minified urls, and you're fine. It'd be a good project for google :P
The web is patchy enough already w/ domains expiring and sites rearranging their content (w/o a way to update 3rd party links elsewhere). Add to this another service that may or may not be around in 5 years to the opacity and you've got scads of links going dead if one service/domain goes dead.
If perhaps there was a common shared standard for how the hashes mapped to urls, that was reversible, then it'd be less of a problem, since then you just stick the hash into another service that supports minified urls, and you're fine. It'd be a good project for google :P