Lots of blogposts regarding the evil that URL shortening services do appeared this weekend, from Jason Kottke (“URL shorteners suck”), Joshua Schachter, creator of Delicious (“on url shorteners”) and Dave Winer (“Josh is right, URL shorteners are risky”).
None of them are happy, with concerns, variously, about spam, speed, efficiency, transparency, longevity and what Joshua calls “the great linkrot apocalypse”.
I think the one idea that we should take from all of these arguments is that if you are using a URL shortening service you have no control over your links, now or in the future. One such service may get bought up by a nasty commercial entity who redirects all your existing short URLs to its own ends. Your URLs pointing to all your lovingly curated content will, effectively, become spam.
One solution to this quandry, which no one has mentioned, and one which large media organisations should pay attention to, is that building a URL shortener is really, really easy. I spoke to Simon Willison about it and he thinks a URL shortener will soon be the example app that someone builds to learn their way around a new language or web framework, like they currently do with a creating a blog. That way you get to solve many problems at once: control over your own links’ destiny and complete consumer confidence that your own-brand short URLs (gu.com/abcde, nyt.com/vwxyz) won’t take them someone nasty.
And the ability to shorten your own URLs isn’t necessarily restricted to large companies with lots of resources. Many people who want to use this sort of service already have all the tools they need — their blogging software. All that Movable Type or Wordpress, among others, need to do is add an extra database lookup table and pretty soon all their users can take care of their own URL shortening needs.
UPDATE: A useful comparison of existing URL shortening services (even the method of redirection matters: 301 is a permanent redirect, 302 a temporary one, with implications for SEO and link credit).
[...] would appear now that the newest riff on this disease on social media is for us to create our own in the hope that this will cancel out the fear that if some URL shortening service [...]