The other day I was talking with local entrepreneur Sanjay Parekh about a domain I had recently purchased. He commented on how it was rather short and could be also be used as a URL shortening service. That triggered a few responses on my end: 1) I feel that URL shortening services are very much a crowded “me too” space and 2) relatively few URL shorteners provide real benefits other than their primary utility.
URL Shorteners 101
By my count, there are somewhere between 90 to 100 URL shorteners that are even remotely used. There’s no doubt in my mind that at least 500 URL shorteners/redirection services exist in some working form online. We all know the premise behind them; you have a long, nasty URL that you need to share with someone either in some limited space, more recently Twitter, but originally from old email clients that hard wrapped lines and broke links in emails.
Thoughts
First off, my title for this post employs a bit of sensationalism. I’m not entirely opposed to URL shorteners, I just know they have a time and a place. I don’t like all of the blatant me too URL shortening services that offer no value-proposition over its competitors, other than just a really short URL.
Second, as Joshua Schachter seemed to focus on last week, URL shorteners add a delay to the end-user who clicks on them, with an extra DNS lookup. However, chances are all these common domains are already cached by the user, but the real issue for me is the uncertain lifetime of shortened URLs. I don’t feel this is a huge deal if shortened URLs are used properly. In the case of Twitter, how often do people read your tweets from last year and does it really matter if that link is dead? However, this is a big issue when shortened URLs are used in the ‘wrong’ types of situations – such as saved to your delicious or tumblr account, or posted on your blog – places that make it easier to find and follow URLs than Twitter. And when that happens search engines will start indexing those types of shortened URLs (bad URL shorteners use a temporary 302 redirect, causing search engines to place value on the shortened URL, ugh!); and that’s a problem when the URL shortener stops working.
Third, I like URL shorteners that do something in addition to shortening my URLs by 40 characters or what have you. Bit.ly is one of these services. At first I was jokingly shocked to find that a 6-character-long URL shortener received venture funding, when there are several 5-character-long URL shorteners online. Then I actually checked out bit.ly. They’re doing some impressive stuff including keeping detailed URL statistics in addition to making it easy to share shortened URLs and aggregate conversations around such URLs.
Example stats page of a bit.ly shortened URL
Unfortunately, many Twitter clients do not yet utilize the bit.ly API so you lose the stat tracking, but I digress.
In a more perfect world, two things could be different:
- Twitter would have a separate area for links of any length, that do not count as part of the 140 character limitation, similar to how the late Pownce.com handled URLs.
- Sites would have their own URL shortening services. I actually had my own URL shortener on this website back in 2006 after hearing about Shorty on Derek Punsalan’s blog and now I see Derek is using another method of shortening his URLs. As he points out, you get to maintain your own personal brand by having the shortened URLs come from your site, without risking anything.
Verdict: URL shorteners are a necessary evil. I only shorten URLs for Twitter and will only use a modern service that uses 301 redirects and does not have a middle-man interstitial advertisement or ad/iframe-bar, all the while providing me with some bells and whistles. For now, that is bit.ly.
Do you think URL shorteners are laying the groundwork for a future Web filled with dead links? What URL shortening service do you use? What do you use it for?
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{ 30 comments… read them below or add one }
Rather than dying off and leaving millions of dead links, I think it is more likely that a url shortener would first get gobbled up by a larger service, eventually leaving us with two or three mega-services that are “too big to fail”.
Also check out what Adjix.com is doing. As a contingency plan, they create a HTML page for every shortened link and store it on Amazon. These pages use a meta-refresh to redirect instead of a server redirect. If the servers go down, they make a dns change and the adjix links continue to work (assuming Amazon is running):
http://blog.adjix.com/2009/04/kobayashi-maru.html
Try http://tr.im
I use URL shortening services in very limited areas. Usually only in e-mails and IM’s and only for unimportant links. I don’t really see any good reason to use them elsewhere.
I, too, use tr.im for microblogging and (occasionally) email. Ping.fm auto-bookmarks links I send out in my Delicious account, so my only wish is that either Ping.fm or Delicious would start to auto-expand short URLs when they’re bookmarked.
nope; it’s just food for more linkrot. I would only use one that’s within my own control, and probably not even then, since that would create risk for other people (i.e., I wouldn’t like other people using them, even if it’s their own)
Someone needs to crawl the url shorteners and archive them, then provide a recovery mechanism once these sites start disappearing.
I agree that bit.ly is the pick of the crop, precisely because of the added features, such as tracking. And I understand the concern of the life of the URL and the added time taken to reach a destination due to the additional DNS lookup.
For me, though, they are outweighed by the sheer convenience in two areas: email, where long URLs are often broken by email apps, and in print. On the tech mag I work for we use them all the time: it’s much easier to ask a reader to type a tinyurl or bit.ly url then a lengthy address of a specific support or download page.
I was mentally composing a reply about print when I saw that Kenny had beat me to it.
If I’m creating a presentation that’s meant to be printed as a leave-behind, I’d much rather direct people to type in http://tr.im/kwFk rather than
http://otl.gtrc.gatech.edu/documents/otl_disclosure_invention.pdf
Unfortunately, some of these print materials can last a long, long time, so I have to share your concerns about the longevity of tr.im (or any other current URL shortening service).
My thoughts exactly..
I used to use is.gd because it cached links but I’m on bit.ly now primarily because of the traffic stats for shortened URLs.
I, too, believe that there are too many URL shortening services out there. The thing is, I only see a handful being used on Twitter (TinyURL, is.gd, bit.ly, tr.im, and ff.im), and these services already satisfy the need to make long URLs short, so why clutter the Web with more TinyURL wannabes nobody would use?
Just for the record, ff.im is used only by FriendFeed. There’s no way for users to shorten arbitrary URLs; it’s not a URL shortener in the usual sense.
So I have to comment since @stammy called me out on this. And I still think what I proposed was a good idea for that domain BTW – although there needs to be some innovation around it.
This is kind of a funny post because not too long ago I was chuckling over the phrase “great linkrot apocalypse” – http://bit.ly/TaaUI (yes, I’m going to URL shorten every link I post in this comment for the sweet irony of it all). That comment was specifically around the idea of adding rev=”canonical” (http://bit.ly/xtel) to pages to help with the issue of URL shortners. You can read the gory details but I think it’s a good idea. Another idea proposed would be to run your own shortener (so for my site at sanjayparekh.com I would have my blog post hierarchy but also shorteners of the form sanjayparekh.com/. So if the shortened versions fail, it’s only my fault.
That said, I think there are a lot of things that can be done by shorteners that can’t be effectively done by individuals. There is still quite a bit of innovation that I think could be done in this arena and there is probably a way to profit from it (haven’t figured out that piece yet but I have some ideas).
And the whole issue of delay caused by the DNS lookup and/or the redirect jumps is, in my opinion, bunk. If we were all still on dialup (yes, I know the majority of the world is but more people on Twitter or reading blogs probably aren’t) this would be a semi-valid argument. But we’re not.
Okay, I’m done. I think you get my point. By innovating you could create something useful to compliment what is already being done. Just my two cents.
Be careful relying on bit.ly. The .ly TLD is owned by Libya. All kinds of potential problems down the road including Sharia law …
URL shortners I think are obnoxious, and only occasionally necessary. They completely defeat the purpose of the readable urls. We moved toward readable URLs because regular URLs faced practicality problems. People who didn’t understand web server structure didn’t understand how to predictably type URLs (if the URL even is predictable)
Another question arises with browsers like Firefox and systems like Google maintaining Smart URL identifying. You don’t have to type in a URL or even a domain name anymore, now it’s just the title, or part of the title that you need. Even the URL bar in most browsers can be used as a search engine.
Not a fan of short URLs, I wish that services like Twitter would take URLs and disregard them in character length usage. It certainly can’t hurt their setup that much…
Some of the issues pointed out could be avoided if Twitter were to incorporate their own shortening/linking tech. (That’s where I mostly use them – submit or click. Some blog readers stick them in comments without realizing they will most likely expire.
I never understood the point of these things. They started showing up before twitter and used on blogs and the most random places. I think even Lifehacker used some in posts!
Outside of twitter and IMs (and those email wordwrappers), they should be banned since some people don’t get the point.
I started using bit.ly and I must say its much better. I was previously using tinyurl but the website is clutter and I like the idea of keeping track on the times the link was selected. It would be cool if more people use this service!
However I see no use of this service other than for twitter…maybe others disagree… but in the case of blogs its unnecessary to use this king of service, you can link your words to the original URLs.
I use bit.ly also, and I really like their service. Their stats (how many visitors, what time visited, from where, etc) are really impressive, I think.
I used tinyurl and what some of you guys said are correct. Twitter should do something about url link. Thanks for the links!
I used to use tinyurl , until the links started becoming dead. I always wondered why people wudn’t use a 301 redirect instead of using url shortners. I rather control my site rather than using a third party to redirect traffic.
I don’t like that you lose the referral. It looks like direct traffic.
I tend to use tiny url via the magnificent bookmarklet I have. Digg’s url shortner is sure to be quite a contender as well.
well there are no option but to use URL shorteners when using new networking sites such as twitter which provide just 140 character limit of posting. i prefer ow.ly service.
hey Paul, try if you want http://urlborg.com – it’s better than bit.ly and made from a fellow greek, Panayotis Vrionis (vrypan.net). Check it out if you want.
“URL shorteners are laying the groundwork for a future Web filled with dead links” http://u.nu/2463 (article ironically shortened)
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I Don’t Like URL Shorteners http://ff.im/-2rfbs
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had to comment on @stammy’s latest blog post cause he called me out in it – http://bit.ly/f4zAn (URL shortening irony)
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¡Totalmente de acuerdo! http://bit.ly/cyam5 –> In a more perfect world [...] Twitter would have a separate area for links of any length.
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URL Shorteners 101 Article breaks out some of the differences in approaches. Stat Tracking of bit.ly
http://bit.ly/S18JS
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Paul Stamatiou has a good post about why he doesn’t like shortened URLs http://tinyurl.com/ca35ho
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