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Link Shorten

I recently saw Terence Eden’s blog with the title “Never use a URL shortening service - even if you own it”. The main gripe expressed here is that they will let you down eventually.

The point of the article is essentially that it is only a matter of time until you lose control of the URL. An example is that The Guardian sold their gu.com (Guardian Unlimited) sold to academics. They have now put the domain up for sale for millions.

In my professional life I also see the use of link shortening, and it drives me mad! I will give some examples of where I see it:

In emails - mimecast hijacks links and replaces them with their own. This is apparently for security, but instead of previously being able to see the URL, now I can’t. It bugs me to no end that this is used. A better implementation would still somehow make the link visible.
Internal documents - Staff are using something like TinyURL to shorten links, meaning you have zero idea where they lead until you click them. If you want to maintain a document, you now need to click every link to figure out which are the old link you want to replace.

Problem Being Addressed

There are several problems that are being addressed here:

Avoid links to spam content by scanning the URL. Personally I think that replacing the link entirely and obscuring the actually URL is the worst solution.
Some links are seen as ‘too long’. Long links in documents and sites can become unsightly. This is better addressed by simply using a shorter text with the URL behind it. The likes of Twitter have created a need for shorter URLs, where they didn’t previously exist. In any case, there are still some cases where shorter links are more useful.

Addition Problems

An additional problem the shortening services could address is one that affects all links - link rot. If you are going to middleman the links, why don’t you offer a service to archive the link? This could use the Internet Archive. Another option could be to take a very basic copy of the target’s content.

Yet another problem that could be consider by shortening services is link previews. Some content will use Open Graph to generate previews, but tonnes of content does not. They could all content to be previewed by generating a render of the page or finding some interesting image, which should further help security too.

Partial Solution

For the basic role of shortening links, we could look at a simple compression algorithm. Browsers could play a large part in this role. We could take advantage of the following:

Links typically start with http:// or https://. We could immediately encode this as a single bit.
Most URLs are ASCII only and are highly compressible.
Tracking IDs could be removed to reduce the size of the URL.