When your URL shortener of choice goes Kaboom
Interesting timing. Today, the URL shortener tr.im just announced that it’ll be shutting down and closing shop. What does this mean? That the thousands of shortened URLs that its users created will no longer work.
This is a topic I covered at length in a recent PBS piece, “URL Shorteners Help Track Links, Take Heat for Framing” As at least one of my interview subjects points out, many of these URL shortener companies are only one or two person operations, meaning an entire line of URLs are only a failed business away from being lost forever.
So what would happen if it’s five years from now and the internet is a wasteland of non-working links? Are we potentially crippling our navigation?
One solution is, of course, for larger sites like google and other Url shorteners to buy their hash-code databases (i.e. the records of what links to what). I’d be surprised it bit.ly doesn’t make a bid for tr.im’s data. Alternatively, google could have figured out what links to what automagically, and simply buy the tr.im domain and then offer it’s own branded, ad supported linking.
Why assume that most of the stuff presently on the net will still exist in 5 years? My experience over the last 10 years says that most of what’s here now will be long gone.
Some URL shorteners will fold, get hacked and purge their older databases. Most blogs will die and many will be deleted. Most websites will fold or be bought out. Google will change it’s algorithms and whatever you used to find in the 10 ten will be unindexed: probably out there, but beyond the power of search.
We often say once something is on the internet, it’s there forever, but that’s a silly lie. Something is only there for as long as someone protects it from digital entropy.
Geocities got bought out by Yahoo, which is now closing down the service. That only means something if you remember how Myspace-big Geocities was at it’s time.
A big question for all of us is whether and when we want to lay cement and make lief on the Internet more permanent? That’s when convention will begin to control and power will concentrate into fewer and fewer hands. The transformation from virtual wilderness to virtual settled city will demand more predictability (paved streets, rules of the road) in everything from blogs to url shorteners. I could see Facebook disappearing a few years back, for example, not sure people would let that happen today.
lief = life