Google has been doing this for years with its image searches, but for some reason it seems more transparent because they have a “remove frame” option and they show you the source of the original content. I completely agree though – control over the address is an important factor on the Web, especially when everything is link-driven.

Alan -

It has puzzled me why Google has not bought one of the shortening services or created their own. There is a tremendous amount information that can be captured about the relevancy of a site.

Although the shortening is needed for Twitter, I don’t think it should be used elsewhere. I see some site using it to expose the URL, but I think it is counterproductive. You see a short string, but have no idea where you are headed. That could lead to viruses and other bad sites. tinyurl.com/prettyflowers could lead to a porn site. Exposing the URL gives the reader some information to decide on whether to click on the link.

The short URL’s actually make my life easier developing sites. Think of it as your personal bookmark site! tinyurl.com/sitelogin etc… actually freaked out last week when on a demo the local admin didn’t allow access to tinyurl and I needed a login to one of our development sites. (usually having an extremely difficult url to remember)

The public address or URL, is already a synonym for an IP address, which is translated for you by a DNS server; very similar to what Tinyurl and other services are doing for you. Granted, when they go down there may not be a backup service such as with the DNS system.
Nevertheless, these shortening services are addressing a need which is there, because current publicly available addresses are too long to be easily copied.

Besides, even all public URLs are subject to link-rot.
You have to accept that the web is not static, but its becoming a real time information river; URL shortening services fit in perfectly, as an additional service.

You can, of course, run a plugin on your site that will make your domain a URL shortener. WordTwit has this built in *and* lets you tweet your new posts automatically with a shortened URL, great for retaining branding.

http://www.sciencetext.com/shorten-your-urls.html

There are other plugins that just do the shortening using your domain. Unless you have a two letter domain and two letter TLD they’re not going to be as short as tr.im et al, but v useful nevertheless.

The design work done on Xanadu in the early 90s focused a lot of effort on maintaining the integrity of links over time. It seemed like overkill at the time to me, but successive iterations on the web demonstrate the foresight of that team. Sadly, it’s hard for me to imagine any manner of refactoring of the web to where it could preserve link integrity over time using the Xanadu tumbler line model. The problem isn’t so much as a technical one, but one imposed by the complexities of social relationships.

That being said, technologies like massively parallel search engines (Google, etc.) have all infrastructure needed to reconstruct these link relationships. If a popular link shortener did go belly up, Google or Microsoft have all the data needed to reconstruct the data. Similarly, Twitter could record all the link relationships in their own logs and restore them if any should die. In fact, if I were twitter I would do that since a portion of their value prop is directly related to their role as a link archive. If any of these services die they would loose some portion, admittedly unknown, of their value.

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