Am I the only person hoping that a high profile URL shortener liky bit.ly get taken offline so people learn quickly that redirecting their content's URLs through a 3rd party is a bad idea?
Redirecting your content through a third party like Amazon Web Services? Or Akamai CDN? Or Rackspace?
All small- to medium-size websites are the result of dozens of third party companies -- server farms, network backbones, DNS providers -- working together. Even the really gigantic sites like Google and Yahoo, who really do own their whole networks and all their hardware, use third party services extensively.
In the case of a third-party URL shortener, the other party's presence is more visible but no more intrinsically unreliable. And in fact, in this instance, the redirector itself didn't go down -- what "broke" was the DNS provider, namely NIC.ly.
There's a difference between using a 3rd-party service that provides a value to help deliver your site to your audience more effectively, and using a URL shortener that obscures your site and adds no value to your delivery.
Using a URL shortener also means if that URL shortener ever goes down or out, you just lost all those links to your site.
You're correct that traditional content is routed through a ton of different companies, and that anyone of them can fail, but using bit.ly is essentially pointless, as it just tacts on another service that must be relied on.
In 10 years when bit.ly is completely dead, 2/3rds of the tweets or other comments on the web will be rendered useless.
People complain about this a lot, but the rate of link-rot of ordinary URLs is much, much greater than people believe. I run a URL shortener, and I can assure you that while all of our links still work, huge numbers of the pages they point to no longer exist.
The problem is also overstated because nearly all URL shorteners (bit.ly included) are sending HTTP 301 responses. This means that the short link is never indexed; only the original link is. So shorteners have no effect on pagerank/search results, which is where the longevity of pages is important (since anything not published in the very recent past is mostly discovered by search).
The project definitely needs more volunteers. Check out the website or join #archiveteam on EFNet if you are interested in helping save the future internet.
I think he's talking about how URL shorteners undermine a bit of the effectiveness and utility of REST. All resources should be clear and readable, etc. URL shorteners remove useful information.
