Greetings. Link shortening services have always been controversial to one extent or another. By injecting a third party into user interactions with Web sites, questions of reliability and privacy are frequently raised. And now, questions of religion have joined the fray, and Google has been drawn somewhat indirectly into the controversy as well.

Reliability is a factor since the failure -- or disappearance -- of a link shortening service would on its face appear to trigger the immediate uselessness of all links that have mapped through the associated shortening service throughout the service's lifetime.

Privacy questions enter the mix since the shortening service is typically in a position to capture significant information regarding the source and destination of the transaction, in the course of forwarding a user click to that ultimate destination.

Yet it is undeniable that link shortening provides important benefits, especially when dealing with email and other media where long links are ugly, inconvenient, or actually will not function properly.

I use link shortening extensively and routinely in my own email, where experience has taught me that long URLs cause a variety of problems for various recipients of my mailing lists, both due to MTA (Message Transport Agent) and MUA (Mail User Agent) issues. I get asked about this frequently enough that I have a chunk of boilerplate text I typically send in response. I sometimes joke that I see URLs that are so long that you can practically read the contents of the entire Web page from the URL itself without clicking through.

Long URLs can cause a real mess in email -- and including them along with a shortened version can cause the same problems as including them alone. In Web pages themselves, long links are much less problematic, and use of shortened links within such pages suggests primarily an interest in gathering click statistics on the part of the page author -- a practice that some observers condemn, but that I feel can be quite acceptable given appropriate privacy policies.

It would have seemed bizarre even a few weeks ago to suggest that religion would play a role in link shortening, but the Net is all abuzz about the disconnection of an adult-oriented link shortening service using the .ly (Libya) top level domain (TLD), due to the perceived impropriety of the service in the opinion of the associated TLD registry, essentially on religious grounds.

While fundamentally this sort of situation actually points to the increasingly dysfunctional nature of the Domain Name System itself, the more immediate side-effect of this action by the .ly registry has been to call into question the future stability of the extremely popular bit.ly link shortening service (to this point my choice for most link shortening).

Could the same thing happen to bit.ly that happened to the adult-oriented link shortening service? In the short term, the answer would appear to be no. The latter was explicitly aimed at adult sites, while bit.ly is a general purpose shortener with official Terms of Service that would seem to provide it considerable cover in this respect.

Also, bit.ly is actually an entire family of domains. There's bit.ly of course, but also j.mp, and a whole slew of "custom" domains that you may have seen such as nyti.ms, gizmo.do, wapo.st -- and innumerable others that are run by bit.ly and are actually interchangeable with bit.ly URLs (that is, you'll reach the same page with gizmo.do/foobar as you will with bit.ly/foobar). Obviously, many of these are related to statistics gathering and "vanity" addresses -- but note that virtually all depend on TLDs that are controlled by one or another non-U.S. countries, just like bit.ly itself.

Even Google's excellent goo.gl shortening service, which has very recently been opened up for general link shortening use by the world, is based on the TLD controlled by -- can you guess? -- Greenland.

The upshot of all this is that -- at least as long as we're saddled with the current domain name environment -- international registries and potentially their domestic government policies will be an integral part of most popular link shortening services.

In the wake of the recent moves by .ly, some observers have suggested that bit.ly (that's bit.ly proper, presumably not the various other bit.ly-controlled domain names not in the .ly TLD) should be viewed as unstable.

This may or may not be true in the long run, but tends to beg the question of how best to protect the reliability of shortened links against all manner of possible disruptions, including the potential for changes not only associated with international conditions and domestic governments, but also potential changes in business conditions and business operations on the part of link shortening services themselves.

To address this, almost a year ago the Internet Archive created 301works.org as an independent location for the "escrowing" of shortened link mappings, as protection against the disruption of any individual link shortening service. (Why "301" you ask? The Web HTTP status code for "Moved Permanently" is -- ta dah! -- 301.)

In fact, bit.ly is a founding member of 301works.org, and bit.ly's policy of escrowing their links is a major reason why I've been using them for my own link shortening.

It is both appropriate and desirable for every significant link shortening service to escrow their shortened links with 301works -- or some similar third party -- on a routine basis. To do so doesn't suggest that anyone expects the shortening service (or its "parent" firm) to vanish anytime soon. But having a copy of the link mappings in the hands of a trustworthy, independent third party makes enormous sense on general principles, and shows a willingness to put reliability -- even if the chances of disruptions seem vanishingly small -- above proprietary data principles.

I've urged Google on several occasions to consider escrowing their goo.gl links -- ideally with Internet Archive's 301works. There has apparently been some interest at Google in this suggestion, but no definitive movement to actually escrow those links (as far as I know).

Given that link shortening reliability is back in the spotlight, and goo.gl has now opened up for routine and broad use, I'm again renewing my call on Google to take proactive steps to protect their goo.gl link mappings through a third party. It's just the right thing to do.

Link shortening services possess various qualities of the proverbial double-edged sword -- both positive and negative aspects. They are extremely useful when used appropriately, but can be abused. And their reliability over time -- potentially very long spans of time -- is naturally of great concern, since if link mappings are lost, the value of vast numbers of pages will be decimated.

That's, uh, the long and the short of it.

--Lauren--