Social media for the Paranoid

I had intended to start writing about Vodafone’s beaver problem, but somehow got distracted into investigating URL shortening. Initially I thought that it was a none issue – but after alot of clicking on URLs of every length I concluded that if you were an organization that intended to be relevant in two years time you need to get this right or else there is a risk that all your older postings with suffer link rot – and if you don’t know what that is, then read on!

Now I have a Scottish grandmother who insisted in cooking everything in shortening, and very good it was too. I used to catch the overnight train to Glasgow, the to Prestwick and cycle to her house in the early morning where I would be greeted with sausage rolls cooked in shortening and a “wee dram” (well actually a large glass of neat single malt whiskey). It was damned good, but you can see why Scotland had a cholesterol issue.

So when I came across URL shortening I had a wonderful mental picture of golden brown URLs loving hand rolled and baked in the Aga.

Alas the reality was the exact opposite – lovely formed URLs reduced to tiny stings of characters. Clicking on the shrunken URL took you briefly through the redirection service and on to the original destination. Great, less character, or was that characters. But what have you lost?

Well nothing based on the amount of usage that bit.ly has seen (2.1 billion redirects by November 2009 according to Wikipedia).

But I’ve flown on airlines that go bust while I sat at the hub waiting to get to my true destination. The answer is hours spent begging at airline counters, and in my particular case a ticket on an airline that promptly went bust the following day after I had trekked back to the airport and before the plane could be filled up.

What happens if your favorite URL shortening service also goes to that domain in the sky? Well alot of people in “timeout”, server not found, a problem known by that wonderful new word “linkrot“.  That looked like the fate of users of cli.gs, but fortunately there was a shotgun marriage to Mr Wong, or was it Mr Right, and they are back to breeding short little URLs.

So perhaps the answer is to use a real big provider, like bit.ly – they will always be around despite their rather vague business model (what they have of value is information about you – the URL clicker – possibly useful to the writer and advertisers).

But wait a minute where do they get that cute little extension (.ly ) ? Well it appears to be registered with a Liberian domain provider and very fortunately is governed by Arabic law. As it says in the conditions “4.2 Domain names must not contain obscene, scandalous, indecent, or contrary to Libyan law or Islamic morality words, phrases nor abbreviations. ” So no jokes about a “hands-off policy”.

So lets pick a relevant article to link to. How about this one on free expression in Liberia? Here is the shortened URL; “http://bit.ly/aiVPpS” in all its glory. I hope Liberia is as cool as China about this freedom of expression stuff.

Speaking of China, TinyArro.ws (registered in Samoa) uses Unicode rather than the upper and lower cases characters used by bit.ly – so they can use any of the 100,000 Unicode characters, hence producing some truly awesomely short URLs, such as “http://❥.ws/픇韘”, which is obviously leads to this website!

Would you click on that awesome URL? Perhaps not because it looks weird, but plenty of people click on shortened URLs with no idea where it will take them. Even worse if they went somewhere way different than intended. That is what happened when cli.gs was hacked and all 2.2 million of those little URLs subverted to point to a single, not very exciting, location.

So when I started to write this blog entry I thought of URL shortening as having little importance. After some research I think that is still true if you are an individual, but not if you are an organization with a reputation to protect – if so the best answer today is probably to do it yourself, and as you value security over URL length (you don’t have that many URLs to redirect) I would buy a domain from a country who is not going to shut you down if you annoy them.

Here are two examples of organizations that care: The US Government and TED (the conference).

If you want to set up your own, then I would suggest that as a first pass you use the same code as the US Government and use Drupal with the Short URL module. If this sounds like gibberish then I suggest you talk to your IT provider.