Two Possible Link Shortening Answers

Link short­en­ers have come under fire this week. Schachter crit­i­cized them say­ing they make the web more frag­ile as a sin­gle point of fail­ure for hun­dreds of thou­sands if not mil­lions of links on the Inter­net. Jason Kot­tke posted agree­ing with him. And they’re right. There’s no dis­put­ing that. How­ever I have two pro­pos­als for ideas which could strengthen the web while still uti­liz­ing shorteners.

First, what if link short­en­ers devel­oped a sim­i­lar frame­work to what Identi.ca is doing as a dis­trib­uted Twit­ter clone? Mean­ing that there is a uni­fied data­base between any num­ber of link short­en­ing sites.

There would be some coor­di­na­tion required such that sites would have to work hard to remain up to date in their data­bases to avoid col­li­sions. But this would allow peo­ple to take ‘abc123’ and go to one of the mul­ti­ple domains to uti­lize the link short­en­ing. It would of course still be ham­pered by the fact that peo­ple would have to take the tokens to a new url to get redirected.

The sec­ond pro­posal I have is for a third party to backup the short­ened links.

Imag­ine if Google indexed all the link short­en­ers (or rather, uti­lized the data they’re already track­ing) and pro­vided an easy way for peo­ple to access this infor­ma­tion? Maybe as a sin­gle page peo­ple can go to that pro­vides the expanded url and redi­rects them or as a plu­gin in Fire­fox. Now this doesn’t have to be Google or even a search engine, Twit­ter could do it, or per­haps some­one else. And through this sys­tem the Inter­net infra­struc­ture is strengthened.

Updated 8:31am: Changed ‘their’ to ‘they’re’.