From: Francis Hwang <sera@...>
Date: 2005-03-11T10:22:03+09:00
Subject: Re: [OT] Tiny URLs


On Mar 10, 2005, at 12:19 PM, Aredridel wrote:

> In the interest of web durability, I prefer not to use them.

But honestly, the redirection URI is just as likely to stick around in 
the long-term as the URI of the thing you're linking to in the first 
place, isn't it? I mean, if you link to a particular blog entry on my 
site, and then one day I change my blogging tool and its attendant URIs 
without internal redirections, you've got the same problem. I suppose 
going through tinyurl.com gives you two possible points of failure, so 
that's a definite issue, but I just think that for the most point 
durability of URIs is not really that possibility.

It's interesting, anyway ... I wonder what'll happen if tinyurl.com 
ever decides to shut down for whatever reason. Maybe they could just 
release some massive file that was a hash of key strings to URIs? 
Probably nasty privacy issues there. It's like they've become a part of 
the infrastructure in some small way.

Francis Hwang
http://fhwang.net/