Big news for little URLs today, as the Internet Archive announced that they will be taking the lead on301works.org, an effort designed to add permanence and reliability to the operation of URL shorteners.
The Internet Archive and founding companies announce today the launch of 301Works.org, a service to archive shortened Universal Resource Locators (URLs). This will enable redirect services to incorporate these shortened URLs when a member company ceases business activities.
The use of shortened URLs has grown dramatically due to the popularity of Twitter and similar micro-streaming services where posts are limited to a small number of characters. Millions of shortened URLs are generated for users every day by a wide variety of companies.
But when a URL shortening service shuts down, the shortened URLs people put in their blogs, tweets, emails and web sites break. Unless users have kept a record of each shortened URL and where it was supposed to redirect to, it’s not possible to fix them.
A group of URL shortening companies and other interested parties realized the potential for harm to the user community and formed the 301Works.org organization to provide more security for the people who use these services every day. Currently more than 20 URL shortening organizations have participated in an earlier form of this collaboration.
The blog post concludes by saying that bit.ly has begun putting "short-to-long mappings" in an escrow account with the Internet Archive who will be in charge of the 301works group.
In a strategic move, Bit.ly’s leadership including CEO John Borthwick, realized that if people lost confidence in the reliability of shortened links, they might stop using them. Hence, 301Works was born. (Tr.im is notably absent [as is TinyURL].)
See Also: Here are the Members of 301Works (as of 11/24/2009):
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