Although I haven’t written before about why I never use TinyURL to store links but rather only to pass them along, let’s get into it a bit. In the context of RapidShare, though, which I guess sounds non-sensical. Both of these services, in their respective context, are what’s known as a SPOF1.
Recently, RapidShare has been ordered to clean up their servers of any copyrighted materials or, if unable to comply, to shut it down. And I’m seeing the latter to be a more likely outcome, considering that, indeed, RapidShare has been a haven for people and websites to store and pass along copyrighted works almost since its inception. But, arguably, there are people that simply used RS to give their friends things that were not in violation of anyone’s copyright. The service was aimed at corporate users, too (though I have no idea what the percentage of those would be) but there people have, again, probably used RS to share work-related information.
All gone.
Now, RapidShare provides (provided?) a service, and that was file-hosting. Granted, anybody that does the same on the Internet, whether legal or not, faces the same risks. The admins at my webhost might run away with the money tomorrow and leave everything to rot. Google might, eventually, crumble and take away my e-mails with it. It’s something that, well, happens sometimes around these parts. Yet if we can avoid it, why not try to?
While RS links might expire after some time, TinyURL ones don’t. What if 80% of your bookmarked links were TinyURL-ed? What if most forums on the web used TinyURLs almost compulsory2? And then, one day, TinyURL goes out of business and takes all these links with it? The actual websites aren’t gone anywhere, but because we’ve stuck all our links in TinyURL, we don’t know what they are anymore.
Don’t get me wrong, I have absolutely nothing against TinyURL as a medium of distributing links that are not desirable or needed over longer periods of time. And it may very well be that TinyURL is the last site to go offline when someone pulls the plug.
It’s easy to develop ‘affections’ for services and sites. I’m sure most of Facebook’s user-base is deeply committed to the site. Though it is quite possible even FB will die3.
Redundancy is important. When it is unreasonable or unfeasible to ensure it, there is always a possibility of loss that must be mitigated. In GMail’s case you don’t even need to wait for Google to collapse - what will you do if someone locks you out of your account?
UPDATE: I love irony, oh how I do! Posting to my blog shoots an update on my Twitter account4 as well - and guess what, the linkback to this post was TinyURL-ed :)
DreamHost recently shut down url(x), a similar URL shortening service recommended by LifeHacker (http://lifehacker.com/software/urls/shorten-a-long-url-with-urlx-146146.php). url(x) is moving to another hosting provider, but it’s a good illustration that these services can run into difficulties. url(x) has a better design in that it preserves at least the domain name.
inaequitas on February 9th, 2008 at 15:18Hmm didn’t know about that, thanks! The url(x) page is brief to mention what the problems DH had with the service, I hope to find out more as the service gets back on its feet.
For example, yes, Amazon can have some pretty ugly links, as do BestBuy and FutureShop. But it’s one thing to pass the link to a friend over IM - fine - and another to post it for ‘eternity’. The latter is what I take issue with and try to personally avoid most of the time.