URL Shortners And Should You Trust Your Links To Third Party Services?
With services like Twitter only allowing 140 characters as it’s input limit more and more users have turned to URL Shortening services like tr.im, tinyurl, bit.ly etc. A few days ago however tr.im announced on it’s blog that they would be closing the service in December due to not being able to find a buyer for the startup. This begs the question of “Should You Trust Your Links To Third Party Services?”.
tr.im a url shortening service announced on their blog last Sunday that their service would be discontinued effective from the 31st December 2009. This was a shock to many who utilize tr.im to shorten their urls for services like twitter etc as it would mean the death of any links that were shortened using tr.im. Since the initial closure announcement on Sunday tr.im have now reversed their stance and have officially committed themselves to keeping the service operational for the foreseeable future.
Whilst the new announcement that tr.im will in fact not be closing their service is great news for anyone who has been using tr.im to shorten their for me it opens up the discussion, “Should You Trust Your Links To Third Party Services?”.
As more an more of us use these url shortening services how often have we actually taken the time to consider what would happen if the service we favor ceased operation. If the likes of bit.ly announced closure tomorrow what would you do and what would happen to all your shortened links that you have spread through various services? More likely than not your shortened links through this service would die and become useless ultimately effecting your websites traffic from these links.
One solution I’m personally considering is running my own URL shortening service using YOURLS which is a small set of PHP scripts that allows you to run your own URL shortening service. You can make it private or public, you can pick custom keyword URLs, it comes with its own API. Another interesting feature of YOURLS is that a WordPress plugin is available for YOURLS, making integration with your blog a snap: create short URLs and tweet them automatically as you publish blog posts.
By using software like YOURLS i can be confident in the knowledge that my URL shortening service used for blog posts will not someday decide to close causing me problems with broken links.
What’s your idea’s on this, will you continue to use hosted URL shortener’s as they are convenient or are you tempted to run your own private service using YOURLS or similar. Let me know your thoughts.
