joshua's blog: on url shorteners
As the creator of Delicious, Joshua Shachter knows a thing or two about urls and how they should be archived. So I am glad he hates url shorteners as much as I do.
I have never liked them and the only time I have ever used them is on Twitter, where you kind of have to. But I also make sure I feed my Twitter stream back into this blog which then grabs the original url and archives it so I make sure I can always get back to the original information.
The other thing I hate is a frame at the top, and I fear the new url shorteners are bringing this back into the mainstream, especially since Digg is now doing it also with its diggbar.
Joshua sums up nicely all the major arguments against the use of shorteners and I agree with every one of his points and pose this question: how many of these url shortener services do you think will still be around in two years? How about five? My guess, not very many, taking with them a large part of the usefulness of the twitter archive in the process.
