★ Why I hate Bit.ly and wish we had an alternative to URL Shorteners

A very large number of tweets contain links. This was a statement made by Twitter last month and I’ll assume that they’re excluding mentions of someone’s twitter name (ie @adamjackson) and I think the number was that a majority of tweets contain links. I know that many of mine do especially since I’ve taken my curated break.

Oh that’s right, yeah, I took this 2 (now 3) week break and decided to switch to less moment to moment tweets and do more broadcasting of blog posts, photos and long-hand content so basically, every tweet from me over the past 2.5 weeks is links to things and not just tweets.

URL shorteners are great! It helps me share links in tweets and over email and it makes long links less ugly and more portable but, like an email service or web site, Bit.ly can go down and so can other shorteners. It’s not really just bit.ly. In fact, their service is probably the best available right now next to Google’s Goo.gl service that is supposedly faster than Bit.ly. My point is, I’m such an advocate for owning my own data, having copies and posterity through backup systems, co-location and making duplicates that I forgot that the “awesome cool blog post” that was shared out via Twitter 3 years ago could be a broken link 3 years from now and I’ll forget what I shared.

The same goes for any link, really. If I link to a magazine article online and that magazine goes under, the link dies. Yeah, I get that but New York Times going under is far less likely than Bit.ly being acquired or just dying out but maybe I’m just being overly sensitive.

Every time I see a startup get purchased, I feel bad for the users. Drop.io was purchased by Facebook and the service will shut down on December 15^th. That’s sad because some people really liked and used the service and even paid for it and now it’s just gone. What will happen with the billions of Bit.ly links just die because the service goes away?

Think about that for a moment. If 30-50% of all tweets contain links and Bit.ly has 70%+ of the market, that’s billions of shortened links that will forever be broken. Twitter doesn’t seem to care because their aspect is on NOW and not on later. Who wants to read old tweets? That’s their direction with a lot of things like you can’t search Twitter more than 14-21 days in the past and it’s hard to go back very far the way their interface is setup. I can’t do twitter.com/adamjackson/2007/03/21 (the day I signed up) and see those tweets like I could on Flickr. Heck, I can’t even search my own tweets back very far but I’ve found ways around that (Backupify and favors from employees at Twitter).

Something bothers me that I have TinyURL and Bit.ly links in my very old Twitter archives (some that are 3 years old) that may not be accessible one day if those services go away. Most of the content was links to things I posted on my blog or photos so those are still on Flickr and my personal blog but I’m uneasy about it. And yes, every day, every post, comment and photo uploaded to Facebook, Flickr. Gmail, Google Docs and WordPress is backed up to Amazon S3 (POSTERITY!) but what I don’t have control over is Bit.ly’s service.

I don’t think I’ll create my own service that is self-hosted since I’m not that techie like some people but it’s something that bugs me.

Maybe I’m the only person that cares? Do you care if your links shared over Twitter and Facebook 3 years from now won’t work if Bit.ly goes away?

I do. I don’t do things for the now. I do them for the later and later, I want to be able to access what happened now. For most users of social media, it’s the other way around so perhaps I’m crazy. I just don’t like it.

Mini-Rant over.