Две хороших мысли касательно сокращалок урлов:
URL shorteners may be one of the worst ideas, one of the most backward ideas,
to come out of the last five years. In very recent times, per-site
shorteners, where a website registers a smaller version of its hostname and
provides a single small link for a more complicated piece of content within
it… those are fine. But these general-purpose URL shorteners, with their
shady or fragile setups and utter dependence upon them, well. If we lose
TinyURL or bit.ly, millions of weblogs, essays, and non-archived tweets lose
their meaning. Instantly. To someone in the future, it’ll be like everyone
from a certain era of history, say ten years of the 18th century, started
speaking in a one-time pad of cryptographic pass phrases. We’re doing our
best to stop it. Some of the shorteners have been helpful, others have been
hostile. A number have died. We’re going to release torrents on a regular
basis of these spreadsheets, these code breaking spreadsheets, and we hope
others do too.
But the biggest burden falls on the clicker, the person who follows the
links. The extra layer of indirection slows down browsing with additional DNS
lookups and server hits. A new and potentially unreliable middleman now sits
between the link and its destination. And the long-term archivability of the
hyperlink now depends on the health of a third party. The shortener may
decide a link is a Terms Of Service violation and delete it. If the shortener
accidentally erases a database, forgets to renew its domain, or just
disappears, the link will break. If a top-level domain changes its policy on
commercial use, the link will break. If the shortener gets hacked, every link
becomes a potential phishing attack.
