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It's a point-of-failure issue. As a general rule of thumb, dependencies are bad. They introduce "uncontrollable" risk into things. Obviously, websites and bl
by ZachPruckowski 17y ago
It's a point-of-failure issue. As a general rule of thumb, dependencies are bad. They introduce "uncontrollable" risk into things. Obviously, websites and bloggers and web-apps can't do much about having the Internet as a dependency, but I don't want to have half my publicity for my content* reliant on a web service that could well be completely fly-by-night.
* - At this stage in my life, such publicity and content are only hypothetical :(
- Semiapies 17y agoFly-by-night is to be avoided in all things. I would recommend picking a shortener that's been around more than a short while and seems healthy, certainly - just as I would recommend picking a hosting company that has the same qualities.
- ZachPruckowski 17y agoEven the major shortening services are fly-by-night relative to other services one depends on. They're even fly-by-night relative to Twitter, for the most part, much less something like Wordpress, and infinitely less than something like Google or Apache.
- Semiapies 17y agoTinyURL's been around since 2002. http://tinyurl.com/a http://tinyurl.com/a still works. How many of those TinyURL links lead to pages and sites that no longer exist? Now, if your site is something that you're serious about keeping up over the long term, including retaining or properly redirecting all the URIs you offer, great - you're ahead of most of the web. However, if you don't want people to shorten your URIs, then you'll want to make short URIs.