Link shortening companies such as TinyURL allow web publishers
to create a short proxy web address that redirects web users to web
pages with long and cumbersome web addresses.
Those shortened web addresses, or URLs, though, are in danger of
being rendered useless if the company behind them goes out of
business or loses data or makes changes to its services in the
future. A group of those companies has joined up with web archiving
non-profit body the Internet Archive to create an 'escrow' store of
data which would allow the links to go on working if something
happened to the companies.
"Millions of shortened URLs are generated for users every day by
a wide variety of companies. But when a URL shortening service
shuts down, the shortened URLs people put in their blogs, tweets,
emails and web sites break," said a statement by the body,
301works.org. "Unless users have kept a record of each shortened
URL and where it was supposed to redirect to, it’s not possible to
fix them."
"301works.org was conceived to provide redundancy so that users
and services could resolve a URL mapping regardless of
availability," said John Borthwick, chief executive of one of the
biggest URL shortening companies, Bit.ly. "The Internet Archive is
a perfect host organization to run and manage this for all
providers."
“The Internet Archive is honored to play this role to help make
the Web more robust,” added Brewster Kahle, founder and Digital
Librarian of the Internet Archive.
"The Internet Archive will manage the over all initiative in a
fashion consistent with its charter as a non-profit organization,
and supporting the interests of the greater community ahead of
those of the participating companies," said the 301works.org
statement.
Companies that sign up to the service will agree that technical
control over their domain name and the services that run on it will
pass to 301works.org if the company goes out of business, allowing
the links to function beyond the life of the company. Its terms and
conditions say that the passing of technical control does not
necessarily involve the passing of ownership of the domain to
it.
"Participating companies will provide regular backups of their
URL mappings to the 301Works.org service," said its statement. "In
the event of the closure of a participating organization, technical
control of the shortening service domain will be transferred to
301Works.org in order to continue redirecting existing shortened
URLs to their intended destinations."
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