"If Tr.im shuts down its servers, millions of links will simply die,"
Tr.im says in its announcement that all of its URLs will continue to redirect until December 31. Parr thinks someone will buy Tr.im before the end of the year. Bit.ly, Twitter's go-to shortener has a project called
But once again, the issue lies on a much larger plane than that of Tr.im. If more of these sites fail for any reason or get hacked, the web could turn into link bedlam. "Millions upon millions of links could suddenly vanish, leaving users confused and a possibly uncleanable mess," says Parr.
How Big is the Problem Really?
Or perhaps we're sensationalizing this a little bit. There's no question that there are many, many shortened URLs out there in circulation, but if they all stopped working, what would happen? Let's look at where they're being used - Twitter. In a hypothetic scenario where no URL shortening service works any longer, people will stop using them from that point on. That eliminates the further spread of problem-links.
That leaves you with all of the ones out there that people have posted in the past. That means while they are out there to be clicked on, they will become more and more buried as time goes on. Twitter Search is after all about what is happening "right now."
I don't mean to play down the issue too much. It is definitely an issue, and there would still be some hiccups experienced by many webmasters. over a Denial-of-Service attack. Without functioning links, Twitter becomes a lot less useful for many users. Does Twitter want to depend on third party services for such functionality as it continues to grow? Is rethinking the 140-character limit in order?
Twitter does have a relationship with Please share them
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