URL shortening is just wrong and it’s not just me that thinks so Joshua Schachter thinks so too and Simon Willison has a partial solution. The reason various folk are worried about URL shortening and think that it’s largely evil is because it breaks the web.
URLs need to be persistent and that’s not so likely when you use these services. But the ever increasing popularity of Twitter, who impose a 140 character limit on tweets, means that more and more URLs are getting shortened. The ridiculous thing is it isn’t even necessary.
In addition to the rev=”canonical” fix that Kellan proposed Michael has also recently come across longurl.org which
…could solve at least some of these problems. It provides a service to expand short urls from many, many providers into long urls
That’s cool because:
it caches the expansion so has a persistent store of short <> long mappings. They plan to expose these mappings on the web which would also solve [reliance on 3rd party – if they go out of business links break]
Of course what would be extra cool would be if, in addition to the source code being open sourced, so was the underlying database. That way if anything happened to longurl.org someone else could resurrect the service.
All good stuff. But the really ironic thing is that none of this should be neccessary. The ‘in 140 characters or less’ thing isn’t true. As Michael points out:
if i write a tweet to the 140 limit that includes a link then <a href=”whatever”>whatever</a> will be added to the message. so whilst the visible part of the message is limited to 140 chars the message source isn’t. There’s no reason twitter couldn’t use the long url in the href whilst keeping the short url as the link text…
All Twitter really needs to do is provide their own shortening service – if you enter anything that starts “http://” it gets shortened in the visable message. Of course it doesn’t really need to actually provide a unique, hashed URL, it could convert the anchor text to “link” or the first few letters of the title of the target page while retaining the full-fat, canonical URL in the href.
Derivadow 
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