waste/pynchon-l search results: tinyurl: 720 matches were found

[Werner Presber]

Read this:

Could a Billion TinyURLs Go 404?

„TinyURL, a free and extremely popular five-year-old web service that  
shortens URLs and is a staple of tools like Twitter, has suffered  
some brief downtime lately. It's down as of this writing, as you can  
see from the screen shot below.As a result, some are starting to  
imagine what might happen if such a single point of failure should go  
down for an extended period of time or, worse, shut down or be  
acquired. Twitter is far from the only company using the TinyURL API  
service.

The thought of an evaporating TinyURL - a wonderful tool that remind  
you is provided to us all for free - especially considering its  
rising popularity is all more than a little bit frightening, yet  
fascinating. Take a look at the chart below, which comes from Google  
Trends. It shows TinyURL clearly rising. No wonder it's having a hiccup!

Perhaps Google or someone else will buy TinyURL at some point. Still,  
that's not a good solution since all roads still lead to one. All of  
this points to a big weak spot in the web as more people and services  
rely on the terrific TinyURL service (and its alternatives).

Good fodder for a short week!“ via Steve Rubel



and read this:

„I knew the day would come when users would wake up and realize that  
centralizing stuff is not good for the Internet. Today two signs that  
things are sorting themselves out.

1. Steve Rubel writes about the danger of routing all our URLs  
through TinyUrl. I love what URL-shorteners do, it's especially  
important in Twitter when you're limited to 140 characters to express  
an idea. If you have to include a link, that could use up a lot of  
the space you have. The problem is if everyone uses TinyUrl, as  
Twitter does, what happens when TinyUrl goes down or is sold to  
someone we don't like, or disappears forever? I admit I don't know  
the owners of TinyUrl and what their motives are. Their service is  
reasonably long-lived, reliable and quick. Even so I've written my  
own URL-shortener and am running it on one of my servers, and I try  
to use it whenever possible. However, like all my sites, this one  
will likely disappear within a few days of my passing. I have to  
maintain my servers to keep them running. A better solution is surely  
needed. Rubel's epiphany just exposes the tiniest sliver of the huge  
problem below, creating a sustainable web. We're nowhere as far as  
that's concerned.“



via Steve Winer
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