This is areply I posted on the following blog post:
How to Fix URL Shorteners – My Take « tweete.rs blog.
Good thoughts.
The idea of mapping the short tracker domain to an about page or redirect to the users preferred url is a good suggestion for providing some form of identity on the urls that are being generated.
A subdomain, as you point out, would work for this. However, adding a clear subdomain that actually is immediately identifiable without becoming too long (defeating the purpose of a short url) could become a challenge. And you basically get into name squatting, spoofing and impersonation issues just like everywhere else. Though that could be moot since its a universal problem.
The subdomain does allow for a good technical separation of ownership.A more casual approach without subdomains could be to just append a short url with an ID for example – http://my.su/Ru6_sull where ‘sull’ is my id and http://my.su/sull or http://sull.my.su could be my about page on the service or itself a redirect to my preferred url that identifies me such as my sull.tel domain
This casual approach could work in conjunction with your subdomain idea and allow for preserving a domain’s vanity appeal without interrupting it with a subdomain. for example, if i had the domain jmp.to, i might not want to have to add an ID subdomain to it (sull.jmp.to/Ru6). It just messes up the vanity appeal. so instead, jmp.to/Ru6_sull means the link is by sull and a user could check me out at sull.jmp.to.
As for your other points, they are important and as you noted they are being considered by the likes of Brian Hendrickson’s rp.ly, adjix and tr.im as well as any self-hosted DIY system. I’ve pointed to Yourls.org a few times in other blog comments (i have not used it myself) and at least a half a dozen WordPress plugins and many more tutorials and scripts floating around.
I personally lean towards suggesting DIY solutions in this space. But a good mix is the next best solution. I plan to test out rp.ly etc and compare to my own software/techniques. I like the adjix experimentation with s3. My software also depends on static files with XML (ie. RSS) feeds for exportability and mirroring (and could involve importing to s3 account without giving shared access to the buckets).
Though I don’t agree with some of the methods involved in the adjix recipe (ie. meta-refresh, requiring subdomain/CNAME etc.) I do love the experimentation and willingness to delve into helping Dave Winer and others with the issue of data ownership and branding.
These are good community efforts and yourself, Joe Moreno, Brian Hendrickson, Eric Woodward, Dave Winer, Marshall Kirkpatrick and others are all socially available participants. In a way, that’s the best part of this whole silly url shortening debate.
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