TinyURL Outage Illustrates the Service's Risks
The link shortening and redirection service TinyURL went down apparently for hours last night (it's still down, in fact), rendering countless links broken across the web. Complaints have been particularly loud on Twitter, where long links are automatically turned to TinyURLs and complaining is easy to do, but the service is widely used in emails and web pages as well. The site claims to service 1.6 billion hits each month.
There are many free public alternatives to TinyURL, some with better ancillary features (see elfurl.com for just one example). The name TinyURL is very literal and memorable though. I use SNURL more often, myself.
It's not good when so much of the web runs through a single service. For some, politics could be a consideration as well as technical considerations. The man behind TinyURL, Keven Gilbertson, uses his hugely popular website to promote US presidential candidate Ron Paul, which I personally find somewhat distasteful, and encourages people to use TinyURL to obscure affiliate links on their webpages - which strikes me as extremely distasteful. Presumably a Paul supporter would want our redirects to run wild and free too, unbeholden to a centralized service provider capable of holding us under its thumb (I joke, but really.)
URL shorteners are important because they make long links much easier to communicate. The print world could learn a thing or two from these services; InfoWorld magazine, for example, used to to publish very short redirects through infoworld.com for all links it discussed. That's great for efficiency and brand recognition and makes me wonder whether all of us ought to have our own private TinyURL service.
If there was some sort of distributed standard or tool that could be good as well. The Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) has run Purl.org (Persistent Uniform Resource Locator) since the 1990's but user experience there is something only a librarian would put up with. A public institution solving this problem gracefully might be as realistic as it would have been for the Library of Congress to have acquired Del.icio.us (my fantasy) instead of Yahoo!
The moral of the story, though, is that it isn't supposed to work this way. There ought not be one single point of failure that can so easily break such a big part of the web.
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Nothing like some good hyperbole.
TinyURL outage doesn't show fragility of the "web" it shows fragility of one service: TinyURL. It's not difficult to roll your own URL shortening service, there are free services out there. I'm surprised every major site doesn't use their own URL shortening service. Twitter using TinyURL is puzzling, at best.
I agree. I rolled my own too : http://urlb.at
(you have your own too don't you TD? ;) )
Maybe a 'big' player (Yahoo/Google/etc.) needs to acquire one and give it some serious firepower.
I think Twitter used TinyUrl, due to their simple API.
Maybe *they* should buy it? ;)
It seems to me that services like Twitter shouldn't rely so heavily on outside players for stuff like this, they should do it themselves. For individuals, downtime of a few hours is doable, but when tied so closely to a service it isn't.
It seems like a case where TinyURL was baked into Twitter at some stage, probably because it was a nice thing to add and because TinyURL was good enough, but hasn't been given much thought since. I could be wrong.
I've been a TinyURL user, but perhaps I shall switch. I'm not sure where any of these services don't pose the same service interruption risk.
Yup Kosso, we use our own.
For those reading this who aren't programmers (for those who are, you probably already have created your own), just do a search because there are several open source scripts out there that you can use. Just buy a short domain, wire the script to it and start using. End of reliance on Company XYZ.
As for Google buying TinyURL, that's a good idea. Another good idea if the service is open to the public would be hooking up their service to Amazon S3 -- those making money from their services, anyway. Most of these services are spammed worse than blogs.
Bad Marshall!
Web good! Relying on sucky proprietary services bad!
This is really a fault of Twitter - not tinyurl or the Web in general. It's obvious that people want to Twit URLs, so Twitter should have URL-shortening baked-in.
Then, if Twitter was up, URLs would work.
No - what about relying on Twitter's sucky proprietary service? I'm ready for an open alternative that's good enough to get momentum.
"The moral of the story, though, is that it isn't supposed to work this way. There ought not be one single point of failure that can so easily break such a big part of the web."
Um...
http://www.w3.org/Addressing/
If you don't want to be dependent on a single service.. DON'T USE IT. Yes, yes, I know.. twitter and all that. But my good friend Captain Obvious would like to remind you that routing everything through one point makes you dependent on that point.
Sheesh.
Should have clarified my last response on it being a good idea for Google to buy TinyURL -- for scalability as Kosso suggested, but not for business. The reality is unless you can control what URLs are getting shortened, you'll end up with some really nasty URLs traversing your network (see signature URL)
I'm glad this has stirred such strong emotions!
Let's see what kind of reactions I can offer here:
Re Twitter's reliance on TinyURL: I think Twitter users probably make up a substantial portion of total TinyURL users, but there's a lot more at issue here than twitter. Further, no one wants to rely on Twitter uptime, either.
Re roll-your-own, I found two on Sourceforge with a moment's searching but will look into just how easy this is asap. I love the idea. Anyone have recommendations for the best open source software to put on my server to do this?
Re proprietary software/don't use it - principles are all well and good, heck sometimes I don't eat anything else until after lunch, but the facts is the facts - TinyURL is widely used, as is a lot of other proprietary software. I'd love to see an open source, distributed alternative - I think I asked for one in this post, did I not James :) - but where are they?
Ironically, I only started using TinyURL the day before yesterday, because urlTea was down.
There are a plethora of problems with these services, even if you take reliability out of the equation.
http://breasy.com/blog/2005/10/26/i-hate-tinyurls/
Marshall,
You don't have to use ANY service, open or closed, distributed or single-pointed.. There's a universal scheme for links - that's what URIs are. Despite your snark, it's not about principles, it's about using what's there already. Unless the target of a URL goes away a standard link NEVER fails since there's no service behind it aside from the web itself.
I get why they don't work for Twitter, but in general URIs work just fine... no alternative is needed.
What about the day on Google will start charging for Feedburner services? Big blogs with over 100k subscribers via the service would be in an uncomfortable position.
It is just speculation obviously, but makes me wonder nonetheless.
Daniel, you might note that RWW uses Feedburner but via our own URL on our server. Thus if it got too uncomfortable, nobody here is held hostage. Also, there are few enough with 100k that it would probably start at 10k :)
"It's not good when so much of the web runs through a single service."
heheh -- so what does that tell us about Google? ;D
Generally, if/when I care about the (shortened) link being available long-term, I will create a link myself.
:) nmw
As a service like Twitter why not have shorter URLs to begin with. Then you don't need services like TinyURL. Makes more sense to me.
I'm not convinced that rolling my own url shortening service would really improve on the reliability of tinyurl.com
Go away, troll. This post is pathetic.
I think Marshall's got a strong point here... when none of the #tinyurl addresses could be resolved, a large part of the existing linkages in The Web suddenly blinked out.
Not just Twitter... much bigger than that.
Doesn't matter if you yourself support diversity in the URL-shortening ecosystem, because much of the content out there is already wired to those particular URLs. Part of The Web blinked out.
I wonder what would happen if URL-shortening services shared databases, or spidered each other, so they could interpret each other as needed? I don't know the dynamics of their work, but that seems like it might have helped this situation.
jd/adobe
For yet another set of opinions look here:
http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/11/18/1319201
TinyUrl has had problems all along like redirects going to wrong sites, etc. I never use it.
I'm using http://www.canurl.com and find that it's much faster than tinyURL
I built a service called fupi.ws, which also allows you to password protect a URL along with making it shorter.
http://fupi.ws
"The man behind TinyURL, Keven Gilbertson, uses his hugely popular website to promote US presidential candidate Ron Paul, which I personally find somewhat distasteful"
You're guilty of the same crime... interjecting your political views in a news-like post is even less respectable than Gilbertson's use of his site.
"...it isn't supposed to work this way. There ought not be one single point of failure that can so easily break such a big part of the web."
The web is designed and built with redundancy at many levels. The web doesn't break when a site goes down. Packets still get to their destination.
What's broken is your understanding of how the web works. Step off your soapbox and pick up a book, Marshall.
So why exactly should have the Library of Congress acquired del.icio.us instead of Yahoo? Thanks to the corporate acquisition, the firefox plugin was substantially improved. It even caches bookmarks locally so you don't have to worry about del.icio.us being down and not being able to see your bookmarks (solving the tinyURL problem).
Government organizations acquiring things tend to make them less efficient. Sure del.icio.us contributes to the "closed internet" in the same ways that myspace and facebook do, but if I really cared enough I'd use an ftp based bookmark synchronization (there are firefox plugins for those too) and run it from my own site. Sometimes it's just easier to use someone else's service in exchange for ads.
I agree web apps shouldn't rely on tools like tiny URL. Blogging software should include this functionality within the engine to prevent problems like this. It would be fairly trivial to setup a similar service just for your website or company.
Sumdog
Honestly, I guess I never got it with tinyURL anyway. If people want their website to be read, they need to have it user-friendly.
Out of all of these link shortening services, I find http://hidd3n.com to be the most convenient as it makes the shortest links. When I'm moving around the computer lab and need to bring up a page on another workstation, I use hidd3n.com and all I need to remember is the 4 digit suffix.
Hey all ... we've just launched a beta of our new service http://Shrinker.com ... very basic atm but we're building in a lot more smarts soon including an api and directory services.
Dang sorry the above should be http://Shrinkr.com
Keep in mind TinyURLs aren't private--no unauthenticated site is private. You can browse TinyURLs at http://www.tinywurld.com to see what TinyURLs other people are creating. 30% of the results would be maps, but they're filtered, along with duplicates.
Eric
The reality is unless you can control what URLs are getting shortened, you'll end up with some really nasty URLs traversing your network
I agree that using URL shortening services to obscure affiliate or objectional links is distasteful. My service xaddr.com has a few tricks to try to discourage this.
I think you've missed out a popular use URL shortening services like http://www.tiny9.com - publishers often use them to hide affiliate IDs in the links.