Tinyurl down?
Published November 19th, 2007 in InternetThe Internet cannot be broken by a single point of failure. That it the way it was designed, and that is its great strength. And that’s why I think it’s a really bad idea to use tools like tinyurl.
Tonight I clicked on a tinyurl link, and got an error page from tinyurl rather than the desired link. It was back up in a couple of minutes, but it set my mind a wandering!
Why are we trusting tinyurl to be the single point through which we pass so much information? Do we know anything about the owners of tinyurl? Do we trust them not to do misuse the data passing through their hands?
A quick google on the subject brought up this extensive discussion on slashdot -
Do Tiny URL Services Weaken Net Architecture?
Stumble it!
Tags: tinyurl
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Hi Robert,
On the button with this one, but you can see why twitter and some newspapers use tinyurl.
I’d never use it on a a blog or web page.
Hi John.
Twitter I can see - the posts are by their nature intended to be ephemeral (thought of course they aren’t really). Newspapers should know better though. What good is it going to be to me 100 years from now (still planning to be alive!) when I look at an old newspaper and find tinyurl links, if tinyurl folded in 2012? The Sun is, of course, welcome to use tinyurl!
Hi Robert,
Agreed, maybe the newspapers could have both to save my typos.
I’ll see you at teachmeet 2107.
Both would be perfect
Congratulations on being the first visitor to identify yourself via OpenID!
D’oh! I just noticed your joke! It was too early in the morning for me to spot such subtlety
Yeah, I had the same issue too and stumbled on . I’ve using it since because it lets me specify words to use in my links.