Link shortening companies such as TinyURL allow web publishers to create a short proxy web address that redirects web users to web pages with long and cumbersome web addresses.
Those shortened web addresses, or URLs, though, are in danger of being rendered useless if the company behind them goes out of business or loses data or makes changes to its services in the future. A group of those companies has joined up with web archiving non-profit body the Internet Archive to create an 'escrow' store of data which would allow the links to go on working if something happened to the companies.
"Millions of shortened URLs are generated for users every day by a wide variety of companies. But when a URL shortening service shuts down, the shortened URLs people put in their blogs, tweets, emails and web sites break," said a statement by the body, 301works.org. "Unless users have kept a record of each shortened URL and where it was supposed to redirect to, it’s not possible to fix them."
"301works.org was conceived to provide redundancy so that users and services could resolve a URL mapping regardless of availability," said John Borthwick, chief executive of one of the biggest URL shortening companies, Bit.ly. "The Internet Archive is a perfect host organization to run and manage this for all providers."
“The Internet Archive is honored to play this role to help make the Web more robust,” added Brewster Kahle, founder and Digital Librarian of the Internet Archive.
"The Internet Archive will manage the over all initiative in a fashion consistent with its charter as a non-profit organization, and supporting the interests of the greater community ahead of those of the participating companies," said the 301works.org statement.
Companies that sign up to the service will agree that technical control over their domain name and the services that run on it will pass to 301works.org if the company goes out of business, allowing the links to function beyond the life of the company. Its terms and conditions say that the passing of technical control does not necessarily involve the passing of ownership of the domain to it.
"Participating companies will provide regular backups of their URL mappings to the 301Works.org service," said its statement. "In the event of the closure of a participating organization, technical control of the shortening service domain will be transferred to 301Works.org in order to continue redirecting existing shortened URLs to their intended destinations."
