By Dave Winer on Saturday, March 03, 2012 at 9:16 PM.
We shouldn't have to shorten urls. It's only because of a fairly selfish and unwise company in San Francisco that we're adding an extra layer of fragility to an already loosely-coupled network. Introducing another point of failure.
But with all that disclaimed, we still need url-shorteners.
And the point of url-shorteners is to be short.
The shorter the better.
Today I have got something working I've wanted to play with for a long time. Instead of using pages inside a site, like all other url-shorteners, I wanted to try having hostnames as short urls.
So here's a short url: 1.blork.ly. Try it, it works!
Now with an even shorter domain, blork.ly is not optimal, the names can be even shorter. But they're already 4 or 5 characters shorter than bit.ly urls. So it's off to a good start.
We shouldn't have to shorten urls. It's only because of a fairly selfish and unwise company in San Francisco that we're adding an extra layer of fragility to an already loosely-coupled network. Introducing another point of failure.
