The tr.im story – why we shouldn’t use link shorteners!

The URL shortening service tr.im caused havoc in August

On Sunday the 9th of August the link shortening service tr.im announced that it would shut down it’s free service only to announce a few days later that they intend to reopen it. On the 17th of August they finally decided to hand it over to the open source community.

Link shortening services are used to shorten the typically long web addresses to make sharing of the link easier. They have seen a recent growth in usage, specifically due to the popularity of Twitter, which places a 140 character restriction on each message. Some popular shortening websites are tinyurl.com, bit.ly and tr.im.

The temporary shutdown of tr.im generated an outcry in the community and many users of the service saw themselves in an awkward situation. All the links they had shortened using this service were now completely inaccessible. This situation raises the question why we are using link shorteners in the first place.

In my opinion, the only reason to use link shorteners is due to the artificial limitation of the message length imposed by Twitter. In almost any other context there is really no need for the use of short links. As a matter of fact there are many reasons why you should avoid the use of link shortening services. Here is a list of arguments against using link shorteners.

When using link shortening services you give away the control over your link. If the service is up and running everything is fine. If the services shuts down for any reason all your links have suddenly died.
By adding a redirection layer to your link, the user experience will be slower. This may not be much for most users, but for users with slow internet connections the difference can be significant.
The redirection effectively obfuscates the link to the user. Links normally tell the user a lot about where he is going. Not only the domain name but also the rest of the URL gives information about the content that can be expected. Many users make a choice of following a link based on this information. Hiding that information is doesn’t make for a good user experience.

Should we avoid sort links altogether then? The answer is: avoid them as much as possible. Don’t use short links on your blog, don’t use them on any of your normal web content. When using Twitter, think twice! A lot of the time there is enough space left to include the full link. Only use the short link if it really doesn’t fit within the 140 character restriction. And finally, when transfering your tweets from twitter to your blog (as some people do) try to expand the links back into their original form. Re-expanding links can easily be automated, so there should be no extra work involved.

Link shorteners are a necessary evil for the Twitter community, but keep them confined to their limited realm and don’t let them invade your web content.