301Works

301Works is a working group of participating companies, and is now being managed as an initiative of the Internet Archives.

The working group is made up of a group of companies involved in what has been come to be known as ‘URL shortening’. The companies offer — as at least one aspect of their services — a way for users to take long URLs and to convert them into something much smaller. The primary motive for URL shortening is to diminish the number of characters involved, which is quite important in communications solutions like Twitter or SMS, which are quite character constrained. Secondary motivations include avoidance of breaking URLs across lines within email and documents, ease of recall, and analytics.

The analytics aspect arises as the second part of URL shortening. Once a long URL (for example, a NY Times Op-Ed piece, ‘http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/08/opinion/08thu1.html’) is shortened by a service (to ‘http://bitly.net/14KKjR’ in this case) then the service must catch all clicks on the short URL and redirect the clicker to the long one. And the service can count the clicks, and gather all sort of information, like time, location, and so on.

This works fine as long as the URL shortening companies are up and running. When they go down, there are problems for users who are seeking to access through redirection what the initial URL referenced. And if a company goes out of business, or simply wishes to discontinue the URL redirection side of their business, users are potentially worst off. Short URLs embedded in media will cease to work, which is at the least annoying, and in the case where the short URLs are critical to the business, organization or individual who created them, replacing them with the original URLs or new short URLs might be costly.

In a recent post, I made the case for there to be a guarantor of short URLs (see The Downside Of URL Shorteners And One Answer):

The 301works organization is still in the process of being formalized, and its relationship to Microsyntax.org and other organizations is still in the process of definition.

Its goal is to ensure that those using URL shortening services can do so without worrying that these URLs will someday stop working.

However, for 301works to stand as that guarantor, the participating members will have to agree to cede control of their redirection in the case of a shutdown. Otherwise, the organization and the guarantee to the community that 301works represents will be hollow. And if it is only that, just PR, I won’t be a part of it.

Certainly companies can opt not to be a part of 301works, and maybe the community won’t mind. It won’t stop companies from raising money, or selling their service off. But it will mean — once we hammer down the official details — that users of shortening services will know that any company bearing the 301works seal has contractually agreed to hand over control of any shortening domain to the organization in the case of a shutdown.

Obviously, 301works will have to structure the technical side of things so that the redirection for these shortened URLs will work. That is a technical challenge, but one that can be managed. And the organization will have to canoodle bandwidth and servers so that URL redirection on these retired domains will work, or raise money to do so.

And 301works must be structured so that it is not perceived as a publicity stunt of any single participant, or of the participants collectively. We are working to create a governing board where all participating companies have an equal voice and a seat at the table, but where the interests of no one company dominates.

Most importantly, 301works — in whatever form it takes, finally — has to run on our behalf, we, the users. We are the ones potentially harmed if a service shuts down. We are the ones harmed by link rot.
And it is our trust that these companies need. So in the near future, once 301works has a seal that participating companies can display, it will stand as a guarantee that your URLs will work. And we can get back to business.

I will be working with the Internet Archives as the lead on this project. We have a lot to do in the weeks and months ahead, but we are pushing ahead pretty quickly with the foundation. The Internet Archives will be archiving the mappings of long-to-short URLs that participating companies want us to retain, and we will be standing up a proxy redirection service for any company that chooses to close down a URL shortening service.

The technical aspects of the 301Works are still under development, but expect more to follow soon. We will also be publishing the terms of participation that spell out what companies must do if they would like to support the activity.