301Works

New project in scramble to save vanishing internet links - Times Online



[reposted from /Message]

Brewster Kahle, John Borthwick, and I were interviewed last week for  WSJ piece that was published this week:

[via Trying to Save the Web’s Shortcuts by Andrew Lavallee]

“If one of these organizations were to go away, then it’s like part of the whole Web going dark,” says Brewster Kahle, co-founder of the Internet Archive, a San Francisco nonprofit that makes backups of Web sites through its Wayback Machine.

The archiving project has implications for the legal profession. The Wayback Machine is used by lawyers to look at sites on a particular date, and shortened links could increasingly be called on as well, making their stability a key issue.

“If you have a shortened URL, and the trail ends there, you may have a dead end,” says Daren Orzechowski, a partner at White & Case LLP.

For example, a defamation suit might hinge on a Web site that a plaintiff links to in an email, said Jonathan Pink, an attorney at Bryan Cave LLP. “You have to go to the link to get the defamation,” he said. “If the link is now broken, then you can’t really prove your case.”

Concerns about the longevity of start-ups that provide shortened Web addresses was sparked in August when one service, Tr.im, said it it would close its doors. It has since changed its plans.

“Many of these companies are likely to go out of business,” says Stowe Boyd, director of the archiving project, dubbed 301Works.

Link-shortening services exist in a crowded, revenue-challenged space. Most are offered free to consumers, though a few are ad-supported or sell premium options such as customized URLs. The market is also dominated by Bit.ly, the default shortener on Twitter, and TinyURL, which started in 2002.

Actually, the legal implications of a short URL had not occurred to me.

The notion that many URL shorteners are likely to set up shop and fail, later, is fairly obvious. For example, if a dozen photo sharing services are created, and each offers URL shortening as an aspect of their service, a natural fallout will lead to more than half going away. Note that this example, where photos are being stored as served as well, offers an additional area where the Internet Archive might get involved, since 301works.org is only focused on the URLs at this time, not storing objects that may be referenced by the URLs.

And to clarify: I am the director of 301works.org, which is an initiative of Internet Archive, as well as being a working group of the companies participating.



The Internet Archive and founding companies announce today the launch of 301Works.org, a service to archive shortened Universal Resource Locators (URLs).  This will enable redirect services to incorporate these shortened URLs when a member company ceases business activities.

The use of shortened URLs has grown dramatically due to the popularity of Twitter and similar micro-streaming services where posts are limited to a small number of characters.  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.  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.

A group of URL shortening companies and other interested parties realized the potential for harm to the user community and formed the 301Works.org organization to provide more security for the people who use these services every day.   Currently more than 20 URL shortening organizations have participated in an earlier form of this collaboration, and an industry leader, Bit.ly, has already begun donating archives of their URL mappings (pairs of long URLs and the generated shortened URLs).

The non-profit Internet Archive, a digital library with extensive text, audio, video and web collections, will administer 301Works.org as a project of the Internet Archive.  “Short URL providers have in the space of eighteen months become a corner stone of the real time web — 301Works.org was conceived to provide redundancy so that users and services could resolve a URL mapping regardless of availability.  The Internet Archive is a perfect host organization to run and manage this for all providers,” says Bit.ly CEO John Borthwick.  “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.

All participating companies are members of the 301Works.org Working Group, a technical and policy discussion group, but 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.

Participating companies will provide regular backups of their URL mappings to the 301Works.org service.  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.

Stowe Boyd, the well-known blogger and web commentator, has agreed to serve as director of 301Works.org. “The community really needs the stability of an organization like the Internet Archive so that we can trust shortened URLs. I’m honored to participate in the project,” says Boyd.

About the Internet Archive

The Internet Archive is a 501(c)(3) non-profit that was founded to build an Internet library, with the purpose of offering permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format. Founded in 1996 and located in the Presidio of San Francisco, the Internet Archive includes texts, audio, moving images, and software as well as 150 billion archived web pages. For more information visit www.archive.org.

About 301Works.org

301Works.org arose as a working group of URL shortening services in response to concerns about the longevity of shortened URLs. As of October 2009, the Internet Archive agreed to manage 301Works.org to archive and redirect shortened URLs. For more information or to participate, contact the project director, Stowe Boyd, stowe.boyd@gmail.com, or visit the website: www.301Works.org.



Someone has created an ad site using the near-miss typo of ‘310works.org’, and offers this up:

The use of shortened URLs has increased rapidly over the last few years, mainly due to the growing popularity of Twitter. However, fierce competition between these URL shortening services has created a situation where some services are no longer commercially viable and have gone out of business. The result of this is that URLs shortened using these services no longer work.

What is needed is a non-commerical working group of companies that are prepared to work together to ensure that shortened links continue to work long term. This would help ensure that shortened links can be relied upon and can justify their position as a major facilitator of the real-time web.

310Works.org is absolutely not this organization. In fact, it is pathetic, confusing and cheap for-profit-please website that aims to take advantage of an honest and simple typo. These guys are douches. If however, you really are interested in the longevity of shortened URLs, we suggest you visit http://301Works.org. 301Works.org was conceived to provide redundancy so that users and services could resolve a URL mapping regardless of availability.

[emphasis mine.]

We are getting support in many quarters.