DISQUS

VentureBeat: Bit.ly nabs cash, gives TinyURL a run for its money

  • homepage · 7 months ago
    I don't get it... how do you monetize this kind of service? Try the best home page
  • AJ · 7 months ago
    How do you monetize your homepage site?
  • Jay Cuthrell · 7 months ago
    Let's hope they have an archive.org export or database escrow in their funding plans.

    Here's what I mean:

    I've been using LiveJournal for a long time [1].

    One of the things I loved about LiveJournal was how easily I could post links to my favorite cNet articles from news.com. It was awesome. I could post a link, a comment on it, and it was fun to share with folks/ Of course, this was before this whole share-centric web evolved before our eyes in the past few years.

    One of the areas I've been interested in lately in the wake of our here today and gone tomorrow approach to the web has been link rot [2]. After reviewing some of my entries from years gone by on LiveJournal, my comments and links to news.com just don't make any sense now.

    Why? Well, the URL's I posted don't go anywhere useful, there is no context relevant SEO word loading... etc.. etc... it's just a 404 Not Found redirecting to a page with no help or relevant hint as to what I was referring to or talking about. I also learned that "Hah, this is cool!" does not make for very good metadata. Lesson learned.

    So, I have to wonder how long bit.ly/something will really be available for the long haul... whatever that long haul might be. If a tinyurl.com or the many clones die... what happens to their hash database tables that present the magic 301 redirect to where you would be going? What about that? Does it matter?

    To that end...

    http://tinyurl.com/thiswascool10yearsago
    and
    http://bit.ly/thiswascool10yearsago


    [1] ~10 years *yikes*
    [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_rot