I’ve been watching more and more people use href="http://www.makeashorterlink.com">make a shorter link — a
web-form service that you cut-and-paste a long link into and then
returns a 38 character URL that is easy to e-mail around. On the back
end, the Pants Collective’s service presumably records the URL in a
database and then returns another URL that can be used to key to the
longer one. While this service seems great for e-mailing URLs around
(even then, I’m not sure — most e-mail clients can handle long URLs
these days), I hesistate embedding these shorter URLs into published
web pages.

Think of this like giving your friend somebody to get more directions
to your friend’s house. What happens when your friend arrives at the
first location, and there are no more instructions there? What does
he do? On the web this is of a bigger problem — which link will web
crawlers index? Does this level of indirection break programs (or
more likely, does it exacerbate stupid web programs that don’t handle
meta refresh tags)?

What I would love to see is this service aquired by href="http://www.google.com">Google or the href="http://www.archive.org">Internet Archive. What they could
provide is a system with more value — this key could key into a
cached copy or an updated URL when it changes, or it could key not
only to the page but its entire history. aAkey for the sake of
shortening to the URL (and not even shortening it to something that
people can remember) seems mostly pointless, but a key that provides
more value might be interesting.