This is almost a must read about URL-shorteners, or in other words, what we do to the internet right now:

“The humble hyperlink, thanks to pervasive URL shortening, can now be wielded as a weapon. The internet is the house that PageRank built, and it’s all predicated on hyperlinks. Once you start making every link your special flavor of “shortened” link, framing the target content — heck, maybe wrapping it in a few ads for good measure — you’ve completely turned that system on its head.”

The rise of Twitter and URL-shorteners, that are connected to them as a completely new, I want to say “private owned”, layer to the internet, that makes the DNS and php-serverbased URL structure almost obsolete in a special sense.

Just read the whole article on codinghorror. Hot reading of the day:

“What’s aggravating to me is that the current situation is completely accidental. If Twitter had provided a sane way to link a single word, none of these weaselly URL shortening clones would have reared their ugly heads at all. (…) Every tiny URL is another baby step towards destroying the web as we know it. Which is exactly what you’d want to do if you’re attempting to build a business on top of the ruins.”