Never use a URL shortening service - even if you own it
guardian hyperlinks newspapers url web · 17 comments · 700 words · Viewed ~6,637 times.
The Guardian launched its online adventures back in 1999. At some point, they started using the name "Guardian Unlimited". Hey, the dot com boom made us all do crazy things! As part of that branding, they proudly used the domain GU.com
Over time, the branding faded and GU.com became a URL shortening service. Tiny URls like gu.com/abc could be printed in papers, sent via SMS, or posted on Twitter. They made a huge fanfare about how it would help with analytics.
You can read some of the history of the shortner to understand why it was created.
Niche twitter thread time. I'm raising a glass to the end of the @guardian's URL shortener gu.com, which is now on sale for £2.5 million.
Back when twitter was only 140 chars & didn't shrink url links itself, making short URLs a whole important thing.
1/8 pic.x.com/wu9joo3vkw
And now, for reasons best known to themselves, The Gaurdian have stopped the service and put GU.com up for sale.
The starting price is TWO AND HALF MILLION DOLLARS!
Look, if I had an asset that valuable and was looking at declining revenue, I'd sell it.
But breaking that URl comes with a problem. I've written before about why URl shortening is bad for users and bad for the web. I've even helped publish government guidance about it. But all of those were based on the premise that the shortener was a 3rd party service. I never thought someone would be as daft as to switch off their own service.
Here are some of the problems this sale causes.
Whoever buys the gu.com domain will effectively get to rewrite history.
They can redirect links like these - and change the nature of the content being commented on.
Is there a tweet somewhere of a future politician saying "I support this 100% GU.com/...."? Redirect that to something horrific and you have a potential scandal on your hand.
There are lots of academic papers with gu.com shortened links. Those are all now dead.
Millions of links around the web - including many on the Grauniad itself - are all now broken.
The Guarrdian could fix this by publishing a list of all the shortened URls. That wouldn't stop links breaking, but would make it possible for researchers to reconstruct the original destination.
For decades, we've tried to remind people that "Cool URls Don't Change". We'll just have to hope that the people of the future find a way to decipher all these obsolete links.
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