Every Piece of the Infrastructure Carries Potential to Fail

Though it may end up being a temporary blip, at this moment FriendFeed is down, following a scheduled outage at Twitter this afternoon. And while that's not really news, it comes on the heels of many discussing the potential for failure that third-party URL shorteners bring to the Web. For every fan of TinyURL or bit.ly, there are others who say relying on another service to be a go-between between the user and the intended data is just begging for trouble. But the truth is that in a network, when there are multiple items with potential to fail between the user and the data, any one of those pieces in many cases can bring the entire system down to its knees.

• Storage can fail.
• Servers can fail.
• Networks can fail.
• Routers can fail.
• Lines can be cut.
• Services can close down.
• Users can delete images or pages.

It happens, and until we control all aspects of the system, there will be outages.

On Wednesday, in the middle of testing a third-party Twitter service, I linked to the Guardian using a URL shortener called tr.im, required to get the service to work. Later that night, tr.im failed, and it broke all links that were being used.


The conversation (in Google cache)
In response, Paul Buchheit, co-founder of FriendFeed, with a long history at Google, Microsoft and Intel prior to his latest efforts, referenced the break, calling it "another reason why url shorteners are annoying."

But FriendFeed itself has a URL shortener, called ff.im, which it uses when sending updates to Twitter. Paul added in the thread, "Except ff.im of course :)"

But guess what? Because FriendFeed is down (for now), also down are the ff.im links, making them as likely to fail as any other third party shortener. I could rant up and down saying that FriendFeed and ff.im should be served from different data centers, or offer better redundancy, but I won't. Nobody loves downtime, and FriendFeed by and large has had a fantastic track record of staying up. But as they become a more integrated part of the ecosystem, they too will get more opportunities to fail and need to take the same safeguards to protect the infrastructure as do all the other players.

Things will fail. We will live, but we know that there is no such thing as a fully redundant failsafe machine. Every hop delivers the potential to turn into a skip, and not in a good way.

BurnURL Unveils ShareBar 2 With Moods, E-mail and Social Sharing

The world of URL shorteners is being hotly debated this week, and seeing tremendous change, with bit.ly making news by raising a new round of venture funding, and the release of DiggBar. In this wake, Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land asks openly, "which URL shortening service should you use?". Joshua Schachter says they add a layer of indirection to an "already creaky system", and Jason Kottke adds on, saying they "suck" in general.

But as the use of Twitter explodes, so does the use of shorteners, as many are debating the number of characters they have left for tweets, or what one service gains them over another, as Twitter's built-in limitations make their use a necessity.


The New BurnURL ShareBar 2.0
Amid this backdrop, I have been closely watching the development of a URL shortener which does things differently - not requiring any software download or login, and not being married to any one social service - and working to determine the intent of the sharer, and mood of those who read the destination content. Round 2 of BurnURL, a URL shortener and share bar from the team at ReadBurner, where I am an advisor, is aimed to not only help information distributors pass links to friends on Twitter and other services, but to help information publishers gain feedback on their content.


Burning a link on the BurnURL site


Getting a "Burned" URL to share
The new BurnURL ShareBar, released this morning, is retroactive with the more than 20,000 BurnURLs that have been issued since its initial launch, and adds on some features which I believe will make it extremely competitive with some of the more well-known products out there, including:

Integrated Sharing to Many Social Services

Every BurnURL ShareBar shows a "share" button letting visitors of the page further distribute the content, to social sites including StumbleUpon, Delicious, Reddit, Mixx, FriendFeed, Digg, Facebook and Twitter.


Sharing to Social Services via BurnURL


Sharing by E-mail via BurnURL
E-mail Sharing

From the new ShareBar, you can now e-mail the content of any Web page to any number of friends, just by clicking Share, and selecting the e-mail tab. You can send it to multiple friends, and add a custom message.

A Tweets Button that Shows Mentions of the BurnURL

By clicking Tweets in the ShareBar, you can see all mentions on Twitter of that specific BurnURL. For example, see how widely my highlighting of TechCrunch's post rumoring Google was in late stages to buy Twitter was disseminated by clicking this saved search.


The new ShareBar integrates Twitter search results for the "burned" URL
Mood Mining Ratings

Rather than a simple up or down vote, Digg or bury, like or dislike, BurnURL is looking to get the mood or emotional feedback from readers by using emoticons. Now, instead of voting a story down as "bad" because you disagree with its premise, you can tag the link as funny, interesting, boring, sad, or even exciting.

Statistics

Information distributors and publishers are also likely interested to see how far and wide their shares have gone. For example, my share of that TechCrunch article has already gained more than 400 unique impressions. The new ShareBar now shares both unique views of that link and the total number of views. And as the post on the ReadBurner blog reads, you can expect more statistics to be developed in the future.


BurnURL shows more than 400 visitors from my shared link
A former TinyURL advocate, I have been using BurnURL exclusively since its initial launch - not because of my relationship with ReadBurner, but because I like the product's flexibility and promise. Techies can argue all day about whether URL shorteners are a good idea or if there are some better than others, but I believe BurnURL is taking a different approach that is social and informative, in a world when shortening is still necessary.

You can try out BurnURL yourself by starting out at http://www.burnurl.com. If you have more questions, there is an FAQ available.

Dell's TinyURL Finds a Porn Star Guru: Fun With Redirects

Affiliates are the first beneficiaries of custom TinyURLs. Earlier this month, the link shortening service, TinyURL.com, added the capability to customize a URL, effectively letting you replace the usual nonsensical combination of letters and numbers with real words - a long overdue feature which had already been adopted by other services, including bit.ly. At the time, in my coverage of the news, I said it would help people trust URLs, rather than finding themselves sent to a malware site. But, as he commonly does, Allen Stern of CenterNetworks accurately picked apart my theory, correctly saying that despite the customization options, readers could still point any old URL to any old site. (See: TinyURL Adds Custom URLs; Is This Exciting or What?)

Despite my best intentions, Allen was right and I was wrong. So, eager to lead with my chin again, I thought I'd learn from Allen's guidance and see how well brands did in securing their own names, or if smart squatters grabbed hot brand names to hijack traffic. Here are a few I checked out.

TinyURL	Actual URL
http://www.tinyurl.com/amazon	http://blogs.zdnet.com/Berlind/?p=917
http://www.tinyurl.com/bestbuy	http://www.amazon.com/gp/search?ie=UTF8 &keywords=bestbuy (Custom referral by techlist.com)
http://www.tinyurl.com/centernetworks	http://www.centernetworks.com
http://www.tinyurl.com/dell	http://www.pornstarguru.com/page.php? x=183137&m=1
http://www.tinyurl.com/digg	http://www.digg.com
http://www.tinyurl.com/facebook	http://www.amazon.com/gp/search?ie=UTF8 &keywords=facebook (Custom referral by techlist.com)
http://www.tinyurl.com/friendfeed	http://friendfeed.com/jigarme
http://www.tinyurl.com/fujitsu	http://www.computers.us.fujitsu.com/Consumer.php (Custom referral by Affiliate)
http://www.tinyurl.com/google	http://www.google.com
http://www.tinyurl.com/hitachi	http://www.hitachigst.com/portal/site/en/ menuitem.8027a91c954924ae4bda9f30eac4f0a0/
http://www.tinyurl.com/ibm	http://www.rediff.com/entertai/2002 /jun/28varma.htm
http://www.tinyurl.com/iphone	http://www.tuaw.com/2008/07/03/international-iphone-pricing-guide/
http://www.tinyurl.com/linkedin	http://www.amazon.com/gp/search?ie=UTF8 &keywords=linkedin (Custom referral by techlist.com)
http://www.tinyurl.com/mashable	http://www.sedoparking.com/ wwwtext-link-ads.com
http://www.tinyurl.com/microsoft	http://www.microsoft.com
http://www.tinyurl.com/myspace	http://www.amazon.com/gp/search?ie=UTF8 &keywords=myspace (Custom referral by techlist.com)
http://www.tinyurl.com/orkut	http://www.amazon.com/gp/search?ie=UTF8 &keywords=orkut (Custom referral by techlist.com)
http://www.tinyurl.com/reddit	http://www.reddit.com
http://www.tinyurl.com/rediff	http://www.amazon.com/gp/search?ie=UTF8 &keywords=rediff (Custom referral by techlist.com)
http://www.tinyurl.com/socialthing	http://www.friendfeed.com
http://www.tinyurl.com/stumbleupon	http://www.amazon.com/gp/search?ie=UTF8 &keywords=stumbleupon (Custom referral by techlist.com)
http://www.tinyurl.com/techcrunch	http://www.techmeme.com
http://www.tinyurl.com/techmeme	http://www.bitgain.com/techmeme
http://www.tinyurl.com/valleywag	http://valleywag.com/5024969/viacom-unleashes-pr -thunder-on-san-franciscos-press-corps
http://www.tinyurl.com/yahoo	http://www.creators.com/comics_show.cfm?comicname=oc
http://www.tinyurl.com/youtube	http://www.youtube.com

As you can see, entrepreneurial Amazon.com affiliates grabbed the aliases for a number of tech sites, from Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace to Best Buy. Clicking these undoubtedly gives the squatter a kick-back if you purchase any of the books from Amazon.com, so watch your cookies. Some other folks clearly thought it was funny to point the TechCrunch alias to Techmeme, and another from SocialThing to FriendFeed. Meanwhile, Jigar Mehta is the "lucky" recipient of the FriendFeed TinyURL himself.

Brands that did manage to get their own TinyURLs in time included Digg, Google and Microsoft, while interestingly, TinyURL didn't have any information on Apple, Blackberry or others, neither offering the ability to create a new URL with those aliases, or to preview them, so they appear to have been whacked from the database. I had naively hoped that by opening up custom TinyURLs, people could increase their trust of these Web shortcuts, and I've been using them myself to announce new posts, but for the typical cyber scammers out there, it just opened up a new field of opportunity for redirection and annoyance. It's no wonder that Edelman's Steve Rubel sent an internal note to the company telling the PR agency to warn clients and get them to snap up their own TinyURLs before it was too late.

TinyURL Adds Custom Alias Feature To Shortened URL Service

The URL shortening service TinyURL was first useful for sending longer URLs to friends over e-mail to avoid line breaks that would often disable links in many e-mail programs.

With the advent and massive growth of SMS and microblogging services, like Twitter, TinyURL and other services like it have become omnipresent, an integral part of sharing blog posts, news, and other items.

In fact, Steve Gillmor of TechCrunch recently wrote, "Who controls TinyURL... controls the high ground in the battle for the Internet platform."

But until Friday, the URL was always a string of gibberish, a simple link to tinyurl.com followed by an indecipherable string of letters and numbers. You typically had to trust the person or service sending the TinyURL, or preview it to be sure you weren't being sent to a Rick Astley music video or a malware site.


Now, TinyURL added a new wrinkle, the ability to make a custom alias for any shortened URL you make, making it just as easy for people to read as Web browsers. Now, instead of always showing links to my blog posts that read as http://tinyurl.com/55aml3 or http://tinyurl.com/6px3kc, I could in theory, make them read like: http://tinyurl.com/lg70508 or http://tinyurl.com/tweetdeck.


This might seem like a small update, and it is, but it could make the service more mainstream, especially in the enterprise where slower adopters are more comfortable sharing items that are branded, or in a consistent format. It could also be another step in helping TinyURL compete with smaller URL shortening sites, including Snurl. With the exception of automated TinyURLs generated from TwitterFeed, I'll be trying to make my own custom aliases to links I share via Twitter, E-mail, or FriendFeed.