Aren't tiny url's an odd evolutionary adaptation in the Internet? Intricate structures that solve an immediate problem caused by technological choices (web developers who use very long URLs and query-strings, application developers who impose limitations on message lengths, email implementations that cause links to get split over long lines).

The result is a surprisingly brittle solution, where millions of URLs per day are run through redirection services. The growth of affiliate and marketing campaign tracking has spurred a small industry around shortened URLs. But what happens when one of these businesses goes under? The meaning behind millions of tweets gets lost (the horror!)?

An Internet Archive-sponsored consortium called 301works.org (301 is the HTTP code for a redirect) has formed to ensure that the links of its members can be preserved for all eternity.

To try it out, lets' see if this carefully crafted tinyurl can resolve: http://tinyurl.com/yd87aoj.

The url is the result of 10 redirections:

            http://tinyurl.com/yd87aoj =>
            http://to.ly/H33 => 
            http://tiny.cc/FSlc4 => 
            http://kl.am/5D53 =>
            http://snipr.com/tpb27 => 
            http://is.gd/5oJbd => 
            http://short.to/10qyt => 
            http://u.nu/3tw84 => 
            http://ur1.ca/hwxf => 
            http://bit.ly/190EZI => 
            http://301works.org
        

Constructing it turned out to be difficult, since several of the major shorteners (bit.ly, tinyurl.com, is.gd, tr.im) blacklist major known url shorteners to prevent spammers from using redirect chains to obfuscate URLs. Fortunately, there are abundant URL shorteners to choose from, many of which are not so scrupulous, and many of which are not yet known to the major shorteners. I also avoided shorteners such as ow.ly and su.pr which add annoying frames (which are preserved through redirect chains, but which crush each other).