You may be seeing a lot of URL Shortening Services, such as bit.ly or Tinyurl.  These are some of the most popular used ones and there are plenty of others out there as well.  Typically these are used a lot on Twitter which is a mirco blogging service that only allows 140 characters and sometimes you want to send a link and they can get pretty long and take up all the space.  To fix that users created URL shortening services that shrink the URL to show something like this: http://bit.ly/bXdt564 instead of something like http://domainname.com/year/2010/month/january/day/12/url-shortening-services – you get the point. 

URL shortening is very useful for sending these long addresses in emails, twitter, Facebook, etc.  The problem is that these going all around the web and getting copied and handed out to this person and then the next and then it’s posted on websites,blogs, etc and if something was to happen, lets say if TinyURL stopped doing URL shortening, then the web will have a ton of dead links, plus all of the other URL shortening services that could stop providing service.  This would be bad because if your doing lets say some research for school or something and you visit a website and you click on one of those short urls and it’s dead, doesn’t go anywhere’s. 

I think the best way to fix this problem is websites having their own URL shortening services, like your web hosting company.  This way your short URL will always be active, the only way for it to be non active link is for the site to be removed.  This would hopefully slow down the dead links floating around the internet if a url shortening service would go down.

I’m sure there could be other ways to fix this problem, so what do you think could fix this problem with URL shortening services?