The Internet Archive corralled a bunch of URL shortening companies and has begun collecting and logging shortened URLs. Prominent in their absences are one of the most popular of the services, tinyurl.com and one that’s already suffered prominent downtime, tr.im.
Shortened URLs (translating, for example, a Google Maps location into a twelve-character URL) are a necessary evil in the era of message systems with short character limits, but among their many problems are two related to keeping web content usable.
The major problem is that if the URL shortening service fails or goes away (as tr.im temporarily did), every link on the web using that service is now disabled (or possibly maliciously diverted), even when the targeted web pages (for example, a Google Maps location) is still alive and healthy.
The minor problem is that more people are developing the bad habit of shortening all their links, even where it’s not necessary (for example, when the target URL’s already short or readable, or when embedding a link in conventional HTML), masking the identity of the target page and unintentionally destabilizing their own content.
A persistent archive of shortened URLs is a major first step (and a respectably massive effort), but its utility is limited unless there’s a means to recall from that archive as needed from anywhere, and that will be a hard problem to solve.
There are a few other problems with these services: crap programming can mean the URL you thought you were pasting doesn’t actually go where you wanted it to. Systems failures can be worse than downtime if you lose part or all of your database. Funneling traffic through these sites has privacy implications. And so on.
I’m also not convinced that there’s not better things the Internet Archive could be doing with their finite cash, but that’s a handwavy thing.
And so on. Arguably the IA needs the info in order to keep their archive of the Internet intact, to help patch over a problem inherent in their own scraping of millions of web pages containing third-party shortened URLs in links. There is plenty already written elsewhere about the many other problems with URL shorteners.