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.

This is a bookmarklet for restyling the text on the page in a minimal single-column presentation, with superfluous content stripped out. Clever and useful, but has some problems (On Arc90′s own homepage, for example, the first context box is displayed and there’s no apparent way to view any of the other content boxes).

They’ve also released a Readability add-on for Firefox which works similarly.