Short URLs are great, they make sharing blog posts and YouTube videos easy for things like Twitter and old school email programs that love to break URLs into multiple lines causing frustrated users to cut and paste humpty dumpty URLs.  They do however have a lot of down sides.  They may not point where you think they do, and can be easily spammed around and provide for some pretty effective trojan horses.  These tiny locators usually don’t include your own domain name, so trackbacks for blogs, statistics or Google Page Rank don’t work (Although I’m sure Google has a plan in the works for this.)  Many sites implement their own sharing tools that let you save and share links to their site.  Many of the free externally hosted tools use their own URL shortener or own of the major players like bit.ly (recently acquired by Twitter.)  This still adds just more URLs out there that you don’t control.  You can solve this by having your own inhouse service (homegrown or bought using a whitelabel service) that will use yor own domain which will help with your own stats, trackbacksGoogle Page Rank.  But if the visitor of you your site doesn’t know how to easily get this URL they won’t use it.  The most common place to get the URL is of course from the Address Bar and people will cut and paste it or use a plugin to autosubmit the URL to a shortener or to a Twitter service.

I think a solution can lie within the page and camn be consumed by the browser and other services.  For browsers it could work as either a built in feature like the common favicon.ico or via a plugin for now till things catch. When a browser knows that a page has a short URL it could provide an option to copy that or allow for it to be passed easily to other plugins when requested.  When services such as Twitter post a link and wish to shorten it, they can check the page for the existenence of the shorturl and use that over one they would use by default.  This does however mean that the service has to retrieve the page or it’s headers to get this info and then check that the shorturl does in fact meet their length requirements.  The other issue is if the page lies and links to something false.

In thinking about the use of the <link> tag for an in-page solutiuion I came across someone that had a similar idea: <link rel=”shorturl” href=”http://example.com/12345″ />

I don’t know what would suffice as the perfect solution, but I think it can only be solved via the community at large.