Announcing The Launch of 301 Works - A Short URL Archive

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November 11, 2009

Announcing The Launch of 301 Works

Big news for little URLs today, as the Internet Archive announced that they will be taking the lead on 301works.org, an effort designed to add permanence and reliability to the operation of URL shorteners.

From the release:
The Internet Archive and founding companies announce today the launch of 301Works.org, a service to archive shortened Universal Resource Locators (URLs).  This will enable redirect services to incorporate these shortened URLs when a member company ceases business activities. 

The use of shortened URLs has grown dramatically due to the popularity of Twitter and similar micro-streaming services where posts are limited to a small number of characters.  Millions of shortened URLs are generated for users every day by a wide variety of companies.

But when a URL shortening service shuts down, the shortened URLs people put in their blogs, tweets, emails and web sites break.  Unless users have kept a record of each shortened URL and where it was supposed to redirect to, it’s not possible to fix them.
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