TinyURL is a handy service that converts long url’s into short url’s. Sounds simple and harmless, but there has been quite an on and off discussion about TinyURL over the past year in the marketing and tech space, ranging from TinyURL becoming the “next YouTube” (which I argued against) to whether or not services that use TinyURL, such as Twitter, should dump the service.

Allen Stern of CenterNetworks takes another stance and writes that Twitter should buy or build their own TinyURL service in order to preserve links in case the TinyURL service goes down (ironic since Twitter is down every other day at this point):

Sites such as Twitter use TinyURL to replace the links within tweets. I believe this is a mistake as many writers are moving to Twitter instead of blogging but the ability to view history is important. If TinyURL is down or out of service, not one Twitter URL will work. If Twitter was smart, they would take some of their VC money and buy the technology from TinyURL (or another short URL service) and make sure all URLs are using the twitter.com domain.

Twitter has also received heat in the past for using TinyURL based on SEO arguments. I disagree with Andy and others who make this point because Twitter is not intended to be a link sharing service and the idea of seeing the gaming that would take place if Twitter opened the nofollow doors is downright scary.

However, Twitter does need to consider the long term… what if TinyURL is bought by someone else in the near future who competes with Twitter or changes the link formula? Would all of those millions of links in Twitter’s archives suddenly become dead links? I’m starting to agree with Allen on this one, though I’m not sure his buy strategy will happen anytime soon.

Interesting debate to follow if you’re into thinking about the efficacy of links long term…