Aside from the issue of linkrot what seems perverse to me is the use of URL shortening in contexts such as Twitter at all. Textile and Markdown provide elegant ways to encode link text with a full href behind it without the need for the user to write HTML; and the syntax for these is no harder to learn than understanding the world of URL shortening services themselves. Just because Twitter carries so much weight doesn't mean URL shortening (outside of HTML email and referencing in print) is a good idea does it?
I'll grant both sides a go - Paul, you're right to say that Twitter is time-sensitive. But, I'll also grant that for historical research there does need to be a permanence to the short-hand URL's we use in micro-blogs. I for one, would rather it be more universal than just Google's archiving of everything there is. This is the trouble with the speed of the tech-(r)evolution. But, since Robert has posed the problem there will, no doubt, be a good solution in relatively short time - most likely from the Open Source community.
You're completely wrong. You're not taking into account why Twitter is used, and you have to factor in disaster situations like the earthquake in Italy. Even if we forget about the fact that most people who knew the earthquake was occurring through Twitter first, what about from a historical standpoint? What if I want to find out exactly what happened that day by searching tweets? Granted, Twitter is not as powerful as say friendfeed in this instance because it doesn't have a commenting system and thus a relevance organization is not set up in the system, but it doesn't matter what damn service someone used, if the information was published, then it's important for a researcher. So yes, link rot is an important problem right now. Redundancy of the internet is not ubiquitous, and we have to figure out solutions.
Completely agree - the appropriate tools for the job - in my mind twitter is no more an intended record of permance than an idea scribbled on the proverbial fag packet. If your realtime utterances have resonsance and relevance good...they should stimulate debate in more verbose and considered forums (which are likely to be more permanent). Its also worth remembering that the real-time web is a broad category of technology, services, communities and emerging behaviours ITS NOT JUST TWITTER. nite!
Aside from the issue of linkrot what seems perverse to me is the use of URL shortening in contexts such as Twitter at all. Textile and Markdown provide elegant ways to encode link text with a full href behind it without the need for the user to write HTML; and the syntax for these is no harder to learn than understanding the world of URL shortening services themselves. Just because Twitter carries so much weight doesn't mean URL shortening (outside of HTML email and referencing in print) is a good idea does it?