Dave Winer has been talking about TinyUrl and some thoughts/issues he has regarding their service. Basically he says that we are subject to them going down, having troubles or even ceasing to exist. While all good points, he suggests that publishers should run their own url shortening service.

I have some simple thoughts on that too... Your service might break as well or be subject to similar shortcomings. There is the ability to do this in Apache with redirects, etc. and it's a common thing that is used in a lot of software to make url's pretty. I know that CMS's do this such as Drupal and Joomla, etc., so....

But what if you did something a bit different Dave...? What if there was a standard way to create a shortened url as your own service? Why would this be good...? Well, if anything ever broke, it could be re-created with ease. It would also be a standard that developers could implement and grow on top of. For example, I might run a url shortener, but get tired of it and want to hand it off... with that, I could hand it to Dave if need be. It could be on my end, or it could be a service.

So what I am thinking, and this is just off the top of my head, thinking out loud so don't flame me about it and tell me I'm an idiot, is this.... What if this was something like passing the filename (file_name.php or .html, etc.) through a hash (MD5, etc.) and using a phrase, maybe the website domain, to hash it? Then maybe it's added to an Apache redirect or a .htaccess file doing the redirect... That way all shortened url's would be unique, you could change servers and re-generate the redirects consistently, etc. or another machine could do this all for you if you wanted it as a service. Just some thoughts to chew on.... :-)