After threatening as much for many months, Joshua Schachter has published a piece about how URL shorteners (TinyURL, bit.ly, is.gd, etc.) suck for everyone except the companies which build URL shorteners.
There are three other parties in the ecosystem of a link: the publisher (the site the link points to), the transit (places where that shortened link is used, such as Twitter or Typepad), and the clicker (the person who ultimately follows the shortened links). Each is harmed to some extent by URL shortening.
I agree with Schachter all around here. With respect to Twitter, I would like to see two things happen:
1) That they automatically unshorten all URLs except when the 140 character limit is necessary in SMS messages.
2) In cases where shortening is necessary, Twitter should automatically use a shortener of their own.
That way, users know what they're getting and as long as Twitter is around, those links stay alive.
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A couple of days ago, I pointed to a patent filed by the Flickr folks for the concept of interestingness. I should have poked around a bit more because there's a related patent filed by the Flickr and Josh Schachter of del.icio.us concerning "media object metadata association and ranking". I'm not a big fan of software patents, but even so, I can't see the new, useful, nonobvious invention here. I also find it odd that these patents reference exactly zero prior inventions on which they are based...compare with Larry Page's patent for PageRank.
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Notes from a talk that Josh Schachter did about del.icio.us and web apps. "When you track spammers, don't give them any feedback." (via josh)
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Accidental Tech Entrepreneurs Turn Their Hobbies Into Livelihoods, including Dooce, the Trotts, Josh Schachter, and the Digg folks.
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Nice interview with Josh "Shake" Schachter about del.icio.us. "I would not say [that I am an] entrepreneur - the enterprise of the thing was always dragged along by the thing itself."
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