WP-A: A New URL Shortener

[Chris Angelico]

(Bouncing back to the list)

On Thu, Mar 17, 2016 at 10:32 PM, Vinicius <me at vmesel.com> wrote:
> Sorry for my bad English guys.

Your English is fine. Don't stress about it. :)

>> Em 15 de mar de 2016, às 9:34 PM, Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> escreveu:
>>
>>> On Wed, Mar 16, 2016 at 11:31 AM, Erik <python at lucidity.plus.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> I often like to make a small
>>>> change when I reimplement, though - something that I thought was
>>>> ill-designed in the original,
>>>
>>>
>>> OK, so maybe the idea for Vinicius (if he's still reading) to pursue is that
>>> it should be something that can be used as the basis for a URL shortening
>>> "service" that is distributed and can NOT go away (think DNS). That is what
>>> some people don't like about the URL shorteners, so maybe that's an itch
>>> that he might want to scratch.
>
> So I really don't see what you were trying to say with this paragraph, the part of "that is distributed and can NOT go away". You think that the project could be distributed with a range of people and get them all syncronized?
>

The problems with URL shorteners are:

1) They are centralized, and thus vulnerable to outages

2) They might be taken down completely, particularly if they're losing
money for someone

So you would need to come up with a system that's distributed (such
that one computer's inaccessibility doesn't bring everything down) and
permanent (keep on circulating that information!). It could be a
rather fun problem to tackle.

ChrisA