Dennis Hancock of Wikinomics recently posed the question, “Why are URL shorteners so Important?”

Hancock’s basic argument is that Twitter and similar services could eliminate the need for URL shorteners by simply allowing Hyperlinks within tweets.  This is true, but architecturally it’s an unattractive solution.

Twitter is fast.  Superfast.  And there’s a very good reason for it: Tweets are incredibly easy to organize and search.  That’s because every tweet requires a very exact amount of space.  140 Characters + some metadata like the Time, tweeter, and retweet originator.  All told, maybe 200 characters total.  Imagine every Tweet is an index card, and Twitter is a card catalog.

Now, if Twitter were a hyperlinked service–which is technically possible–suddenly any given Tweet could be a variable length.  Hyperlinks aren’t free.  Ultimately, they’re text, just like any other part of the web.  So you use 100 Characters of text, and add a hyperlink with 30 characters.  You’re still under your 140 characters, right?  Wrong.  In addition to the URL, you need the HTML tags <a href “”></a> to indicate that this text refers to this URL.  Add an extra 15 Characters.  Suddenly you need to add another line to the bottom of  your index card.  Which is fine, but now it doesn’t fit in the card catalog anymore.  So make a card catalog big enough to accomodate, right?

Now, imagine a URL which is 1023 characters long, shoved into a 140 character-long tweet.  Suddenly you aren’t using an index card, you’re using a poster board.  You try to find that in your card catalog, no problem, but it’s much harder to keep organized when all of the cards are different sizes.  Basically, it would require a total re-write of Twitter–A truckload of work I wouldn’t want to get stuck with.

This opens the floor for another good Wikinomics question: “Are URL shorteners wrecking the Web?”

To which I say “meh.”  The web is an evolving entity.  Geocities, for example, was THE web staple of the late 90’s.  And here we are, barely a decade later and no one cried at its demise.  Well, almost no one.  Geocities was the destination of countless millions of links, and despite the fact that none of these links are now functional, the functionality of the web has experienced virtually no change.

Granted there’s a fundamental difference between Geocities and URL shorteners, which is temporal proximity to primary usefulness.  Geocities’ demise was a long time in coming.  URL shorteners are hot stuff right now.  That said, the diffusion of the market from tinyurl to bit.ly to dozens of others to hombrews protects the web from the crash of a hegemon.  If any given service crashes, it will suck for a while.  But it won’t be unfamiliar–who doesn’t know exactly what a 404 message is, or what to do with it?  URL shorteners aren’t particularly dangerous to the web–they’re just another step in its evolution.