The Internet Archive and founding companies announce today the launch of 301Works.org, a service to archive shortened Universal Resource Locators (URLs).  This will enable redirect services to incorporate these shortened URLs when a member company ceases business activities.

The use of shortened URLs has grown dramatically due to the popularity of Twitter and similar micro-streaming services where posts are limited to a small number of characters.  Millions of shortened URLs are generated for users every day by a wide variety of companies.

But when a URL shortening service shuts down, the shortened URLs people put in their blogs, tweets, emails and web sites break.  Unless users have kept a record of each shortened URL and where it was supposed to redirect to, it’s not possible to fix them.

A group of URL shortening companies and other interested parties realized the potential for harm to the user community and formed the 301Works.org organization to provide more security for the people who use these services every day.   Currently more than 20 URL shortening organizations have participated in an earlier form of this collaboration, and an industry leader, Bit.ly, has already begun donating archives of their URL mappings (pairs of long URLs and the generated shortened URLs).

This is a really worthwhile initiative that should be supported by all URL shortening services. Check whether the service/s you routinely utilise are on the list below (maintained on the 301Works.org blog) or not. If not, perhaps it would be a good idea to log a feedback or support ticket and ask if/whether they intend to support the initiative. If they don't plan to, perhaps it's time to look around for a new service.

* abbrr.com
* Adjix.com
* AppsFire.com
* awe.sm
* bit.ly
* buk.me
* Cli.gs
* Delivr.com
* ham.org
* idek.net
* Jdem.cz
* Lin.cr
* u.mavrev.com
* trcb.us
* Twurl.nl
* ur1.ca
* URLizer
* urlShort.com
* Xrl.us
* youific.com
* Zip.li

Major players such as bit.ly are already way ahead of the game. I'm nervous that I don't see my personal favourites (ow.ly and Digg.com) on the list.