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Shortened URLs are great for character-conscious Tweeters, marketers who want to track Web site visitors, and even perhaps an opportunity for venture capitalists who are investing in companies such as Bit.ly.

But they are also providing a boon to spammers.

MessageLabs, a division of Symantec, said today the presence of shortened URLs in spam has skyrocketed over the past few days and now appears in more than two percent of all spam.

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Twitter's dramatic rise has helped ignite an industry to shorten Web addresses to fit within 140-character messages. With the technology, though, comes a new handful of challenges.

Among the challenges are reliably connecting people to the Web sites they want to reach, keeping spam and phishing attacks at bay, and maintaining the service into the future.

Joshua Schacter, founder of Yahoo's Delicious site for storing and sharing Web bookmarks and now a Google programmer, summarized the issues in an April rant about short-URL problems. "I feel that shorteners are bad for the ecosystem as a whole," he concluded.
Until a remote future arrives when Twitter and the telecommunications industry decide 140-character messages are too short, though, URL-shortening services aren't going to go away. Fortunately, their potential problems can mitigated through careful use, and newer services such as Bit.ly are being designed expressly to avoid the pitfalls.

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http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10277724-2.html

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History so far.. 10 years surfing & 29 Years Computing (First ZX81 1k)

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