Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Digg Redirects Shortened Links

Digg has just shown that their may be an even greater concern ('thing to consider') when choosing a URL shortener besides the service going bankrupt and all the links failing. Now you need to consider the likely hood of the service stealing your links and redirecting them to the site of their choosing.

http://mashable.com/2009/07/21/digg-hijack-permanent

"Digg quietly made a small change to its Digg.com URL shortener with big implications. Instead of Digg short URLs directing you to the source of a story, they started directing you to a landing page on Digg.com. This also applied to URLs that were created months ago. In other words, Digg hijacked our Twitter links.

The result was an uproar by content publishers and Digg’s users. Blogs were steamed about the situation and Digg users pushed our story confirming the change past 1300 diggs while dropping over 230 comments, most of them critical of Digg.

Now, Digg is back-peddling on the issue, sort of. Although links created before the change will now direct to the source, going forward, short links will continue to direct to Digg for non-logged in users.
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