Does the world really need another URL shortener? Apparently, the U.S. government thinks so. It just launched http://go.usa.gov as a link shortening service for government employees. It shortens links from any .gov, .mil, or .si.edu site.
For instance, http://go.usa.gov/llX takes you to a page on Nasa’s site with some nice satellite imagery showing the Fall colors in Wisconsin. And http://go.usa.gov/liO is a link to www.Recovery.gov (I think you save two characters n that one). The idea is that if you see one of these short links you know it is coming from a government employee, which doesn’t exactly make it official but is supposed to make it more trustworthy.
When you see a go.usa.gov tweet, it will be like getting a messge directly from Uncle Sam, or rather, one of his minions. But I mean, really, can’t they just use bit.ly like everyone else?
With commercial link shorteners such as Cli.gs and Tr.im falling by the wayside, maybe the government will start a short URL bailout next. Go.USA.Gov!
(Hat tip to Anil Dash)
You know, I think you all have a lot more to worry about and write about than the Federal Government’s URL shortening service. The fact is the government spends more money buying crappy American goods and services than anyone else. You did mention that some URL shortening services are dying and you know what? At least this service, from the most technologically advanced administration in US History will be around for years to come.
Yes we need this. Where is the guarantee that any of the other services will be around as long as the us government. Not to mention the benefits of knowing its a trustworthy source before you click on it.
gu.com was/is considering something similar.
Well said. This a worthy investment by the government for both security and longevity.
That’s exactly right. If the government uses another service, then data becomes dependent on links that may cease to exist. Not only that, but do we want federal employees passing around government information via bit.ly? I don’t think so. The real question isn’t why can’t the government find something better to spend money on, it’s why can’t Erick Schonfeld find something better to write about.
“But I mean, really, can’t they just use bit.ly like everyone else?”
So what happens, if say, bit.ly goes out of business? or if the services becomes heavily infected by spammers (it’s already heading that way)
I think it’s a good idea for the government to distinguish itself, my 2 cents!
I think it is an excellent idea and a step in the right direction. Imagine if gov had decided to use tr.im, this post would have been about pointing fingers at them and laughing. No one should be depending on a centralized commercial URL shortening service. It is asking for trouble down the road.
Please tell me you’re just pretending to be an idiot.
I think it’s good. There’s lots of mistrust of what you get with shorteners, lots of people who copy tweets and replace links to other things. As long as only govt agencies can use this, the trust would be nice.
If done well they can avoid phising.
There is a wide scope for improvement in short urls but those people (founders of short url service) are not doing enough to keep up it..
For example..
Shorturls can be meaningful but they are not.. since those shorturl services are only concerned about making money and not improving the service
It’s some Go.USA.Gov has gone – down!
This makes total sense- you miss the point. The Gov will always be in biz and sets up a trust impression re short links .
Yes, I think it’s a good idea.
At first, I thought it was another unnecessary general URL shortener.
However, government runs large numbers of online services, employees millions of personnel, and supports countless organisations.
I think the need for a civic URL service makes sense and I think it does help to promote official and government-approved information.
Private URL shortening services are not reliable and pose many security risks, whereas (theoretically) the government service carries an implicit guarantee that the URL is safe for government employees to visit. More importantly, it also (implicitly or explicitly) guarantees safety and privacy when shortening intra-network URLs, such as
http://private-...re/a/link/to/it
The government has a need to make sure that certain information stays in a closed loop. Or do you suppose that government departments should be using free GMail IMAP services instead of their own Exchange servers too?
Wonder what their revenue model is? :->
Commercial services can’t be relied on for something as permanent as a URL that goes into documentation. Say you’re a low-level government office worker creating training manuals for coworkers. Do you use a commercial service that could expose your organization to all kinds of risk? In addition to reliability concerns, there’s the concern that a commercial entity will share traffic logs, some of which could expose sensitive government IP addresses to hackers. There are also the confidentiality concerns — as a government worker, you’d want to know that URLs you enter are not going to be compiled and shared to some non-national hell-bent on creating trouble for the government.
There are numerous reasons why this makes sense.
It’s the same reason the president’s email isn’t entrusted to run-of-the-mill Hotmail or RIM services.
Bingo. Right on the mark.
I think it’s cool. With bit.ly links I always pause for a second to assess it, even if I trust the poster. I think it’s nice for them to have a service that you KNOW is spam-free for gov links.
I never thought of URL shorteners as serious authentication method, but this makes sense.
Have you guys checked out http://trust.md the official URL shortener for doctors and other healthcare professionals.
official? ha
http://trust.md/bmzpzn
(warning, NSFW)
If blog’s like TC would talk about tr.im service as they do about bit.ly maybe but just maybe they would get sold instead of even more bashing on service. (Nothing against your current blog post)
As far as the gov making shortner I think it’s cool because as you say it’s more trustworthy.
And why don’t they use bit.ly?
Well for security reasons for sure, imagine bit.ly founder has my IP and all kind of crap like Twitter ID and Password (Before they had OAuth) etc…
Ever tried typing “Erick Schonfeld” in MIT Personas? Now you know why gov is more secured and not using bit.ly and tr.im services
http://personas...ersonasWeb.html
As someone who has been a beta tester, I can attest that the URL shortener both works better and is more reliable than bit.ly.
Also, it does give our audience additional confidence that they will end up at a .gov website when items are retweeted.
This is a good move for the Gov 2.0 services.
You missed one major thing in this posting, it was developed using Drupal. Yep, that’s right, the US government developed a Government-wide URL shortener using open source contributed modules and worked with the Drupal community (including a Gov’t drupal geek and other community members) to pull this together.
I know we all know what that means, but let me point out, that means, the code will be available, and soon.
Now, how cool is that?
It makes sense to me , let say govt has a confidential page like “http://*.gov/confidential_pres_meet_xjon_some_date.html and it has link to some url shortened site , if there is no stop over in the middle[url shortner] , some body can see the url from HTTP_REFERE
i thought we were in october. (ie not april, specifically not the first)
wouldnt it be easier to just negotiate some sort of corporate account with bit.ly or someone rather than this?
whats next, a government employees social network? its not a big step to go from here to “national champions” like britain did in the 60 and 70ss. i really dont want to see america cock up like that.
Next: twitSIR! and facelessbook
Actually, Erick, I think it’s a moral imperative that the government have its own methods of sharing information with the public, and not be dependent on for-profit private entities to do so. Just in *this thread* we have multiple examples of private companies that have failed to preserve theoretically-permanent URLs for even a few years, let alone for centuries.
Take parts of our culture like 401Ks or 501C3s or the like — you know what those numbers represent? Permanent links. They’re references to particular parts of specific documents, each of which has an extraordinarily big impact on business, individuals, and everyday life. What would happen if the piece of legislation that the term “401K” referred to suddenly pointed somewhere else? Or pointed nowhere at all? That’s why references matter — they’re the bedrock not just of a good web, but of good law.
Let’s put it another way: It’s just an accident of the tech industry’s history that almost all of our elected officials carry Blackberry devices and not Sidekicks. Fortunately, most of their messages are also stored on redundant servers, but your argument is tantamount to saying they should just trust the private sector to take care of their data and not have the government run its own redundant mail servers.
Let’s get outside of the tech bubble and startup triumphalism and think about what kind of culture and country we’re actually trying to make.
Moral imperative?
What a frickin moron you are.
I’m sorry, TigerT – the combination of your eloquence, persuasiveness, and extraordinarily articulate phrasing has convinced me of the error of my ways. Thanks for adding value to the conversation.
Anil – You win the prize. Your reply to Tiger’s crud was fantastic. Like mom used to say, “if you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything at all”. Now days you can add “worthwhile, or useful”.
Cheers
This is a good idea. If you’ve ever clicked on a shortened link and went somewhere you did not expect to go, go.USA.gov can provide some sense of trust, especially since the service should only be available to governments.
Federal, state and local governments are using social media and URL-shorteners now. Since most of them don’t seem to have a revenue stream, you really don’t want your government relying on them.
And Govloop.com is a social network for government employees, contractors and others.
Interestingly, nobody so far mentioned the key problem with bit.ly — its hosted in Libyan DNS space (the .ly country code is Libya).
This would mean Gaddafi would have ultimate control over all US government links posted on twitter via bit.ly.
Go.Usa!
uhm, they have control over the whole .gov and the shortest name they picked was “go.usa.gov”???
How about: go.gov or any single letter dot gov??
I think a .gov link shortener is an excellent idea. It will especially help with links included in retweets as others have mentioned. The .gov extension does add additional trustworthiness.
This was going to be my comment. I think this is a great idea, but http://go.gov/ would have been farrrrrrrrrrrr better.
Usability studies have shown over and over that people trust .gov websites and the information contained on them more than .com, .org, or private company information.
Using a .gov URL shortener allows the .gov trustworthiness of the information to be retained, along with a shorter, more convenient URL. (I suspect some of those shortened URLs on this just-launched feature are just beta tests!)
Viva .gov URLs!
Oh yea this is SOOOOOO important people – whatever would we do without a Government sanctioned URL shortening service?
Wait – what about 140 character real-time messenging services? They could go out of business too? OMG what would we do then. We better get twitter.gov up and running fast. Wait, what about an auction service for Government employees? After all, is eBay really that reliable and secure?
Most of you commenters are a bunch of idiots – stop thinking the Government needs to provide for every last little thing.
I should have realized before I responded to your trolling higher up in the thread that you were choosing to be anonymous and completely unaccountable because you have nothing of value to add to the conversation. It’s small wonder that you bristle at efforts to make society better, government more effective, and communications more efficient.
We’re very glad to see that people are understanding the rationale behind the shortener.
On behalf of the Go.USA.gov team, please forgive any downtime on the site. We’re still in beta and working on scaling.
Someone remind me to send a VIP invite for the upcoming O’Reilly Media / TechWeb Gov 2.0 Expo to Erick Schonfeld – for educational purposes.
Oh, cool! So now the government can track clicks on every single link someone within the government has shared.
Brilliant!
Of course the government can track links that are clicked. It’s a basic server log statistic and part of a standard that’s been used for a very long time.
I’m glad to see all the comments. There are plenty of services available to do URL shortening, yes. But as many government, and non govy, people have mentioned already it provides another level of trust and authentication for links being sent out by a government entity. Think about how many times you see a bit.ly or is.gd URL without knowing if you’re clicking into digital minefield? Now, if you see a go.USA.gov URL then there’s absolutely no worrying involved. It’s also helpful for government employees to have a secured and trusted service to use for shortening URLs.
The government also has policies that they’re required to follow in order to preserve everything they do within the transaction of business between them and the public. Although a third party service may be reliable, it’s not guaranteed. A government service allows for all agencies to ensure that they’re meeting records management requirements “out of the box” instead of having to wonder how they’re URLs shortened are being saved for future access when it comes time for submitting those records as part of the requirements.
There are many benefits to this kind of service. The benefits to the public and gov’t—trustworthiness, security, and reliability—are well worth the effort.
No thanks. If you want me to trust your link, use a full URL so I can see where I’m heading.
Let the people determine what URL-shortening services they use. At least then, we’d be able to collect statistics on our own, and not commit them to the government’s “theoretical” responsibility.
More on point though, I really think that if the government wants to increase its presence in social media, it needs to do it through the same medium(s) that everyone else uses. The government shouldn’t be some organization that allows its constituents to pay for its own little private service, especially when there are a great many small businesses attempting to establish their own livelihood using this very same method.
It’d be acceptable if the industry that the government was trying to break into was an already established and otherwise stagnated industry (take, for example, the healthcare insurance industry), but when the government places its own taxpayer-funded enterprise into an emerging market, the line should be drawn.
You think the American government should trust posting links to sensitive data to a domain name that’s controlled by a Libyan registry?
There’s nothing stopping individuals from using whatever service they want to in making their links; This is just a way of indicating that a link is being created for government purposes and is trustworthy. Or do you think government sites shouldn’t be allowed to use .gov domain names at all, and should all be on .com URLs?
What are you talking about? You think the government is breaking into an industry? The shortener was built using Drupal modules. Open Source, you do know what open source is, right? These were community contibuted modules. Anyone can do what the Go.USA.Gov team did, and that’s what’s beautiful about the service. There’s no fee for it. No one pays for it except the space where it is hosted, by the agency hosting it.
And more importantly, the Government can give the code back to the community for future iterations, changes and more importantly, development. Unless of course, you’re also against Drupal and not just Government doing stuff that makes sense.
Well, we can do that now with bit.ly.
They wouldn’t need to start up this “safe” service if they would all just upgrade from IE 6. =p
Or am I barking up the wrong tree?
Actually you’d be surprised how many gov’t employees don’t like IE 6. Many use firefox, IE 7 & 8, Chrome, and safari. We all recognize the problems with IE 6. You don’t have to be a developer or IT specialist to know that.
Nice, but they could have used an even shorter URL like go.gov
FAIL.
retaining the .gov does indeed imply official information. this is a huge point, not to be trivialized.
This article can be summed up as a typical, thoughtless, knee-jerk libertarian sentiment: “Governmet sucks!”
Grow up.
So consensus of these 56 comments is that the author:
1. misinterpreted the importance of this service
2. overlooked the critical reasons why it was done
3. under researched/valued it.
4. took a somewhat amateur approach to criticizing it
At what point is the author going to respond to overwhelming (I would say 95% or greater) negative sentiment to this? Sucks to have a well read blog…
http://go.usa.gov was built using open-source Drupal (http://drupal.org) and open-source module contributed to Drupal (http://drupal.o...roject/shorturl) and put together by government employees with almost no budget. Where’s the rackless spending?
Erick, how much did Techcrunch spend launching your own branding URL shortening: tcrn.ch ? Or US government should not afford what a bunch of bloggers seem fine for themselves?
I don’t see a logic.
If you guys are upset you overpaid for tcrn.ch because you did not know about the Drupal module – well, you can always switch
Good times. And please stop being so ready to criticize without first figuring-out what is what. Finally US government is open to using open-source: a genuinely good thing. Sorry, but your shallow post does not help.