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Have you ever wondered what would happen to your content on third-party sites if those sites ceased to exist? You may own your content on them as it stands now, but what if they went away? 

Would you be ok if your tweets or your status updates disappeared? Discuss here.

You may recall earlier this year when URL-shortening service Tr.im announced it was going to shut down and sparked a big discussion about what happens to all of these links if such a service just decides it doesn’t want to exist anymore. It is an interesting discussion, and it ultimately led to Tr.im having a change of heart and deciding to remain functional.

Now, the Internet Archive has announced the launch of 301Works.org, a service, which archives shortened URLs. The organization sums up the need for such a service pretty well:

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.

Over 20 URL shortening services have gotten involved with 301Works.org, and Bit.ly (Twitter’s service of choice) has already begun donating archives.

"Short URL providers have in the space of eighteen months become a corner stone of the real time web — 301Works.org was conceived to provide redundancy so that users and services could resolve a URL mapping regardless of availability.  The Internet Archive is a perfect host organization to run and manage this for all providers," said Bit.ly CEO John Borthwick.

"The Internet Archive is honored to play this role to help make the Web more robust," added Brewster Kahle, founder and Digital Librarian of the Internet Archive.

The issue of archiving the web of course touches a much broader spectrum than that of URL-shorteners. 301Works should go a long way for maintaining shortened URLs, but what about Facebook updates? Tweets? What if Facebook or Twitter decided to shut down one day? According to Twitter’s terms of service, you own your content, but Twitter does host it and they have control over it regardless of whether or not you own it. Jesse Stay talked about this with WebProNews in a recent interview:

The concept of Twitter or Facebook shutting down seems far-fetched, but the same thing probably could’ve been said about Geocities 12 years ago. Now Yahoo has shut it down. It’s just something to think about. Given the speed of the real-time web, it seems that archiving could become a concept of growing importance.

Do you agree that archiving is growing in importance? Share your thoughts here.

Related Articles:

>Ushering In a Whole New Era of Linking Questions

>R.I.P. GeoCities: A Community is Killed

>Who Really Owns Your Tweets?

Regardless of what some individuals and marketers seem to think, the point of Twitter is not to amass as many followers as possible.  Experts discussed this and other no-nos – along with what you should do – at BlogWorld during a session titled "The Twitter Game – How To ‘Play’ Social Networking And Why It’s A Bad Idea."

(Coverage of the BlogWorld conference continues at WebProNews Videos.  Keep an eye on WebProNews for more notes and videos from the event this week.)

This was a question and answer session, so apologies go out in advance if the tips seem a little disjointed.  The speakers weren’t changing subjects at random.  Here’s what Jesse Stay, the CEO of SocialToo.com and man behind StayNAlive.com had to say, however.

Stay stressed that Twitter is a broadcasting platform, with the whole idea of it being to initiate conversations.  Use it to build relationships with people, and use other tools as you see fit, too.  (Stay suggested beginning things on Twitter and then taking them to Facebook.)

Micah Baldwin, the CEO of Take Comics and creator of #followfriday, pointed out that Twitter use can put a human face on a large corporation.  He also said it’s the "who" that matters more than sheer numbers – "followers are the megaphone," but who you follow is the voice.  And on that note, he added that the worst thing Twitter’s done is introduce value to followers, and that auto-following is bad.

Reem Abeidoh, Outrider North America’s social media strategist, supported and put a new twist on some of these points, saying that at the end of the day, no one’s addicted to the platform.  It’s the people who matter, instead.

Finally, Lucretia Pruitt, the director of social media at Collective Bias and blogger behind GeekMommy.net, said that following and engagement aren’t tied as directly as people think.  She believes that social media is a tailored industry, as well, rather than one-size-fits-all, and that social media use should be specific to every situation.

WebProNews Video reporter Abby Johnson contributed to this report.

FriendFeed announced today that it has released version 2 of the FriendFeed API for beta testing. The focus, according to the company, is making the API simpler to use.

 "FriendFeed seems to be staying one (or two or three) step(s) ahead of Twitter in everything they do," notes Jesse Stay of the Stay N’ Alive blog. "Today FriendFeed released their real-time stream of data in beta to any and all developers wishing to write applications. Unlike Twitter, there is no application necessary, no NDA to sign, and all is controlled by simple OAuth. This also means users of FriendFeed-based applications will no longer need to get their special key to manually enter as was previously required."

New features include:

- Real-time APIs – utilize long polling to get feeds in real-time, including search!

- Flexible sharing options – Direct message users. Share to multiple feeds.
 
- File attachments – Attach images, pdfs, spreadsheets, etc.

- OAuth support

- Simplified response format

"Your application doesn’t need to know the difference between a users and groups, how ‘friend of friend’ works, or deal with hidden entries until you want to," explains FriendFeed. "We provide the HTML for representing entries so you don’t have to construct it. Authenticated responses include a list of possible commands on every feed, entry, and comment so you don’t have to do the detective work."

The documentation for the API can be viewed here. Other resources include a Python library that implements the new API methods and OAuth Support, and a sample application. Here’s the source code for that.