So you’re saying their claim of ‘never expires’ is probably false then? I suppose ‘will expire sometime in the dark and distant future or when we get bored’ isn’t so catchy.

I expect the fact is that most URLs are only really relevant, particularly those with very long paths, for a year or two. Past that, everything moves on.

TinyURL will run out of URLs eventually, but not any time soon. I guess they will just add another character on the end, which will increase the possible codes by a factor of however many characters they use each time.

My real problem with services such as TinyURL is that they become a “single point of failure”, which kind of goes against the ethic of the internet having distributed name servers… think about it – if their website goes down, nobody’s URLs work…