A couple of seemingly unrelated developments signal a certain instability in the computing and communications fabric that supports innovative, distributed customer care and communications initiatives. The first is a decision by retail giant Target to begin to decouple its e-commerce operations from Amazon.com’s Web Services subsidiary. It’s a relationship that traces back to 2001 when Target.com relaunched with a robust online catalog and check-out system running in Amazon.com’s cloud. It is now scheduled to terminate in 2011, when the existing contract ends and Target.com says it will take its e-commerce activities in house (though there are many who think it will end up migrating over to alternative e-commerce outsourcer GSI commerce, which provides “back-end” services to the likes of Toys R Us, Dick’s Sporting Goods, Nautica, Zales and others.

The other development is the exit of the url-shortener tr.im from a crowded niche that already includes tinyurl, snurl and a few others. Tr.im’s owners made no secret about the reason for its precipitous departure, explaining that “there is no way for us to monetize URL shortening — users won’t pay for it — and we just can’t justify further development since Twitter has all but annointed bit.ly the market winner. There is simply no point for us to continue operating tr.im, and pay for its upkeep.”

URL shortening services have occupied an interesting, but not vital, backwater of the Web navigation world. They emerged when e-mail clients – the first and foremost means of engaging in social media – had a bad habit of inserting line breaks when lengthy, embedded Web addresses “wrapped” across lines of text. They became much more important as SMS and then microblogs, like Twitter, constrained posts to 140 characters (including embedded links). That transformed the millions of microbloggers into link-shortening addicts as they embedded pointers to longer posts or articles of interest.

The addition of this type of meta-directory “on top of” or “in front of” the Web’s DNS (Domain Name System) has long had the seeds of disaster. As Bob Frankston pointed out in a recent e-mail “tiny URLs just compound the failure of the DNS – they should be used as a last resort and not a normal way to make the Internet unravel even faster.” Well the flurry of microblogging has had just the opposite effect and there will be more serious repercussions down the road as IP v6 brings the promise of an address on the Internet for just about everything that moves.

The Amazon.com/Target rift was inevitable, as the two firms discovered that they compete on several levels of their core retailing business. It is within Target’s right to shop around for other providers of pieces in the recombinant telephony and e-commerce puzzle. The shrunken URL issue is just beginning to surface and we look forward to our readers helping to figure out how to solve both the technological and business challenges posed by the need to provide abbreviated ways to provide pointers from short posts (including instant messages, SMS-text and microblog posts) to Web resources who’s addresses are bound to get longer, not shorter.

Categories: Articles

Tags: Recombinant Telephony, Amazon Web Services, ecommerce