Go.USA.gov the Government URL Shortener using Drupal
"Does the world really need another URL shortener?" Asked TechCrunch in a snarky post by Erick Schonfeld on October 13, 2009 entitled Go.USA.Gov! Our Taxpayer Money Hard At Work Shortening URLs. He was referring to Go.USA.Gov the new URL shortener that lets government employees create short .gov URLs for their links. Go.USA.gov also tracks the number of clicks each shortened URL receives, so you can measure the impact of the spread of those links.
His point was that the government does not need to spend time and money on yet another URL shortener. His assumption was probably drawn from prejudices many people carry about how our government uses the web. Especially here in the tech world inside the beltway, we tend to assume that government IT initiatives on the web are: a) hopelessly expensive or inefficiently executed, b) misguided in their direction, and c) lagging behind in technological relevance.
Well here is some good news. It was none of the above.
While it is true that many URL shortening services exist for this purpose already, none can ensure that the link being served is from an official .gov, .mil, or .si.edu url. Meaning with Go. USA.gov you know that you are getting an official link to a government site and not spam. Also, there is a real risk to the government that a third party service could go out of business or who knows maybe get infiltrated by hackers or spammers. This gives government the same control we would expect them to need to exercise over their email addresses and domain names.
If you are still wondering if it is necessary or misguided, lets look at the comments to this post. 58 comments were posted. The overwhelming majority (maybe 90%) were in support of the effort. It was my review of the comments that inspired me to write this post. It is very rare to see so many comments in agreement with each other and in total disagreement with the author (of course we arent talking about a sensitive political issue like gay marriage, abortion or healthcare reform here).
So was this effort expensive or inefficient? Absolutely not. http://go.usa.gov was built using open-source Drupal specifically using three already created open-source modules contributed to Drupal: Short URL, Shorten and TLD Restrict. The site was put together by government employees with some assistance from the open source community. No expensive IT contracts were issued, no expensive software was purchased and no proprietary - soon to be legacy - IT system was created. Just a simple site with a simple purpose using Drupal.
For full disclosure the Short URL module was actually created by, and is maintained by Irakli who lended some assistance to the project. That is how the matter came to our attention, but not why we support it. We support it because it is a model for government/open source community collaboration.
So let's get real people. Is this a problem that government created something useful and relevant to stake a place in the emerging social media for sites like Twitter or do we just not want them there? Does anyone really believe that our government doesn't already have millions of domain addresses, email accounts, and other web assets it has to maintain? I mean didn't they also invent the Internet (or was that Al Gore)? Its not like this single site running on open source is somehow single handedly draining the American taxpayer.
So let's give credit where credit is due, the government rapidly and inexpensively deployed something innovative that will protect the reputation of government assets on the web. Its not a big thing, its hopefully not what most of the government is working on, but its a nice example.
...and oh yea if you re-tweet me you can use whatever shortener you want - maybe even TechCrunch's own unique shortener: tch.cr?
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