How 'bout we create our own internet unique 'tinyurl' like is available from TinyUrl.com. Of course ours would be free of ads and would be useable from a simple ns_geturl request. I don't see any other way to crack the bug than to have one single place on the internet to generate unique ids.
Maybe you could install djb's libtai and create an attosecond precision timestamp and convert that into a 16 byte packed representation. Maybe uuencode that. Apparently this would handle up to 1x10^18 objects per second.
Maybe you could request a series of numbers in one request.
Actually I guess a simple udp protocol would work great.
