bytex64.net/blog

Way back in the late 80's, Sir Tim Berners Lee had the idea of creating a distributed repository of information that was different from existing services like FTP and USENET. Previously, the Internet was less of a single pool of information and more of a richly connected set of small pools of information. Certainly, there were references to other sites, but it was often more like a set of directions to get to a friend's house. Sir Tim's World Wide Web changed that by making hyperlinks part of the design. This allowed resources from all over the Web (and the greater Internet) to be referred to and navigated to with ease. The World Wide Web solidified the Internet as the vast interconnected repository of information we know today.

It's important, then, that these links remain valid. It's a tough job, to be sure — information on the Internet isn't static, and that thing you linked to yesterday could be gone today. You can search the archives of this blog and find lots of links that no longer work. A lot of the stuff that really matters, though, sticks around. Bytex64.net, for example, has been around for six and a half years! Woo!

Twitter, with its absurdly short message sizes, has necessitated a new kind of link mediator. Since Twitter doesn't support traditional hyperlinking, its users have come up with a workaround solution: URL shortening services. The idea is that you turn a long, cumbersome URL like http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/15/technology/personaltech/15basics.html?8dpc into a short, tweetable URL like http://nyti.ms/9JNdVY. (As an aside, I would like to point out that hyperlinks neatly hide long URLs behind a user-defined label, so having to paste raw URLs into a message is something of a step backwards.)

And in these URL shorteners, we have the rub. The link only works as long as the service stays online. Tr.im, for example, is barely hanging on with plans to shut down in the next year or so. To help protect these volatile links, organizations such as 301Works have sprung up to help preserve these services' links after they fail. The problem has been further compounded by the US Library of Congress's unfathomable decision to archive all tweets. Ostensibly they're saving some sort of valuable information in those tweets (though I'd argue to the contrary), which means those links may point to important information you'd like to find later, leading to even more pressure to keep these URL shortening services afloat.

The breakdown is this: Twitter, due to its arbitrary decision to limit tweets to 140 characters or less without hyperlinks, has necessitated the creation of URL shortening services that make already fragile links even more brittle, undermining the very innovation that created the Internet we know today. Twitter is destroying the Internet.

And this of course only matters when you really care about following those links years down the road. Most people won't even care, but it is an interesting study in how a seemingly innocuous decision can have far-reaching consequences.