The exciting announcements from my American colleagues earlier this week (see http://www.surface.com/) illustrated one mighty strange thing about how social networks in general, and Twitter and link shortening services in particular have changed quite fundamentally the way in which hyperlinking works, and how we are dangerously reliant on these closed services.
On Tuesday morning, I posted a link to the Surface website using the Seesmic Web client. This bit now gets a little bit technical: Seesmic uses bit.ly for link shortening; it had apparently previously made a shorter link for the Surface address, which previously had been itself redirecting to product pages on Microsoft’s main domain referring to the Samsung touchscreen product that used to be called Microsoft Surface (now, I believe, “Samsung SUR40 with Microsoft PixelSense technology ™”); those old product pages no longer existed.
The net result of all of this was that the link I sent out didn’t work because the link shortening services, to be efficient, had recycled old indexed links.
Social networks rely really heavily on these short links, and it’s not entirely clear to me who they are or how reliable their businesses are. But if they stopped working tomorrow, for whatever reason, then a whole load of Web links would suddenly stop with them.
mmitII 