CSSquirrel A look at web development and web design by Kyle Weems

There’s been a lot of discussion (read that: unholy firestorm) lately about URL shorteners, link rot, and solutions to prevent a zombie link apocalypse where a large portion of the Internet’s links suddenly become useless undead anchors within a single fortnight. Today’s comic presents a pair of survivors trying to live in such a world gone wrong, starring Jeremy Keith.

For anyone who’s new to the fray, this is basically what’s going on: As most of you know, popular social services like Twitter exist. Twitter uses TinyURL as a shortener for URLs tweeted to help keep character counts down. Third party shorteners, while convenient, pose the threat of someday going under. This will result in millions of hyperlinks on the Internet that would no longer work, causing link rot. As we all should know, link rot is bad.

Those taking the long picture, such as Jeremy Keith (who’s view of the long picture is much more than most considering his thoughts of concepts such as the Long Now, which is even farther ahead than I can even bother thinking about), are already suggesting solutions today to prevent link rot from killing the Internet’s usefulness in that grim day when these shorteners disappear. One such solution is rev=”canonical”, which Jeremy has discussed at least twice now. It seems like a reasonable option, and far preferable to a rabble of links that rot with no backup plan attached.

Now, by and large the resulting debate hasn’t been whether short url-related link rot is a problem. The real argument is whether the proposed solution’s use of rev is somehow confusing, or whether good alternatives already exist, etc. However, hidden throughout these discussions are little comments like this one from Shelley Powers:

I hate to break it to the folks so worried, but it will probably be a cold day in hell before anyone digs into Twitter archives. Most of us can’t keep up with the stream of tweets we get today, much less worry about yesterday’s or last week’s.

I don’t think that Shelley is actually trying to say “there is no problem,” but I can’t help but feel that the comment is fairly short-sighted, and reflective of a certain prevailing mindset that the issue at hand isn’t largely a serious one because of the medium that’s most exposed: Twitter and other social networks. After all, we each have our own blogs, right? All the smart people on the web are home-brewing their own websites, correct?

I think we sometimes forget how we, as developers, represent a small subset of the Internet’s population. And that in addition to our own blogs and sites we use these services ourselves. The fact is, I like to favorite tweets to follow important links later. If I follow someone interesting, I’m inclined to dig through their past posts to see interesting things they’ve talked about. The first hit on Google for “Kyle Weems” that is me (and not a basketball player or yo-yo champion) is (for better or worse) my Twitter account. Heck, the vast majority of my site’s non-direct traffic comes from links via Twitter, some of which are months old. Regardless of what you think of the quality of these networks, they generate a large amount of content and connect to a lot of content elsewhere. If suddenly all the links went dead, it would kill off a great deal of the web’s existing site-to-site traffic.

So although I’ve yet to build my own URL shortener, I clearly think it’d benefit me to do so because URL shortening is a problem that will affect me (and the rest of us) negatively in the future if we continue to use third party shorteners. Although I don’t know if rev=”canonical” is the proper solution, I think we need to ensure that we focus on a quick implementation of something. Even if the functionality to make use of it isn’t there yet, coding for it now will prevent more headaches later. The pace at which new links are being generated each day is staggering, and the sooner we turn things around, the less tragic the zombie link apocalypse will be for us all.