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Anecdotal observation: Twitter users rely heavily on links. That’s why this Almight Link blog has had so many posts about social media.

Imagine Twitter without hyperlinks.

  • “A plane just landed in the Hudson.” I snapped a shot of passengers on the wing. Unfortunately, I can’t share it with the world. I’m sure newspapers will be happy with the pictures the wires will shoot in a few minutes.
  • “I agree with what Pogue said about Google Voice. What do you think?” I hope it doesn’t take you too long to find that August column. That would really kill this conversation.
  • “I know a good auto shop that can help. No site, but I’ll email a link to the map.” I appreciate one-line emails. Don’t you?
  • “Orange County #followfriday: @jonlan @MelAclaro and @RochelleVeturis” To follow: select one username and hit ctrl-C. Then go to your browser’s address bar, type “http://twitter.com/” and hit ctrl-P. Rinse. Repeat. Remember, this fictional Twitter can’t just add links to @mentions.
  • “You have to check out that one Lego Star Wars video. You can watch it on YouTube.” Okay, now you go to YouTube and search. Wait a minute. That must be a mistake. There can’t really be that many Vader videos starring toy bricks.
  • “@ksablan that is just plain wrong.” I’m confused. My last few tweets were just thank yous. It would be great if there was a link to the tweet to which you are responding.
  • “Does Scoble, Brogan and Vaynerchuk just tweet all day?” No, but how would you know that? Even profiles lack links in this hypothetical Twitter. Don’t get me wrong, those three agent of trust would crush it with their naked conversations, even without Twitter links.
  • “Use TinyURL to shorten that long link.” Sorry, you won’t be able to track it to see if anyone clicked. Gosh, I wish there were other shorteners out there. Oh well.

Update (12/31/09): I’ve created a linked edition of the examples in this post.