The Web is Dead - mobile edition.

The hyperlink (or URL) is one of the greatest inventions of the web era. It is excellent for linking pages, navigating between sites, downloading content, etc. Unfortunately, the URL is largely useless on mobile devices because it doesn't work outside the browser. To solve the problem, mobile technology companies develop alternatives that allow launching one app from another. MIT Tech Review reports that,

Today mobile apps increasingly rule our free time and require us to dive into separate, walled-off digital containers that don’t link up.

The new kind of hyperlink could make apps seem less walled off from one another. Deep linking, as the technology is called, is also seen as a way to open up new forms of advertising that will provide revenue to make mobile advertising more closely match its online counterpart (see “Why No One Likes Mobile Ads”).

Once a suitable replacement for the URL is found, the decline of the web will become inevitable. Here's a cheesy Facebook video that explains the concept:




tags: web, technology, evolution, aboutness, mobile, application