I like seeing URLs, whether in the link text or by hovering over a link. They are often truer to their content than what the person adding the link writes. I always have the status bar turned on in my browsers. It annoys me that there is no status bar on the iPad. It pleases me that Chrome shows URLs without taking up space for a status bar, by fading them in when hovering over a link. But a significant percentage of URLs aren’t worth a whole lot. They are either too long, or contain nothing identifying but numbers.

Some say that URLs will go away. But do they have to? If people still care about them, I don’t think so. That’s why we need URLs worth caring about. Just like we need buildings worth caring about, and neighborhoods worth caring about:

So how ’bout it?

(Yes, I realize that this blog’s urls suck, and don’t have to. I plan to change that soon.)

As stated before on this blog, I’m a heavy twitter user. I tried to quit twitter and found that it was hard to leave. Eventually I just gave in. Now I’m following somewhere between 100 and 200 accounts.

Sometimes I want to say or quote something that’s just below 140 characters, but I feel obligated to provide some context. In those situations, I usually wind up cutting out some punctuation or text in order to fit a shortened URL. Not anymore—if it’s searchable.

I created a new twitter account called @srch. If you click on the twitter ID, it takes you to @srch’s twitter profile. On that page are instructions that will let the savvy user know that if they have decent searching skills, they can probably find where the text came from.

Please let me know what you think of this idea.