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Store Twitter URLs in earth's oceans?

Saturday, December 19, 2009 by Dave Winer.

Mike Wheeler: "how about embedding links etc in geodata? Each service gets a 1deg X 1deg area of ocean and uses the decimals for numeric metadata" 

Brilliant. Wish I had thought of it. A great idea that illustrates how silly this situation is -- where links are treated as an afterthought. Links, which form the foundation of the web, are shortened, made more fragile, meaning removed, the web made slower. If Tim Berners-Lee weren't alive he'd be rolling over in his grave.  

But what Mike says is actually slightly practical. Come up with a way to map domains to tiny plots of ocean space (presumably people can't occupy space in the ocean and 2/3 of the planet is covered with water). How many domains would that be? A lot. Can you estimate the actual number? Any help would be appreciated. 

Then the numbers to the right of the decimal points would map to URLs on the site, the same way short URLs map to them. Each site would manage its own space. Voila! No need to include URLs in the 140 characters. Goodbye shorteners. Now all you have to do is get the client companies (and that includes twitter.com, the largest client) to go along. 

If it weren't so sad it would be funny. Maybe that's why it's so funny. 

Come on Twitter -- Make room for the URL as metadata. It's way past too late.