What is the Depth of Deep Linking?
April 21, 2015
One the Back Channel blog of Medium.com, an article called “Will Deep Links Ever Truly Be Deep?” discusses the hot topic of how apps are trying to forge “deep” connections with each other, by directing linking to each other rather than the fragmented jumping between apps users have to suffer through. The article points out that this is not a current trend, in fact it has been going on since the 1990s (did they even know what an app was back then?). In the 1990s, deep links dealt with hopping from one Web site to another. It makes the astute observation that, as users, we leave behind data mined by service providers for a profit and our digital floundering could be improved.
“ Chris Maddern is cofounder of Button, one of several companies that have set out to make deep links work in the land of apps, and he talks with rapid precision about the sorry state of mobile interoperability today.”
‘Right now it’s no secret that the Internet’s paid for basically by big companies buying tiny time-slices of your eyeballs against your will,’ Maddern says. Button wants to change that by “capturing users’ intent.” For instance, you’re reading a New York Times travel story about Barcelona. You want to book an Airbnb there pronto. On your phone, you’d have to exit your New York Times app, then start up your Airbnb app and search for Barcelona in it. In a Web browser, you could have clicked straight through from one site to the other?—?and landed directly on a page of Barcelona listings.”
It goes on to discuss the history of deep links, the value of our information, and how mobile apps are trying to create the seamless experience we have in a regular browser. The problem, however, appears to be that app developers like major companies do not want to play nicely together, so we have the fragmented the experience. The bigger issue at hands is the competition! Developers claim they are building the deep links described in the article, but they are not. App use is more about profit than improving content value.
Whitney Grace, April 21, 2015
Stephen E Arnold, Publisher of CyberOSINT at www.xenky.com
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