Slinky

###Limitations of links, inadequacy of bookmarks

Today, for two pieces of content to point to each other on the Internet, the creators or custodians of that content have to update the content itself: add a link to it in another owned or managed piece of content. To mitigate the limitations of this situation, there is a ubiquity of bookmarking solutions. These underline the need for empowering content consumers to interlink content, but hardly satisfy it.

Some limitations of today's bookmarking solutions are:

• Browser bookmarks force you to segregate your content, meaning one item can only be in one category.
• Browser bookmarks provide value to only one user
• Social bookmarks, like del.icio.us, enable you to tag and share content, but then you're limited by the descriptiveness of your tags, which are even more space-constrained than tweets. Similar complaints can be made about Amazon Lists, Goodreads shelves, Pinterest boards.
• Social bookmarks often belong to the bookmarking site, rather than to you, or to the public.
• Bookmarks are often not portable.
• Bookmarks are often completely out of context with one another - such as in a Twitter or Facebook feed.
• Bookmarks often have limited value, e.g. a link from Twitter/Facebook serves to draw attention to content, but is not a piece of content in itself.

As far as I know, there's no solution that allows you to simply link two pieces of content together, so that the next time you're browsing a piece of content on the internet, you can see: 2000 users linked this article A with video B, 400 with book C, and 500 users linked articles D, E and F with this article.

This means that each person looking for something on the Internet needs to invest time and effort into discovery to find high quality and high relevant content. For this they use a search engine. Among search engines, Google, the most advanced, uses content interlinking to assess quality and relevance (PageRank). Today, it is only able to use the information given it by content creators. It would be much more powerful if it could also leverage the interlinking content consumers could provide.

We've seen the benefits of interlinking to a small degree on shopping and content aggregation sites: people who X'd this item also X'd this item, where X stands for bought, watched, liked, zoognarfled, etc. This can be mildly helpful, but is still very limited as it typically forces recommendations from the same niche (books, movies, etc.).

What might work better is if people could publish to a global shared space not owned by any one party (Blockchain anyone?). While Google caught up, everyone could have a simple extension in their browser that would augment any given page with the crowdsourced links to and from it. Some solutions attempt to do something like this by inserting such links into the comments section. It sort of works.

###Links as first class netizens

A two-way link between two items on the Web, which we call a slinky for fun, could be something simple like [A, B, metadata], where A and B are content urls and metadata is optional additional information about the relationship between A and B. Here's what might happen if slinkies were to start getting published on the Blockchain, and sucked in by extensions in users' browsers:

Next time you're looking at a piece of furniture on Ikea.com, you might be able to see:

• Other furniture people slinkied to it, or from it
• Apartments that have that furniture, photos in context
• Products that go well with that furniture, photos in context
• Other products by the designer of that furniture
• Other places to buy that piece of furniture
• Environmental groups that protest the use of the material the furniture is made of
• Books that teach this kind of architectural design

Next time you're looking at a person's profile on site XYZ, you might see:

• A slinky to their "primary" profile on site ABC
• All the other profiles they slinkied (doesn't require XYZ to support connecting with other platforms)
• All the stuff they slinkied to themselves (doesn't require XYZ to support importing from other platforms).
• All the stuff other people slinkied to them or to ABC (doesn't require them to rebuild their entire network and portfolio on XYZ)

###Misc

Perhaps by traveling a link, you strengthen it. Blockchain could prevent spam by charging micro-fees for creating/updating links.