By the time you finish reading this article, the life of the link that led you here may have virtually expired, increasingly inactive in its original state, persisting in the online equivalent of a coma.
A link is no longer “alive” once people stop caring, according to a blog post by Hilary Mason, chief scientist at bitly (formerly bit.ly), the URL-shortening service that competes with TinyURL to make longer URLs more compact pieces of text. Mason and her science team at bitly traced a link’s life trajectory by calculating its “half life”: “the amount of time at which this link will receive half of the clicks it will ever receive after it’s reached its peak.” The approximate lifespan of a link comes from doubling this number.
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