This morning I’m pondering the place of the permalink in the real-time web ecosystem. Twitter, the poster child of the real-time web, still has them, but I wonder about the utility of that link when we’ve got updates flying off our dashboards as fast as they do.

I suspect that the permalink will actually become more valuable as we attempt to actually find that link we missed or that we know someone mentioned recently. As the search engines start to make use of these real-time streams, the trick will be making that permalink (possibly hidden behind one or more url shorteners) discoverable again, possibly leveraging #hashtags, /tags, and the like.