With everyone pointing the finger, like in a Agatha Christie whodunnit, it might be time to ask: “is the inbound link and the benefit from them dead?”

With a lot of tech leaders on Twitter these days, and the rest of the world following, much like we did the college kids to Facebook, a lot of bloggers, writers and large traffic sites are seeing a fall in inbound links from other locations.  This affects them because it reduces the opportunity for them to raise their all important page rank on Google and elsewhere.  Ultimately does this really matter though, isn’t the purpose of the content for it to be read? and if you are getting 100-1000-10000 page views a day on an article, isn’t that the key to success?

I suppose it explains why Google and Twitter have recently signed deals with Twitter to include conversations from the real-time micro-blogging service to their search result pages. There is a lot of activity on Twitter, and hubbub that is simply getting missed, and whereby services likely social bookmarking in the past helps coalesce the benefit of group efforts Twitter seems to pretty much ride rough shod over that.

As I famously recall from Science class in 6th year, the teacher shouting across the classroom: “You, Woodhead, are like electricity!  You take the path of least resistance!”  And so it is that people are generally lazy.  Users love Twitter, even if others don’t ‘get it’, because it provides the ease and simplicity, with apps like Tweetdeck, that having to be arsed to write a blog post, such as this one, doesn’t.  Why bother spending 20 minutes or half an hour writing when you can put your point and link across in 15 seconds and 140 characters!

Twitter, Friend feed an Facebook are where A LOT of people are these days.  The advent of the status update has been a real boon for many for whom the joys of blogging would have simply passed them by.  It’s no wonder that @charlesarthur, technology writer for the Guardian newspaper, was reporting only so long ago that 99% of blogs are dead before they even get out of the blocks.

It’s tough, and even I know that and with the ways of the world changing in bound links will become a rarer thing, especially if your blog is at the cutting edge and dealing with technologists.  That being said, I think there is still plenty of meat in the pipeline for those of us who deal with topics that do get real traction and discussion on more static services, such as forums, either at apple.com, or any phpBB hosted board, and as a result there is still plenty of juice out there to be had.

You have to remember that inbound links rely on static content, not the transient mesh of messages that comes and goes in Twitter, and perhaps with few of them out there it might make it easier to discern the quality and therefore raise, yet further, their importance.