Don't you just hate it when your lame friends and/or family members email you links to Hipster Mermaid or Damn You Auto Correct or the Crazy Nastya** Honey Badger or some other ancient meme, website or viral video you saw, like 10 million years ago?
Certainly, the only thing more tedious are those lame friends and/or family members who, upon receiving an email from you featuring Web content with which they're already familiar, feel compelled to respond: "Dude. I saw that, like, 10 million years ago." Jerks.
Finally, here's a solution! Is It Old? is a single-serving website that screens links for novelty. "Before you make a complete fool of yourself when you send a link to your friends, colleagues or Twitter followers, enter it here to make sure it's fresh enough," reads the "Is It Old?" landing page.
Is It Old? is works like the infinitely helpful single-serving site, Down For Everyone Or Just Me? (which saves you from annoying your co-workers with questions such as, "Can anybody else get on Facebook?"). Similarly, Is It Old? is little more than a homepage with a field into which you paste the link in question and hit enter.
Within seconds, the site calculates a link's freshness using the number of times it's made the rounds on Twitter, and provides a descriptive response that may also double as a blow to your ego, including "OLD," and "DEAD," along with the number of times a links been tweeted and when that first tweet occurred. Or, if you're lucky you get: "YOU'RE THE FIRST."
We tested a variety of links fresh, semi-fresh and practically as old as the Internet. While the general descriptions provide good guidance on whether a link is fresh enough to share, the results don't include accurate info on how long a link's been floating on the Web.
For example, a link to Hamster Dance accurately gave us this response:
"Dead" indeed, and "ABORT. I don't know if computers can even run this anymore," provides a vague feel of Hamster Dance's ancient heritage. "It has been tweeted 1267 times, the first time was 947 days ago," is almost nothing to how long this meme has been around. And as we know, the same Internet meme or video can come from many different links. Is It Old? screens links, not content.
We next tried the freshest story posted on Internet aggregator BuzzFeed, and received this response.
This is gratifyingly straight up, so we tried the second freshest story on BuzzFeed, posted mere hours ago, only to receive this confounding result:
If we're to believe, the Is It Old? assessment for this link, only Grandma and Grandpa will find it novel. However, if we tell all the haters at the other end of our emails that this link, though only hours old, was first magically tweeted 31 days prior, perhaps we'll keep our Internet cred.
More on the annoying way we live now:
- Internet talks about 'Occupy Wall Street,' media listen
- Who gets your Internet passwords when you die?
- Soldier comes out on YouTube again, to mom
Helen A.S. Popkin goes blah blah blah about the Internet. Tell her to get a real job on Twitter and/or Facebook. Also, Google+.
