Have you ever posted a link, image, text or video on a website or forum only to receive the discouraging “it is old” reply? Maybe you have sworn to yourself that you will never again post already known contents on that site. And while you could make sure of that manually by running a series of searches on popular search engines, you may be better off using a service such as IsItOld for the same task.
IsItOld takes a link and checks if that link has been posted on Twitter already. It is not a 100% giveaway if you have the intention to post the link on another site, but it could very well be an indicator.
All you need to do is to paste the link into the form on the IsItOld website. You can paste in any link regardless of the web page’s actual contents. This works for YouTube videos, images, plain websites and even applications.
The link scan on Twitter takes a few seconds tops. The service displays information about that link on the result’s page.
Ratings range from OK over Kinda OK to Dead. IsItOld displays the number of shares on Twitter and the time of the first share. In this example, the link was tweeted more than 3000 times in the last two years.
IsItOld cannot make decisions for you. At its core, it is nothing more than a script that checks a link’s popularity on Twitter. Twitter is however often a good indicator if something has already made the round or if it is brand new. This could be interesting for webmasters and writers who are not sure if they should cover a certain topic on their blog or website.
It is probably easier to ignore the “old” sayers on forums and social networking sites than using the IsItOld site regularly. You can run your own Is It Old checks here.
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This has various other uses too. It a good way of quickly seeing the ratings for your own site and other research purposes. Good find.