We're about to enter the Digital Dark Ages

Lorenzo Matteucci for BI

The long-promised digital apocalypse has finally arrived, and it was heralded by a blog post.

Published on July 18, the post's headline sounded pretty arcane. "Google URL Shortener links will no longer be available," it declared. I know, I know — not exactly an attack of alien zombies from the death dimension. But the news nevertheless freaked me out. It means another swath of the web is about to disappear.

Here's the gist: Google used to have an online service that generated pithy...