URL Shorteners

The Jakarta Globe ~~today~~ this week introduced its own shortened URL to help identify and track links that goes to its stories from Twitter.

I’m a huge fan of custom URLs because it tells you where your link goes. While shorteners like goo.gl, bit.ly and tinyurl are fine for the general public, these private, branded ones like aol.it, tcrn.ch, engt.co, on.mash.to and jglo.be are much better for content publishers as well as everyone else.

While publishers will be able to track the links, readers will be assured that they won’t be duped into going to another site.

Of course, then we come across Twitter for Mac that automatically shortens any URL that gets manually entered into it to t.co. Whoever thought this would be a great idea needs to be put into a blender. By the way, this URL issue with the app deserves a post on its own.

[update] Turns out the link on each of @thejakartaglobe’s tweet leads not to individual articles but to the category page the article belongs to. This puts a major dampener on the excitement front and pulls out the, “what the fuck were you thinking?” banner.

Misdirected email of the day

Getting a Faculty Workload feedback form from a university I don’t even work for can be quite amusing. Just so happens that I’ve got friends working there as lecturers.

9gag:

What you didn’t know about Nintendo

Tumblr Pet Peeve

It bothers me that Tumblr forces you to go back to page one of your Dashboard to post stuff that’s not a reblog of what’s on that page. Why not have the post options on every page of the Dashboard? It can be on top, on the side, from a drop down menu, or whatever. After posting, it should have an option to send you back to where you were on your Dashboard before posting, to your post, or to the latest entries.

A workaround right now is to open page one on another tab and post from there but this way you’ll end up with two Dashboards, one with new entries already posted by others.

Surely this is something the designers at Tumblr have thought about but decided against. I wonder what their reason is.

When people enjoy their job, they tend to miss out on a lot of things. But they don’t really miss it.

A new friend of a friend

Merlin Mann wins the internet with 23 toots

At the risk of irony and meta, I’m posting @hotdogsladies’ 23 tweets about the serial tweeting of subjects which may have made great blog posts. Since the BlackBird Pie hack doesn’t work on Tumblr (it gets messy), here goes (remember, these were on 23 individual tweets)

Feature request:

Sometimes on Twitter, this thing happens

where somebody has twenty-three toots in a row,

which would constitute an awesome post—

_on An Actual Blog_.

But.

Presented as twenty-three disjointed Twitter posts,

it’s really not as effective.

And, at least for me, it’s usually a little noisy.

So,

I kinda wish I could throttle seeing “≥ x toots over y minutes.”

Because—again, *for me*—

it’s like trying to read _Remembrance of Things Past_ in Morse code.

So. Not a huge issue.

Certainly not an unfollow-level issue.

But, throttling would be a nice feature on Twitter.

Because, even when their content is thoughtful and super-smart,

a diarrhea of 23 toots can be a little noisy.

At least for me.

So, yeah. Feature request. “Twenty-three” is a lot of toots.

[And don’t get me started on the subsequent surfeit of “at” responses]

[[Seriously. Don’t get me started.]]

/Burma shave.

Apple.com has a new menu bar. The product selection carousel on the Mac and iPod pages also saw an update.

Tumblr’s brand new downtime page

oatmeal:

They used my TumblBeasts!

Thanks guys!

–The Oatmeal

Introducing The iCard

parislemon:

Not surprising to hear that NFC is coming to the iPhone given that this is already built into the Nexus S. But good to hear nonetheless.

Interesting that it’s said to be built into the iPad 2 as well…

They key here is it being tied into your iTunes account (or some variation). That would be beyond a massive win for both NFC and Apple.

Imagine if they could get a cut of all those transactions —I mean, just think about that for a second. It’s hard to know what to say about that. Something with a lot of superlatives.

Introducing The iCard