Tag Archive for 'firefox'

Bit.ly, a new URL shortener, launches, but I’m not going to use it. Yet.

Published
by
Josh Bancroft
on July 8, 2008
. 8 Comments

switchAbit, purveyors of wonderful web tools, have launched a new URL shortener called bit.ly. Besides a cute name, bit.ly has some nice developer-centric features that make it stand out among the hordes of these services (TinyURL, is.gd, twurl.nl, etc.). From Dave Winer’s post on the launch:

They asked what it would take for me to use bit.ly, I said: data. I need to know how many clicks each pointer got and where the clicks came from.

They gave me that, and thumbnails, permanent caching of the pages I’m pointing to (goodbye linkrot) and a lot of smart stuff going on behind the scenes that we’re not ready to talk about yet. (Though we told Marshall and he explained.) Here’s the info page for this post.

And, most important, an XML/JSON interface, so I can process all that data with my own programs.

As URL shorteners go, it looks great. I love the caching using Amazon S3/EC2 cloud resources, the stats, the developer features (XML and JSON), and again, the name is cute.

But I won’t be switching my bits (ha!) to use bit.ly. At least, not yet. Why? Because it’s still way too big of a pain in the butt to use these services, without some tools to make it easier.

Even with a bookmarklet (which you can click to shorten the URL of the page you’re on), it costs me way too much to time load the page for the URL I want to shorten, click the bookmarklet, wait for the shortener page to load (and, optionally, tell it “yes, I really want to shorten this”), and then get my shortened URL, which I then have to manually copy for pasting elsewhere.

Right now, I use TinyURL as my URL shortener (mostly for posting links in Twitter, where every character counts). Not because it has better features than any other shortener (in fact, compared to bit.ly, TinyURL comes up lacking in a lot of ways), But I keep using it for one reason: the TinyURL Creator Firefox addon.

TinyURLMenu.jpg

With that addon installed, all I have to do to shorten a URL is right click on any page (OR any URL on the page), choose “Create TinyURL”, wait a second (during which my TinyURL is created and automatically placed on the clipboard for pasting), then click the “Close” button and paste the shortened URL wherever it’s going.

TinyUrl Creator.jpg

Simple and fast, it saves me at least 10 seconds every time I shorten a URL (which I do many times per day, thanks to Twitter).

I WANT to start using bit.ly. But I won’t until there’s a FireFox addon for it. I can’t code worth beans, or I’d do it myself, and I know the developers are busy, having just launched a few hours ago. But having a Firefox extension makes shortening URLs MUCH faster and simpler, and as soon as I can get one for bit.ly, I’ll dump TinyURL like a bad high school romance, and “switch my bits”. (ha! See that? I did it again!) ;-)


BitStories 2008-06-27: Intel and Vista, Firefox 3, Snow Leopard, SSDs, FriendFeed, and More

Published
by
Josh Bancroft
on June 27, 2008
. 3 Comments

Here’s this week’s show! Have a listen, and check out the download/subscribe links and detailed show notes below.

Video thumbnail. Click to play.
Click to play

This week’s show is about 47 minutes long and weighs about 42MB (it’s a 128kbps MP3). You can download the file directly, listen using the streaming player above, or (BEST OPTION!!1!) subscribe to the Bit Stories podcast feed in your favorite podcast aggregator (like iTunes). If you subscribe to the feed, you’ll get each show delivered automatically as it becomes available - probably once a week or so, with the occasional bonus video or audio segment thrown in for fun. Plus, we’ll love you forever if you subscribe! :-)

Here are some free-form notes and links for the stuff we talked about this week:

  • Intel’s JF1 Workplace of the future. It isn’t soundproof.
    Josh is not leaving Yahoo.

  • Intel’s Not Deploying Vista (NYTimes).
  • It’s more complex and subtle than “Vista Sucks”. Really.
  • Vista’s not really that bad - we’ve both used it. Stability, tablet features, etc. are much better than XP.
  • Why is Josh not using Vista today? Because he switched to Mac. It’s not that he doesn’t like Vista, it’s that he doesn’t like Windows. :-)
  • Conspiracy Theory #1: Intel is creating a Linux distro for employees. All the big companies are doing it!
  • Conspiracy Theory #2: Does Intel’s processor technology come from aliens? Did they tell us NOT to use Vista?
  • Firefox 3 was released! It set the Guinness record for software downloads in a day - 8+ million. Their servers were smoking craters for a while. Speed, stability, new UI, and memory footprint are much improved?
  • Is Firefox 3 threaded for multicore processors? We don’t know. Tell us!
  • The use of the term “you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting…” Swinging a dead cat is not endorsed by Bit Stories. Besdies, Josh is allergic to cats, except Serious Cat.
  • Snow Leopard news - GrandCentral, OpenCL, LLVM, and smaller app footprints.
  • Is Snow Leopard still going to have Rosetta emulation for PowerPC binaries?
  • Hard drives are only getting bigger and cheaper (can you even BUY a Mac with a drive smaller than 250GB?). So why reduce footprint? SSD (solid state disks).
  • Pay more for Windows on a netbook, or keep the price the same and make the SSD bigger?
  • SSDs are The Future, but they’re still WAY expensive (it’s a $999 option on the MacBook Air).
  • How few moving parts there really are in a laptop (HD and fan)
  • Where do you draw the line for legacy hardware support? Apple pushes the envelope because they control the whole stack. Microsoft has it a LOT harder, because they have to support such a wide variety of hardware.
  • Are Mac users more forgiving when Apple drops legacy support (smacks us around) than when Microsoft does it?
  • Josh cops to being an Apple fanboy
  • It’s a miracle that Windows even works at all, given how many different hardware drivers (of varying quality) that it needs to support.
  • Intel motherboards have finally dropped support for PS/2 ports. Josh is surprised in two directions - that they finally dropped them, and that they’re still around.
  • Incompatibility doesn’t happen as much on Apple, because they control the whole stack. But control comes at the expense of competition.
  • It’s amazing that Apple has let Psystar live for so long.
  • Twitter and Friendfeed
  • Twitter has problems.
  • The term “Plurk-up” is just GROSS.
  • Josh explains how FriendFeed sucks up and aggregates what your friends share, and let you have conversations around any of those things.
  • Josh had been resisting FriendFeed, but two things pulled him in - the conversations that were happening, that he was missing out on, and social gravity. Josh goes where his friends, his network, are. Enough of them are on FriendFeed now to make it worth it.
  • The joy you feel when you discover a new, efficient way to connect with people and read (RSS, Twitter, now FriendFeed)
  • FFToGo.com - nice mobile version
    FriendFeed is the source of all joy in the universe?

  • The addiction factor - isn’t FriendFeed just one more time sink?
  • It’s a balancing act - you have to be judicious on what you follow - feeds, Twitter, or FriendFeed. But the social aspect (things bubble up) of FriendFeed make it more efficient/potent, so you don’t have to search and dig for the interesting/important stuff.
  • The other obstacle - the “real time factor”. Interruptions - tweets pop up, distract.
  • Josh and Brian both have major FOMO - Fear Of Missing Out.
  • You have to train yourself to ignore, and to be compelled to read every. single. thing.
  • Use tools like Summize to track your name, topics, so you don’t miss the REALLY important stuff, and then be OK with the fact that most of the rest of it is a river. Stand in the middle, let it flow by, grab what’s interesting when you have time/attention.
  • FriendFeed helps with FOMO, because the interesting stuff bubbles up
  • Brian and Josh argue about which of us is more ADD.
  • Unread Item Syndrome - all these made up dysfunctions that we have…
  • Use a client like Twhirl or Twitterrific.
  • Be the boss of the tools, not the other way around
  • Training for “social media tools for software engineers” that Josh is working on, Brian to be a Guinea Pig
  • We can geek out over anything - never had a problem filling time. :-)

Are you thrilled that the show is back? Mad that we changed something? Think we suck for being gone so long? Just want to say hi? Post a comment, and let us know! Seriously. We crave the validation that your feedback brings. You have no idea how fragile our self esteem really is… :-)