Update 8/20: tr.im has since threatened to shut down (then not), and bit.ly has proposed the FDIC of shortners. I look back on my post below and concede that the hashing thing will never happen, but the central backup surely should occur, and 301works.org is the best chance it will come about. Any service that claims protecting your “privacy” prevents them from backing up their link archive with a 3rd party is lying or misunderstands the purpose of a central repository and shouldn’t be trusted with your links anyway.

The latest brouhaha over URL shorteners is overblown. Are they evil or unnecessary? Who cares? They’re not going away. Proclaiming the death of “unnecessary” institutions is a tired cliché. I’m all for self-documenting pretty URLs like the next guy, but come on.

I feel that the core argument boils down to discomfort with the opaqueness of the the whole thing. Where does a shortened link go? You don’t know until you’re there. What kind of permanence does the shortening service itself have? This kind of worry is an echo of the greater distrustful zeitgeist though – if AIG and GM can teeter on the edge, what hope can we have for TinyURL? That’s probably how Philistine foot soldiers felt when Goliath fell.

It appears that many shorteners use an auto-incrementing database key to store link references. Thus the first link is http://example.com/1, and the second is http://example.com/2, and by using all letters of the alphabet (using base 36) then link number 999,999,999 will only be http://example.com/GJDGXR, six extra characters. Since they’re not all using the same database, then the true link for http://shortenerA.com/GJDGXR does not relate to http://shortenerB.com/GJDGXR. If Shortner A looses their database (it happens) then goodbye all links. Thus, shortening services are opaque and creaky by design, namely big-honkin’ private central database.

If the digerati can’t abide secrets, then they should gather up their pitchforks and demand that their favorite shortening and bookmarking services transition away from private, proprietary incrementing keys to an open URL shortening hashing scheme and distributed URL repository for backup. How would this work? Well, Netcraft reported that there were 224,749,695 servers on the Internet in March 2009. Let’s just round that up to 250 million and say that each site has an average of 200 URLs, which is 50 billion, or MYWPIWW — just seven characters — in base-36. You could normalize and hash any URL through a 40-bit hashing function and format that number to a base-36 string. All participating open shortening services would have to use the same hashing method and synchronize their URLs with a central repository. By using a hash function, each service could defer repository synchronization and use it as an insurance policy. The central repository would be queried only when a hash doesn’t exist locally such as when a competing service goes dark or offline. Storage of 5 billion URL records in the repository (assuming each record is 1kb) would require 4.65 TB of storage, not quite doable with Amazon SimpleDB just yet. Nevertheless, I can easily imagine two guys hacking up a robust shortened URL repository at this scale over a weekend using tools like Amazon’s EC2, SDB, and SQS and charging per-use fees to the services for a syncing API. The repository has the added benefit of being a neutral third party that can validate and lengthen links for security.

I have no illusions that this system will ever actually be built, or if it is, that it will be used widely. You’re welcome anyway.

As soon as I read about LinkedIn Mobile today, I had to try it out. Forget everything you hear about Facebook (and its “mobile” application), LinkedIn is the most useful business networking tool out there, and now that it’s mobile optimized, it’s bound to be even more entrenched in my professional life.Here are some quick screenshots of the beta service on my Samsung Blackjack:

…and now I don’t feel so bad (via TechCrunch):

Facebook was down for a few hours last night, but they seem to be all right now.  I can’t find any signs of “outrage”, just a jaded Internet shrugging its shoulders at Yet Another Outage. This isn’t to say that I don’t take downtime seriously (of course I do) but my growing gallery of outage screenshots is some small comfort.

I joined Facebook mainly so I could test how it works over Skweezer, even though they already have a mobile interface and no offsite links. To complete the circle, today I created a Skweezer group in Facebook to see if it could be useful, although it’s by no means an official forum. I figure that at some point someone’s going to create a Facebook group about Skweezer, it might as well be one of us.

Do you use Facebook and Skweezer? Join our group and post a note on our wall, or better yet a picture of Skweezer in action. It is extremely gratifying to all of us when we read about how people enjoy using Skweezer, and we’re constantly looking for ways to connect with our users people.

The other day when I posted about Zonbu, I added a few sentences expressing that I’d rather call people who own and use a device as “owners” instead of “users”, if appropriate:

…ownership implies that the possession serves its owner’s needs, whereas the word “user” suggests one who has adapted their own habits to suit their possessions. May we all be owners of our possessions and not merely users.

It seems I’m in good company of others tiring of the word “user”, first of all Josh Bernoff who suggested the pledge: “I promise to avoid the word user whenever possible. I will think of people who use technology as people, customers, and friends. I won’t use them, and they won’t use me.” I agree with this wholeheartedly, and the ensuing discussion in the comments of alternate terms to use besides “people” is interesting. He linked to this well thought out article by Thomas Van Der Wal, who has been thinking about this problem for some time, and also Robert Scoble who thought fixation on “users” was “screwing the long tail” way back in June of 2006. I wonder if he has updated his thoughts on that since then.

I’m left with a conundrum, however: if I can’t call people who use Skweezer (which is our public mobile web browsing service that’s meant to be, well, used) “users”, what do we call them? Jimmy Guterman has the same problem and so do his commenters, it appears.

• “People” – not descriptive. I’m afraid we’ll just revert to “people who use Skweezer” and then shorten it to “users”
• “Customers” – Skweezer is free, so our “customers” are Advertisers, and we already call them that
• “Owners” – same sort of problem as above, but it makes up in positive connotations what it lacks in accuracy
• “Members” – works for people who have accounts, but is not all-inclusive
• “Browsers” – better for Skweezer, but we already use this to talk about the web browsing software on phones
• “Community” – no singular term that I know of except “member”
• “Client” – maybe…
• “User” – maybe it’s best after all?

Update: This topic is officially crunched and meme’d now. Hooray.

Many of our users are also MSN TV (a.k.a. WebTV) customers because Skweezer does a pretty good job of stripping out superfluous data from any web page, especially eBay, and reformatting it for a smaller screen, in this case a low resolution standard TV screen. When this tenuous combination of MSN/eBay/Skweezer doesn’t work, however, our customer service department really hears it, and some of those things bubble up to me.

Why don’t they just buy and use a computer or a high-powered phone/PDA? Obviously MSN TV is supposed to be cheaper than a PC, but I don’t think that’s the whole story. After all, you can pick up a bargain PC at Wal-Mart nowadays for next to nothing. I think I have a partial answer. MSN TV owners don’t want a PC and all that entails; they just want to plug a cheap device into their TV, turn it on and surf the web. They don’t want to fool around with updates and plug-ins and viruses and service packs; they just want something that works like an appliance should. They’re not the most backwards computer users in the world (as if they don’t know there’s an alternative), but they are the most demanding. This is why I call them “owners” and not “users”; ownership implies that the possession serves its owner’s needs, whereas the word “user” suggests one who has adapted their own habits to suit their possessions. May we all be owners of our possessions and not merely users.

There are some that we’ve been in contact that regretfully admit that maybe they’ve been holding out too long and it’s time to consider joining the normal computing public. I ran across an MSN TV alternative today that may fit the bill for some. It’s called Zonbu, and it’s priced competitively and available right now. This article from OSWeekly.com compares Zonbu with WebTV very well. I think there’s a lot to like about a Zonbu box, especially automatic offsite backup and the fact that it’s so energy efficient, and I’d consider it carefully when thinking about upgrading/replacing a home PC or set top box like MSN TV which is only good for browsing the Internet and can’t run office applications or games or play music.

As far as I can tell, you need to get your own separate Internet connection, keyboard, monitor, and mouse in addition to this device. I’m not entirely sure why you can’t just add these things on at the Zonbu store, but maybe they want to keep it simple. Your upfront payment will be $99 for the computer + $160 for a monitor and maybe another $20 for the keyboard and mouse if you don’t already have them; let’s say $280 all together.  Then you have the subscription fees, which depends on the amount of storage you want for your Zonbu box, currently between $12.95 and $19.95 a month, and also an Internet plan, like cheap DSL for about $15/month, or free if your city provides a municipal wi-fi cloud or your neighbor lets you share. I doubt that’s an option with MSN TV. Even so, less than $30/month is not bad at all. Worst case, your first year will set you back $640, or about $53/month; best case (you already have some hardware and access to free Internet) your first year will cost you $255, or about $21/month.

In developing a mobile vision, the Greenlight Wireless team has been tempted down several paths over the years. Should we get into video? Unified mobile IM/SMS? Should Skweezer be a mobile Pageflakes? We have thus added/dropped features as they compliment/detract from our main goals because we have to pick our battles. There are some things we do well (like mobile browsing) and some things we don’t (like e-mail). There are some things that we are too small to attempt, such as developing our own web search engine from scratch, and so we partner with companies that offer these things as a service or API we can use. For example, we use WorldLingo’s excellent translation API.

I mention this because I was looking at Clusty’s new mobile search and web proxy, which was announced earlier this week. There is no doubt that Clusty has some advanced search engine technology, and it has an obvious mobile application. However, their mobile web proxy leaves a lot to be desired. I know it’s still in its infancy and they probably intend to improve it, so it’s not fair for me to criticize it yet. However, if I were an executive at Vivisimo, I would take a hard look at build vs. buy or partner in this case. Mobile transcoding is one of those easily underestimated technologies. Skweezer powers the search results of other large search engines, and we’ve been doing it for years. Clusty search with Skweezer-powered results would be pretty nice and might free up a Clusty engineer.

There has been some complaining about the iPhone’s reliance on AT&T’s EDGE network. Here’s an example from Forbes.com, in sidebar to the article “Why You May Not Want an iPhone“:

The iPhone isn’t equipped for AT&T’s fastest “third-generation” (or 3G) wireless data network. Instead, iPhone users are stuck on an older, slower network, which means Web pages will take longer to load.

Also, since the non-announcement at the WWDC that Apple’s idea of 3rd-party applications is “sites that run on Safari”, there has been additional kvetching. I sympathize with everyone whose software does not translate to the web service model.

However, as a developer who makes a web service that speeds up browsing for mobile devices and doesn’t require a client installation of any kind, I couldn’t be happier about the iPhone design “restrictions”: it validates our approach completely. For the record: Skweezer addresses iPhone slowness without requiring any client installation. So while you’re waiting for Opera for the iPhone, give us a try first. And by the way, we just released Skweezer v4.0 which compresses images too, just in time. Welcome to Skweezer, iPhone people. Enjoy the entire internet.

AT&T or Apple folks: could I have one for testing, please? I’m already a Cingular/AT&T customer. You may already know the Kendall family from my wife’s addiction to the iTunes music store.

This has been sitting in my drafts folder for too long, but belated congratulations to Ask.com Mobile, winner in the Mobile category as well as the People’s choice awards! They are deservedly proud. If you haven’t already tried out Ask’s mobile site on your phone, you really should.

The Internet is not all English, although it’s easy to forget that when most of your browing history is to “.com” and “.net” sites. For years Greenlight Wireless has partnered with WorldLingo to provide dynamic translation of mobile content using the WorldLingo translation API. Recently we noticed new language pairs (specifically Arabic) and I had the opportunity to review a section of Skweezer that tries to guess the language of the page using nothing more than the top level domain. While not always accurate, the domain name a good hint of a page’s language when other standard language indicators are absent. For example, pages hosted in Mexico (.mx) are most likely in Spanish. Another example: while the official language of Azerbaijan (.az) is Azerbaijani, the closest language we have in our API toolbox is Russian, given that country’s history as a former republic of the USSR.

I’m sure some of this is not quite right, so I posted the data I have as a page in this blog. While I hope it doesn’t inflame national passions (should Canada be “fr” or “en”? Don’t ask a Québécois…) I hope this resource is useful and that improvements will make their way back to Skweezer.