Talk about web development, technology, and other geeky things
Oops, My Geek Is Showing - MindComet Development Team
XKCD is a webcomic with a very broad geek leaning for comedy. Today’s struck home as I’ve frequently wondered how Windows’ estimation process can be so far off. I still hold that the file copy estimation issues are the main reason to use Apple computers.
Posted by Admin on Jul. 20, 2009
Have you ever wanted to know what games the geeks of MindComet play (or have played for that matter)? Well, here’s your chance. Listen in and be prepared to be amazed (or scared).
Posted by Andrew Riley on Jul. 17, 2009
It drew a lot of raised eyebrows when the link shortening website http://bit.ly raised over a million dollars in funding. Link shorteners are a dime a dozen and on top of that they’re taking a lot of heat for destroying the integrity of the Internet by creating failure points for these links. So why would someone invest in them?
Bit.ly started out as a link shortener with a handful of analytics. Up until then the analytics were extremely sparse and hard to come by. But Bit.ly dove in and provided minute by minute analytics for clicks, sources, twitter conversations and more. They innovated a field that had been blindly simplistic. But their plan doesn’t stop there. The capital they raised is going to help them build a news site. Just like the sites which share the trending topics on Twitter, Bit.ly is going to share the most popular links on their service.
Currently they do this through a twitter bot that sends the top link every hour, but what they’re talking about is akin to a Digg competitor, a destination site that provides this information.
Now, this could be a fool’s bet. Digg is still trying to come out on top financially, and it’s a competitive market with the YCombinator graduate Reddit, the also fast innovating StumbleUpon (and their beta link shortener Su.pr) and a whole host of others. Entering a crowded market requires one thing: innovation. What is Bit.ly going to offer that these others don’t? It will more deeply integrate Twitter and other social networking services.
It could also be that Bit.ly is cruising to be acquired. Twitter has already switched and blessed them as Twitter’s link shortener of choice (sorry TinyURL, you didn’t innovate) and the rumors abound that Twitter would be well off to internalize the link shortening, as they did for Twitter search. And since Twitter has a nice war chest (though no solid income to continue building it) they can afford to make Bit.ly a good offer.
In the end I think Twitter will wait to see what Bit.ly does with their platform, and if they like what they see then we’ll see a merger or acquisition, assuming it isn’t too late and Bit.ly’s innovations don’t take them past Twitter into the next phase of this ‘microblogging.‘
Posted by Admin on Jul. 07, 2009
Seeing all of these shortened links nowadays definitely takes getting used to. I agree with you about the failure points. I also think that Twitter will acquire it eventually, and that is what…
Posted by Erik Folgate on 07/09/2009 02:52 PM
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Haha - I just tried picking up Alundra from where I left off months ago and I can’t find my map. Thank goodness for http://www.gamefaqs.com/ !
Posted by Karina Vedder on 08/27/2009 04:13 PM