512 Pixels

With Twitter’s 140-charcter limit on updates, several URL shortening service cropped up in the last 18 months out of nowhere.

A few months ago, Twitter added bit.ly support to its homepage, effectively making it the most popular URL shortener out there.

It didn’t help rival tr.im:

tr.im is now in the process of discontinuing service, effective immediately. Statistics can no longer be considered reliable, or reliably available going forward. However, all tr.im links will continue to redirect, and will do so until at least December 31, 2009. Your tweets with tr.im URLs in them will not be affected.

We regret that it came to this, but all of our efforts to avoid it failed. No business we approached wanted to purchase tr.im for even a minor amount.

There is no way for us to monetize URL shortening — users won’t pay for it — and we just can’t justify further development since Twitter has all but annointed bit.ly the market winner. There is simply no point for us to continue operating tr.im, and pay for its upkeep.

In short, tweets will survive, but the links in them will probably die at the end of the year.

While it’s always sad to see players in a market disappear, tr.im’s death does serve as a reminder that URLs shortened for ease of use cannot be considered permanent. Heck, even normal URLs can change with easily and without end users being notified, but when tr.im goes under, expect some disruptions.

From WMCTV Channel 5, here in Memphis:

In Tennessee, The Chattanooga Times Free Press has been setting aside more space for local news and puts all national news through a community lens, says publisher and executive editor Tom Griscom. The newspaper has a weekday circulation of about 73,000.

Griscon says if people “really want to read about the Iraq war every day, you are not going to buy our paper. You will buy The New York Times.”

Wise words.

Via Gizmodo:

I’d hire him to work in my shop.

Microsoft has produced a chart outlining the different options available to users who are looking to upgrade to Windows 7. Gizmodo has a nice big version of it here.

It’s unbelievably confusing. Just looking at it gives me a headache. With so many different versions of Vista and 7 in the mix, the possibilities are almost endless, but many users will have to take the “Custom Install” path, which Microsoft describes as basically a clean install.

I don’t see many users doing that. I don’t think the boys in Redmond do either. Check out this nugget from the company’s webpage on upgrading to the new OS:

We recommend that you experience Windows 7 on a new PC.

And if that wasn’t clear enough:

While we don’t recommend it, you can opt to upgrade your current PC from Windows XP or another operating system to Windows 7. We recommend that you get help with this process from your local computer service provider. You’ll need to back up your current files and settings, perform a custom (clean) installation, and then reinstall your files, settings, and programs.

This shines the light one of the things that truly separates Mac users from PC users. PC users usually just use the OS their computer came with, and when they buy a new machine, will use the OS it comes with. Over and over, for years.

That’s one reason adoption rates for new versions of Windows is slower than that of new versions of OS X, by the way.

Apple makes upgrading to a new OS easy — pop in the DVD and come back in an hour. This will be no different with Snow Leopard this fall. No clean installs, no hiring a local computer shop to do it for you, no praying to God your machine will survive. Just a few clicks of the mouse on some well-thought out menus and that’s it.

I’ll take that any day over that chart.

———- Update: This chart puts it into perspective nicely.

The Wall Street Journal:

CBS Corp. saw its profit all but wiped out in the second quarter, as the recession continued to eat into advertising revenue across its TV, radio and outdoor-billboard businesses.

The New York media company relies heavily on advertising, especially at its broadcast-TV network. Television ad revenue fall 13% in the quarter, to $1.15 billion, from a year earlier, even though CBS has been the only one of the four biggest U.S. TV networks to increase its prime-time audience this season.

Ouch.

Ars Technica:

Domain Helper currently works in cases where a URL includes a properly-spelled top-level domain (such as “.com”) at the end and where the site name is not a registered domain name. When activated, Domain Helper redirects users to a comcast.com page that is powered by Yahoo Bing search. The layout of the results, however, suggests that the goals are less about helping you find your intended destination and more about presenting you with ads.

Yet another reason to use OpenDNS.

Phil Schiller of Apple responded to John Gruber after Gruber’s piece about Apple censoring Ninjawords — an iPhone dictionary app — made the rounds Tuesday.

Schiller:

You are correct that the Ninjawords application should not have needed to be censored while also receiving a 17+ rating, but that was a result of the developers’ actions, not Apple’s. I believe that the Apple app review team’s original recommendation to the developer to submit the Ninjawords application, without censoring it, to the App Store once parental controls was implemented would have been the best course of action for all; Wiktionary.org is an open, ever-changing resource and filtering the content does not seem reasonable or necessary.

And Gruber:

What Matchstick could have done was wait for iPhone OS 3.0 and publish the app with a 17+ rating. What they wanted to do, though, was ship their app as soon as possible. Hence Matchstick’s decision to begin filtering out the words which the App Store reviewers found objectionable. As Matchstick’s Phil Crosby told me via email last night, “17+ ratings were not available when we launched, which means at that time, it was simply not possible for our dictionary to be on the App Store without being censored. Given the options of censoring or sitting on the side lines while our competitors ate our lunch, we chose to launch.”

I stumbled across this set on Flickr today of a tablet Mac created from remnants of a 12-inch PowerBook and a MacBook. It’s pretty impressive.

Here’s what has been fixed in OS X client.

Gruber, on Ninjawords, a iPhone dictionary app that Apple has censored:

In other words, not only must the dictionary be censored — a dictionary — but even after being purged of “objectionable” words it would only be considered with a 17+ rating. Even after agreeing to these terms, it took another two weeks for Ninjawords to appear in the App Store.

[…]

Every time I think I’ve seen the most outrageous App Store rejection, I’m soon proven wrong. I can’t imagine what it will take to top this one.

Apple requires you to be 17 years or older to purchase a censored dictionary that omits half the words Steve Jobs uses every day.

They have to fix this.

Ars Technica:

When the iPhone OS 3.0 SDK beta was first seeded to developers, an entry inside the USBConfiguration.plist indicated that a device identified only as iProd0,1 existed inside of Apple. The .plist item was nested among the usual iPhone and iPod Touch identifiers, as well as iPhone3,1, which turned out to be the iPhone 3GS that was released this past June. As shipping products from Apple don’t have a leading zero in the identifier, we speculated then that it was a prototype device that was in active testing.

The iProd1,1 device has been assigned a new productID of 4762 (versus 4757 of iProd0,1) and assigned a different ConfigurationDescriptor of “standardMuxPTPEthernet.” iPhone models also have this designation, and the additional interface identified in the plist for this configuration is “AppleUSBEthernet.” The consensus here seems to be that the new device may have gained high-speed networking capabilities—though the iPhone uses the interface to tether to a laptop to share its 3G connection.

Hmm.

Apple PR:

Apple today announced that Dr. Eric Schmidt, chief executive officer of Google, is resigning from Apple’s Board of Directors, a position he has held since August 2006.

“Eric has been an excellent Board member for Apple, investing his valuable time, talent, passion and wisdom to help make Apple successful,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “Unfortunately, as Google enters more of Apple’s core businesses, with Android and now Chrome OS, Eric’s effectiveness as an Apple Board member will be significantly diminished, since he will have to recuse himself from even larger portions of our meetings due to potential conflicts of interest. Therefore, we have mutually decided that now is the right time for Eric to resign his position on Apple’s Board.”

I think it’s for the best for both companies.