If you have a bit.ly link, for example http://bit.ly/4dWnCu

you can insert ‘info’ into the URL thus:

http://bit.ly/info/4dWnCu

to get all sorts of facts and figures, like how many clicks that link has had, which sites are referring using it, who’s tweeting about that particular URL, and that kind of thing.

Email from Graze

The brown boxes are arriving at our office in huge quantities now: Pod1′s going to need a bigger mailbox soon.

Graze's first delivery

I just received my first delivery from graze.com, a service that delivers healthy (and not healthy) snacks to your home or office regularly. The website’s a great experience (lots of control, rating opportunities, personalised product and some lovely Ajax coding), and the product looks good too. This is the sort of smart innovative new service I really like.

To get a free trial go to graze.com and enter the code G9LMPCM.

Sadly for Twitter, the money stays with Google for the ad sale from the look of things, so they still don’t have a revenue stream.

Twitter is busy

Not long ago, I received an email from Facebook which read:

Unfortunately, the settings that control which email notifications get sent to you were lost. We’re sorry for the inconvenience.

To reset your email notification settings, go to:

http://www.facebook.com/editaccount.php?notifications

Thanks,
The Facebook Team

I wasn’t very impressed with this message, but there have been worse IT issues.

Today, I went to log in, only to be greeted by the following page:

This, combined with the previous message, started to get me thinking. People are relying on Facebook: they’re using it as a utility, like email, like the telephone, and these things are designed so they are very resilient. Email is designed so it will always get through in the end (at least somehow). Telephone service is practically ubiquitous, and we get really annoyed when it isn’t working. Advertisers are increasingly relying on Facebook to recruit customers for them.

That all being so, shouldn’t the technology be a little bit more reliable?

The latest thing is Google Docs, Google’s online word processor, spreadsheet and presentation software, which has been developing well for a while now, but which has just rolled out offline functionality. This uses something called Google Gears to store copies of the documents I work with on Google Docs in an offline cache, with the code they need to work, so that I can edit all my Google Docs on the train, and they just get updated automatically next time I’m online.

My personal email account (for my own domain, not a gmail address) is now Google driven too. And I at last have the ability to sync my Outlook calendar with Google Calendar, which allows me to share my free time with anyone who has a web browser, ending all those daft unsolicited meeting requests I get at a stroke.

How’s Google going to get the money back for all this? The application development might be a one-off, but the storage bill (and the electricity for the data centres is the big one nowadays) must keep going up and up. Theorists will point out that a central storage infrastructure replacing all those local ones in peoples’ personal computers is more efficient in the long run, but where’s the money going to come from? Advertising seems somehow inappropriate as a revenue stream for this kind of service. My bet is they’ll end up charging for it directly somehow, but I’m sure they have some interesting ideas in the pipeline for monetising the Google desktop.

The experience so far has been really good. The machine works well, the software’s great, and for £250 I’ve got a machine that’s faster and more enjoyable to use than my very expensive work laptop. But what’s really impressive is the way that support, enhancement, improvement, has been taken up by the users of these machines.

Asus themselves provide some support, but the really good stuff is on blogs and wikis that have been set up by people who have bought the machines themselves.

If you compare http://vip.asus.com/ with  http://wiki.eeeuser.com/ it’s obvious that the open source offering is better, more up to date, and more responsive than the manufacturer’s. This is a very interesting trend. Actually, I’m happier that there is this community developing and that so much open information is out there than if I was reliant on a secretive, commercially sensitive company. Probably it’s so noticeable here because the eee is a Linux (i.e. open source) machine. You don’t see wikis cropping up for all products, so what makes one more or less likely to be a community hit?