Bit.ly Kung Fooz Itself

You know Bit Ly? Bruce Lee's distant cousin.

I love Twitter, but it's not for everybody and I can understand why some people don't get it or don't like it. One of the things I like is how the 140 char limit forces you to compose your tweet more carefully than you would in email or a blog. Tweeted URL links are counted as chars, so they can become a problem. Whether you use Twitter or not, there are occasions when you would like to replace some cosmologically long URL, like this http://maps.google.com/maps?q=27%C2%B09%E2%80%B236.73%E2%80%B3S+70%C2%B029%E2%80%B248.4%E2%80%B3W+&hl=en&ie=UTF8&ll=-27.268058,-70.423737&spn=0.330804,0.558929&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=37.819897,72.158203&t=h&z=11 with this http://j.mp/dmYEHy. That's where URL shorteners come in and there are many shortening services out there.

Until very recently, I had settled on using j.mp exclusively for Twitter because it was the first service I became aware of that produced the shortest URLs without going to unicode. j.mp is owned by bit.ly. With the recent advent of Twitter auto-shortening, bit.ly seems to be scrambling to keep users and in that process I suddenly noticed j.mp was now being redirected to bit.ly, which is not as short.

Moreover, j.mp was taking much more time to process a URL due to the growing JS eye-candy on their web page, not to mention "processing" your data. I can really see this with my web client bloat-detector: a 1 GHz Power Mac G4.

Finally, I decided to give bit.ly the chop in favor of goo.gl. Here's why:

• Not as short as j.mp but generally shorter than Tweeter's auto-shortner
  
• Tweeter auto-shortner can leave fairly explicit URL fragments
  
• Sometimes I don't want to divert attention with the longer Twitter URL string
  
• It has much lower JS overhead (Goog KISSes it) which makes for faster translation
  
• Goog doesn't need to riffle my wallet for this service
  
• Goog was tracking my data anyway :/
  

So, 再见 (zàijiàn) bit.ly ... fast as lightning.

Guerrilla Mantras Now Updated on Twitter

Those of you in the trenches carrying out performance analysis and capacity planning, perhaps doing it off your own bat, often find yourself in the position where you wish you could point quickly to a more authoritative list of reasons in support your goals. It can mean the difference between convincing your management or not.


To this end, the Guerrilla Manual is provided as a pull-out booklet in the rear jacket of my Guerrilla Capacity Planning book. Now, for an even more rapid-fire response, Guerrilla mantras (140 characters or less) are automatically posted on Twitter. Look for the GMantra tag.

Cloudy Web 2.0: So Much for the 5th Utility

A real utility, like water, gas and POTS, implies that it's always there, with only very rare and explainable exceptions. Which reminds me, did they ever figure out who hacked (as in "chopped") the major phone cables in Santa Clara County, last month?

Twitts of the World, Unite!

The great thing about email is, you can ignore it. One of the things I can't stand about skype and IM is that, by design, they are very intrusive (or can be), to the point where I can't think straight. I'm slow, so I need a lot of uninterrupted time to think. Thus, I've held the same opinion, a fortiori, about Twitter. The very name has been its own aversion, for me.

It's the PLANNING, Stupid!

The phrase "It's the ECONOMY, stupid!" helped boost Bill Clinton's election prospects in 1992. In 1999, when eBay.com was having its "CNN moments" (as we called them, back then), I declared that capacity planning seemed to be an oxymoron for many pre-bubble-bursting web sites. They were prepared to throw any amount of money at lots of iron, which presumably meant they understood the "capacity" part (capital expenditure). It's the "planning" part they didn't grok. Planning means thinking ahead. Planning requires investment in the future. If the Financial Dept. can do it, why can't IT?