1-Click TinyUrl + Twitter

so me friends @ashafrir and @jeffpulver got me onto twitter a few weeks ago. it’s not hard to notice that everyone and his sister are using tinyurl to, well, tinyurl. the task is tedious (if you’re as lazy as i am) you really want these things to take 1-click.

10 minutes of searching and 10 minutes of hacking later, zvitz (sorta hebrew for twitt) is born. just drag it to your toolbar, and whenever you are on a page you would like to twit about, hit the bookmarklet, and you will find yourself in twitter, with your status already containing a tinyurl of the page you were looking at.

here’s the formatted source for the bookmarklet:
javascript:
(function(){
var z=open().document;
z.location=”http://ohadpr.com/zvitz.php?url=”+document.location;
z.close();
}
)()
and here’s the PHP backend to support it:
$f = @fopen(‘http://tinyurl.com/api-create.php?url=’ . $_GET['url'], ‘r’) or header(“Location: sorry zvit or tinyurl not working”);
$tinyUrl = fgets($f, 8192);
fclose($f);
header(“Location: http://twitter.com/home?status=$tinyUrl”);

NetFlix are tracking interesting things on their site

Every web service provider, web application, content site and what not likes to collect data. Collecting data helps web sites to better understand their users, popular content,

usage patterns, and whatever obscurities that are out there.

I was just browsing Netflix and noticed that they have chosen to track something very odd, and at first (and second) sight not too informative. When you search for a movie at the top-right corner, it will actually log WHERE on the ‘Search’ button you have actually hit. So, if you’ve hit the top-left area or the bottom-right area of the button, NetFlix will know.

What does this give them? well, they could calculate what is the average point at which users hit the button, and errrrrr, just know it. Or they could generate a nice little heat-map representing the different areas on the button where people hit most often (for info on heat-maps see Rafael Mizrahi’s wonderful Feng-GUI, and they could ehhhhhh print the heat map and ehhhh nail it to the wall.
Beats me, in any case, just an observation worth sharing, or not.

GOOG, Maps-Mobile, Locate-Me and revenue streams

i will not capitalize my sentences, though i’m still considering capitalizing the i’s :-)

i was writing a reply to my friend rani harpaz and figured its worth a post. this morning tech-crunch or techmeme posted a link to a note by Fred Wilson pondering through a pile of GOOG he just bought. I spent an evening talking to Fred at a dinner thrown by my friend  Jeff Pulver,

so I grew some interest in his thoughts.
me and rani have spent some time discussing GOOG and AAPL, so we bounced back and forth about it. rani thinks GOOG should be shorted :-)  the important thing i wanted to post here is how google is expanding to new areas with what i believe are high chances of success, so here’s
the excerpt:
i see google-maps and perhaps also google-docs/spreadsheets and some of their other technologies as infrastructures for future products. they have implemented these services in an amazing fashion and its a matter of business thinking and market evolution until these things start to be the core of offerings that bring in cash, how much cash is a different question.
an amazing thing that strikes me: google launched a google-maps-mobile feature called locate-me and deployed it to all mobile phones that run their google-maps-mobile app (most nokia phones, iphone, window-mobile and a bunch of other phones). this implements a pseudo gps using cell-tower location, giving location approximation within 10 meter to 1km. ever since hack-grading my iphone yesternight from 1.1.1 to 1.1.3 (which includes the ‘new’ locate-me feature) i’ve been obsessed by it and what i believe can be built around it.
this little feature, largely unnoticed, is the core of the next-gen of local search. this is the first time that a mainstream product (i dont consider any GPS-enabled phone to be mainstream) has the ability to run an application where you type in ‘pizza’ and get a referral to a nearby rated pizzeria. this is the sort of experience people have been talking about for years and now its finally possible. again, just a matter of time until google improves the quality of its local data and implements the right kind of interaction around local search.
so, to sum, i see new revenue paths for google, or at the very least large enhancements to their existing paid-search revenue model.
p.s. – some people think that since steve jobs is flying more frequently this means more deals are getting closed and so we should expect more revenue from AAPL in the coming months, cool, interesting and most importantly funny.
On 2/27/08, Ran Harpaz wrote:
It’s quite amazing to me how someone can be very analytical and at the same time have “blind fate” in GOOG like this guy does. It is clear that they have been over-spending on their “adjacencies” for years, at an incredible rate, and so far nothing happened. Why would he think that it’s going to change? just because we want it to???

kindle haiku

this will be my first analytical haiku, i hope its better than my writeups.

at first i laughed, look at the price, and man is this thing fugly.

american consumerism, kindle is interesting in so many levels.
e-ink, very cool, very nice, very subtle, finally popularized.
so classic that sony failed with theirs and that amazon may not.
kindle’s 1-click instant-buy is the perfect extension of amazon prime.
amazon prime is ingenious. remember, american consumerism.
instant gratification is very valuable, uncle sam picked that up a long time ago.
take all my books with me, sounds foolish, yet interesting.
i wonder when this thing will get hacked.
and there’s a tool got kindlorrent, which downloads PDF books from bittorrent directly to your kindle.
kindlorrent.com and torrindle.com are available.
i think i want to try one out. if it feels good i’m getting it.
how soon will it run zork 1/2/3 ?
if you have a kindle and i can play with it, shoot me an email.