Technology: August 2007 Archives

Lately --especially since I use Twitter-- I receive a lot of URLs in TinyURL format. That made me think: if TinyURL gives out a unique URL each time it is used, when will they run out of URLs?

On their site they state that they have more than 42 million of them, which doesn't sound like an awful lot. All TinyURLs I receive have a six character identifier, such as 3bso2z. A little calculation (six positions with 36 options per position) gives me 2.238.976.116 unique identifiers. More than two billion, that sounds already better. And if they run out of Ids, they can simply use seven or eight characters, which I still consider tiny. Eight positions give 2.984.555.162.628 (2 trillion!) unique identifiers!

It is clear: TinyURL is here to stay.

The productivity guru of the moment, Tim Ferriss, writes in his book how he was able to reduce the amount of e-mail received by setting up an autoresponder to tell that he only reads his e-mail once a day and that it is better to phone him for urgent matters.

I believe him, when he tells that this technique has reduced his e-mail load significantly. But what he doesn't tell is what happened to the number of telephone conversations he received. In my case, I notice a clear increase in telephone calls when I am very busy and cannot answer e-mails within the usual 12 hours. And guess what, when I am very busy, the last thing I am waiting for are telephone calls! When somebody phones me, that person decides what I will be doing for the next two minutes and when I will give attention to him (now!), while with e-mail I am the one deciding who should get my attention and when.

Tim's trick only works because his workload is very low. When you're workload is higher and you need to spend more time in the zone, it makes more sense to change your voice mail message to tell people that you can only be reached by phone during one hour a day and that they get faster response when they send their inquiry by e-mail.

For quite some time I have been happily using coComment. For those who don't know this service: coComment basically keeps track of the comments you leave on web sites. If you're like me, reading and commenting on many sites, it can be difficult to track the replies to your comments. coComment captures your comment and tracks the conversations started by those comments on a single page instead of having to revisit all sites you've commented on.

Yesterday coComment released a new version, bringing more social features. By doing that, they threw out the real value of their service: tracking conversations. The new page reserves 75% of screen real estate for groups, friends, favourites and neighbours, leaving just enough space for only five conversations:

Furthermore, all my conversations have been marked as unread, and I could not find an option to mark them all as read. This is not an upgrade, this is a downgrade!