Until twitter came along I didn’t have much use for services that shorted web addresses.  I quickly learned how useful they are, even beyond twitter.  I saw many people on twitter were using bit.ly and decided to check it out.  Here’s what I liked right off the bat:

• There is no limit to how many web addresses (URLs) you can shorten
• They offer a bookmarklet reveals a sidebar to shorten and share any page
• It works with multiple twitter accounts

Though I’ve used bit.ly mostly with twitter,  I learned it’s power and protection go beyond twitter.   Here are a few examples.

Including a bit.ly link in a direct message on twitter (DM), an email, or blog comment gives me insight to the links being followed.  This is particularly useful if the link is to somewhere other than a site I own.   If I need to follow up, I know the message was opened and the link was followed.

I’ve also found a nifty Chrome extension from bit.ly that goes beyond the bookmarklet and offers even more.  Like the bookmarklet the extension will reveal the sidebar but also ads a hover feature.  Hovering over a bit.ly link (and a few other types) not only shows the destination of the shortened link but also how many clicks link has generated.  Hovering over a twitter id will show a snapshot of a persons profile.  I can usually decide from the snapshot if I want to follow a link or the person.

Before I had this visibility I followed a short-link about local flooding on twitter and suddenly landed on a fake virus scan site!  The spammers targeted the trending topics on twitter to grab traffic.  Seeing where a link will go eliminates my biggest fear with following a shortened link.  Now I know exactly where the bit.ly link will go anywhere a bit.ly link appears.

I’m recommending bit.ly.  Let me know what you think and Consider subscribing.

As anticipated, Official Google Blog: Our new approach to buying a mobile phone.  The Nexus One run’s Google’s Android mobile operating system, but unlike other Android phones it is designed and sourced by Google.  Google contracted with HTC which also makes many of handsets running Microsoft’s mobile operating system.  Unlike the Windows Phone operating system the Android operating system is open source which allows the phone designers more freedom in the phone design.
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Presumably Google was not seeing the kind of innovation they had hoped their open approach would foster and decided to take matters into their own hands, pun intended.

After viewing Malt Mosbergs review the Nexus One sounds like a contender but the phone itself is not a game changer, yet.

The Nexus One’s most distinctive and disruptive feature is it’s being sold as an “unlocked” phone directly from Google.  By selling locked phones cell phone carriers have subsidized (discounted) the cost of the phone in exchange for multi-year contracts with a higher monthly cost.  But how much higher, nobody knows.  It is like getting a great price on a car so long as you agree to only buy higher priced fuel from the car’s dealer.  It’s OK  until someone starts selling fuel at a lower cost and the price difference become apparent.

I’ll take a serious look at the Google Nexus One when my current T-Mobile contract ends next month.  Right now T-Mobile is offering a “no-contract” plan for $10 less per line than the 2-year contract plan.

P.S.  As an Apple (AAPL) stockholder I’d like to see Apple offer an unlocked iPhone.  And even as a consumer I would probably choose an unlocked iPhone vs. an unlocked Nexus One.

P.S.S. I’m looking forward to knowing more about Google Voice integration with a Google phone.  Any information would be much appreciated.

Please leave a comment, I’d like to hear from you.

After reading Ben Parr‘s artle titled What Twitter and Facebook’s 2009 Trends Tell Us About Ourselves I got to thinking about the trends of Twitter and Facebook in 2009.  I thought I would see just how Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and MySpace fared in 2009 on Google search.  I turned to the Google Search Insights tool and found some surprising results.

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I expected twitter would have made significant gains on facebook, youtube and myspace yet twitter made very little progress at all.  What was even more suprising was how facebook broke-out in 2009 against youtube and myspace.  They were all neck and neck at the beginning of the year and by year end facebook was the clear leader.

The graph above is for the United States but the results are virtually the same worldwide.

What do you think, are you surprised?

I was fortunate enough to receive a invitation to the Google Wave preview. I’ll use this post to share some of my experiences.  I’ve used Google Wave for a few weeks now and have been impressed.  Some things I like are:

• Google Wave integrates with Google Contacts so as people I know sign-up they appear as Google Wave contacts.
• Searching for interesting Waves is easy and similar to gmail search parameters.  I even learned a number of new commends I wasn’t familiar with in gmail.
• Collaborating in public Waves can still overwhelming but far better than reading through a chain of emails or bulletin board posts.

Some things which still need to be worked out:

• Responsiveness is good (particularly for a “preview”) but it needs to improve before going into one of Google long beta cycles.
• Automatic subscriptions, once a Wave is read updates start to appear in the Inbox.  I’d prefer to opt in to updates.  As it is, I have to “trash” or “mute” each Wave I no longer want to view.
• When I added the Tweety bot to my invitation Wave.  The Wave was corrupted and is gone forever!  I had just received new batch of invites and was looking forward to sharing them.  As it is, they’re gone!  Who knows if I’ll ever see them again?

Do you have a Google Wave account?  Please, let me know your thoughts.  If not, let me know through the comments if you have any questions.

Do you want to create a resume online?  I’ve found having my sales resume online to be a great way for recruiters to find me.  You can too with little or no knowledge of HTML using Google Apps.  If you know a little about HTML you can make your resume even better.  I want to provide a few tips on creating your online resume and how to make it search friendly.  By making your resume search friendly recruiters looking for workers with your skills and education can find you through search tools from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft (Bing).

Online Resume/CV

First lets talk about Google Docs.  Google Docs is a simple, intuitive and free word processing tool you can use to create your online resume.  Thought it’s not robust enough to replace Microsoft Word, I found it to be a much better tool for creating a web resume.

When I started I just copied the Word version of my resume into Google Docs.  While that worked it didn’t look anything like the original.  I ended up starting over by copying sections at a time vs. the whole resume and avoided using tables like I had with the Word version of the resume.

After I was happy with the result I simply told Google to publish the resume to the world… but nobody found it.  In fact when I Googled for it, I couldn’t find it either! Why?  Well there were a lot of reasons but the main reason was because the resume, as published by Google Docs, was not “search friendly”.  You may be have heard the term search engine optimization (SEO).  It’s a fancy phrase but don’t let it scare you.

There can be a lots of variables to get top search placement but there are also some very basic things you can do that can make a big impact.  Once I made some of those changes my resume started to appear in all kinds of search results and for the kinds of jobs I’m interested in being hired.

That’s enough for now, but if you want learn all about creating a search friendly resume subscribe to this blog!

CIO Magazine has written several times about the brewing battle between Google Docs vs Microsoft Office.  These were my comments on the CIO article based on my experience creating an online resume using Google Docs…

The opportunity for Google isn’t so much in displacing MS Office but offering better and easier tools for sharing information.  I suspect Google’s primary target is MS Sharepoint not MS Office.

Online Resume/CV

When I wanted an easier way to share my resume than sending doc and pdf attachments, I turned to Google Docs.  My MS Office resume was too bloated for the web.  My Google Docs resume is not only formatted for the web but also has added benefits:

• Searching “Software Sales Executive Resume” or “Jim Littlefield Resume” will often show my resume link on the first results page.
• Using Google Analytics, I gain insight into how people are searching for me and my content.
• Web profiles sites like LinkedIn can easily include links to my resume.

Online collaboration works best when posts include links and rich formatting.  Yet who wants to type all the necessary HTML tags?  This response was created using HTML created via Google Docs.  Had I used MS Office, there would be a bunch of inline code that is not permitted by  CIO’s content management system.

Directing people to a web document insures they are viewing the most current version available. After a discussion revisions can be quickly made which are immediately available. Now as I experiment with Google Wave I can see the process becoming even more collaborative and dynamic.

For now  I don’t foresee creating and responding to 100-page RFPs via Google Docs. MS Office tools are far better suited for that task. It’s all a matter of picking the right tool for the job at hand.

Are you using Google Docs?  How’s it working for you?

I attended a web-clinic put on by Marketing Experiements.  The event centered on their critique of several web pages effectiveness getting visitor to take the desired action.  My main take way was keep pages focused with one good call to action.  The recording will be posted in a few days at the link above.

Their recommendation was to ask these three questions for each opt-in page:

Where Am I?

What Can I Do?

Why Should I Do It?

One other point which was particularly well made was…

Optimize Thought Processes vs. Pages

Don’t leave the visitor to guess what the next step is, tell what do next and why.

Do you agree?

This post has moved Enterprise Software Account Executive

Cumberland Island, GA

We drove to the Georgia coast over Thanksgiving weekend.  One of the highlights of the trip was spending the day on Cumberland Island.