• 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.

There is also 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.  The snapshot helps me decide if I want to follow a link or the person.

Without that visibility I’ve followed a short-link about local flooding on twitter and suddenly landed on a fake virus scan site!  The spammer were targeting the trending topics on twitter to grab traffic.  Seeing where a link will go minimizes the risk 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.  Have you find innovative ways to use bit.ly?

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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?

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!

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?

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?

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.