PharmiMike

A couple of things have made me think over the last few days. Things are moving so quickly in social-media-land its hard to keep up. Just as we get used to using a site, it changes, even before we’ve memorised our password, they’ve merged, changed strategies, gone bust, or completely revamped the product. A few examples:

TR.IM – having been used by thousands  of people for shortening URLS on their posts, it announced its closing down. That’s gonnaurt a lot of people.

Facebook aquired FriendFeed – and now facebook lite has been announced. No doubt changes all round.

JS-KIT – A great comment, rating tool plugin has relaunched as “Echo” and dropped their rating tool altogether – just as I was about to implement it on PharmiWeb.com. (http://beta.pharmiweb.com) -  Argh, now I need to start looking for a replacement. 

All this makes me realise that we are putting a lot of trust into the stability and longevity of these tools. Maybe we should get back to developing our own, at least we know it will be around for a while. URL shorteners for example, they are not difficult to develop, maybe every site should include a perma-link generator. Maybe also we all get carried away with the latest gadgets, and wizzy must have’s, without comparing the practical use and benefits against the risk. If Twitter disappeared tomorrow, would your marketing or development strategy fall to dust. I hope not.

With the popularity of Twitter, comes the demand for URL shorteners.  Long URLs simply don’t fit into Twitter, so a number of free URL shorteners appeared. However there has been  concern raised by some about the risks associated with using a free service to link to your valuable online content.

Well, the inevitable has happened… TR.IM is closing down, meaning that unless someone else buys their database, then millions of links will simply stop working after Jan 1st 2010.  they claim that they couldn’t monetise the service and they couldn’t compete against Bit.ly.

It is expected that someone will step in and buy the service to “rescue”  the links,  which will save the day – as long as they don’t re-direct all links to  porn or malware sites!

This situation raises the debate about putting your (shortURL) eggs into someone else’s basket. Maybe we should all build shortURL functionality into our website pages, at least then we are in control.