Clarence "Sparr" Risher

Four days ago I joined the modern era by buying a smartphone. I was an early adopter in the PDA market, with a Palm in the 90s, then again with an HP iPaq and Asus MyPal in the early 00s, but at some point in the last three years the revolution happened. I can thank Apple, however grudgingly, for that. Without the iPhone we would not have Android, and without either of them we would not have the thriving and growing ecosystem of mobile applications today that dwarfs the market for RIM/Palm/Symbian/Zaurus apps in the past. This post chronicles my joys and woes in the first half-week of use.

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Overall I am greatly enjoying the experience, despite the hurdles, most of which were at least somewhat expected. I think that having an internet connected phone will make my life more productive and efficient, and only slightly more distracted. Having one device to take the place of a media player, PDA, phone, and pocket camera[3] is great, but everyone who has one already knew that. I'm looking forward to starting to develop apps. I have some great ideas, and my Java skills are decent but rusty, so maybe I can even make a little money.

( footnotes )

First came tinyurl. It produced URLs like this:

http://tinyurl.com/xxxxx (and eventually 6 and 7 characters, as it got more popular)

Then came a huge assortment of services with shorter domain names, some with interesting features...

http://is.gd/xxxxx
http://bit.ly/yourowntext

But the ultimate URL shortener, in terms of length, has been achieved... The admins of the TK top level domain (owned by the country Tokelau) have started a service called Tweak.tk, which registers a domain name for every shortened URL, so your long URL shortens to something like this:

http://xxxxx.tk

That's it. No path, no extra stuff, nada. It really can't get much shorter than that (sure, you could do 4 characters, but those are more likely to be registered for real, and there are far less of them).

Bit.ly users can rest assured that Tweak.tk won't be offering custom names, since that would undercut their domain registration business, but they will probably end up offering all the other popular features.