And while everyone has predictably been falling all over themselves to get in a lot of general reporting about the debut, yours truly has been busy curating the less obvious, in order to get to the bottom of the question – to buy or not to buy…

The Form Factor Issue

After testing out the iPad at the Apple Store in Austin for about 20 minutes, and then again the following Monday at BestBuy for nearly 2 hours, I have to concur with the commentators that said it was a bit on the heavy side.

Not so much in the sense of the weight itself, but in the sense of being distributed in slightly too large of a form factor (kind of like overly large furniture making moving of it more awkward even if the item isn’t that heavy).

Not once did I think that that there wasn’t enough shown on the 9.7″ screen. Instead, it was almost too much. And watching various commentators such as Scoble et al. on the review by The Gillmor Gang wield theirs for the camera, they looked a bit too large as well. Wield is the right word for it come to think of it.

I said in January after the announcement that I had wished for the iPad to be “one size smaller”, about paperback size. Slightly smaller screen, less bezel instead, to keep it at about 4 x times iPhone size, rather than 6 x. If it had to be slightly thicker to fit batteries and other entrails, then so be it. No one seems quite as obsessed with (device) thinness as Steve Jobs come to think of it.

We’ll see if one of the other tablets planned for Android/Chrome OS or Windows will take advantage of this smaller form factor. [UPDATE: Looks like Dell is going to, with 5" and 7" screen versions of its Streak tablet. 5" seems a bit too small given that the current largest smartphones are already nearing 4.5 inch screens.]

Think about it like this: A 10″ screen held at 2 feet equates to a 50″ screen at 10 feet! (This is why no one thinks that hard about the little screens in the airplane seat backs being too small to watch many hours of movies on long flights.)

Right now I have my laptop on my lap, with the 15″ screen about 2 feet away. The iPad would have to be held with your arms fully out-stretched to create the same distance. At about 1/2 – 2/3 of that distance, the current iPad screen size will actually be the same (at 2/3) or even bigger than that (at 1/2 distance). I really think a 7-8″ diagonal screen would be completely sufficient.

And make the tablets much easier to wield…

The keyboard issue

There are several aspects to this:

1) There seems to be confirmation of what I suspected in my previous iPad post, that the keyboard dock is not as usable as it may first appear. The reason being that the whole thing is a bit unstable for switching from typing to touch-screen as Engagdet writes: “Our one complaint? It’s not that easy to interact with the touchscreen from this angle” (note that NO Bluetooth mouse is supported), and doesn’t transport well.

[While speaking of docks, an interesting fact that seems to be slipping through the cracks is that the VGA-out dock or adapter enables to output content that is DIFFERENT FROM what you see on your iPad screen for at least some applications that make use of this, e.g. Apple's Keynote presentation app.]

2) Given this reality, it is better to buy the Apple Bluetooth keyboard, IF you need a physical keyboard at times. It will work for other Bluetooth enabled computing devices in your house, etc.

Engadget in the same post shows a good quick video showing (at bottom of post) how fast it it to synch up the Bluetooth keyboard.

The question really is, is it needed at all?

The reports on on-screen virtual keyboard usability vary from good (some claim 50-words per minute, and a pre-launch reviewer from PC Mag wrote his entire detailed, multi-page review on it) to so-so, with the landscape view typing mode appearing to…ahem…win by a landslide.

But even in landscape mode, touch-typists who are used to resting their fingers on a keyboard have a problem, because the virtual keyboard will intermittently think you have begun typing.

The portrait view mode however seems to please next to no-one as far as typing more than a few keystrokes is concerned.

Why? Too far apart for thumb-typing or one-handed “hunt & peck”, too narrow for good two-handed typing. Bummer, if there weren’t an excellent solution that I hinted at in the comments on my last post:

3) Swype. One-handed gesture-based input by “swyping” the letters of a word. The application was unveiled at TechCrunch 50 last year, and is finding its way in private (?) beta onto some Android smart phones.

Why is it not on the iPad? That’s the $64k Question. Swype would appear to be a no-brainer, something that could have really pushed the iPad over the top beyond all doubt.

Fast input, aligned with the ergonomics of the device, seamless transition from touch-based navigation to touch-based Swype “typing”, workable and fast even for those of us who happen to be slowish 2-Finger typists.

This alone may make me wait for an Android tablet with Swype on board, with a slightly smaller screen as discussed above. Yeah, it’s that important.

.

Other stuff that is actually great

Somewhat under-reported has been the fact that the battery life is truly excellent, anywhere from 8 hours (non-stop, full-blast use with only the most resource-heavy applications), up to 12 hours or more with normal usage. Very few of the reviewers appeared to be able to get below Apple’s claimed 10 hours, which is a remarkable feat. Manufacturer battery life claims used to be notoriously…how do I put this…optimistic..

Also under-reported is another near miracle that instantly should make the iPad a couch computing favorite: It emits next to no heat, and has no fan, hence no fan noise. All while keeping the screen applications and video very snappy.

This may well prove huge, for business meetings as well, where Steve Rubel has already seen a more positive acceptance than either a laptop (creates distance) or a cell phone (makes people think you’re texting/checking your email).

Despite a variety of conspiracy theories for why Apple has it in for Adobe, THAT is the real reason why Flash is not being supported. Flash is a CPU resource hog. It’s why even a pretty powerful dual-core laptop starts to spin-up mightily when viewing most flash-based video. Have the thing on your lap, and the hot “exhaust” from your CPU is warming up your pants for you.

This is a HUGE DEAL. A literally cool and quiet computer. And just as I write that, here comes news that apparently iPad has issues with sitting out/being used in the hot sun, and can shut down pre-emptively to avoid overheating. Makes sense since it’s all glass and aluminum…

Also underreported: By way of a variety of apps such as Citrix Receiver, the iPad can run any remote computer and nearly any of that computer’s applications that might be too complex or large to run on iPad natively. This could be one of the killer apps for the iPad in settings such as hospitals. Steve Rubel’s point about meetings comes to mind again: Where a laptop would be inappropriate by a patient’s bedside, a tablet can be natural form factor.

About the iPad’s Kindle-Killing…

Much attention has been paid to the iPad’s impact on publishing, especially as a new entrant in the eBook reader category vs. Amazon’s Kindle device. So this area warrants some close scrutiny.

First, let’s point out that Apple is playing it pretty safe when it comes to anything that could smack of anti-trust worthy stiff-arming: The iBooks app is NOT installed by default, even though the iTunes Store is making a pretty obvious suggestion to install it. And Apple did not attempt to block the Kindle app, so they’ve learned from the iPhone Goggle Voice app brouhaha.

Apple has a lot of clout and likes to control everything, and yet, it doesn’t want to get into it with Congress if that can be avoided.

So how should Amazon play this?

Don’t try to take a shrill stand in a battle that can’t be won. Instead of carrying on about how the Kindle is still the superior eReader (e.g. in bright sunlight, which is probably true), Amazon should

1) drop the price for the Kindle immediately to below $200,

2) applaud the iPad for running the Kindle app so well, and so beautifully, pointing out that the Kindle really is a for-the-beach/pool type device, and

3) highlight the fact that ALL of your existing Kindle books will play on the iPad AND hopefully still on your Kindle as well.

The last point will make the Kindle a great hand-me-down device for kids who you don’t quite trust with a $500-900 iPad. And likely persuade prior Kindle owners to stick with the Kindle bookstore. Which is what Amazon should care the most about. There never was much use for them to get into a hardware race against Apple.

The Kindle will eventually simply be seen as a transitional device while Apple and others were still figuring out the new form factor. And meanwhile, Amazon has learned tons of valuable things about eBook economics. The business it should be in.

Given the various issues described further up, especially about the outdoor overheating, maybe it is too early to count the Kindle out just yet, and maybe it will fare better for longer than I first thought. Especially if Amazon further lowers the price.

More details on the iBooks app

One of the big issues that appear to be surfacing in regards to the iBook app is the bookmarking. Writes Gizmodo in “Hands On: Apple iBooks”:

Apple’s Bookmarking solution is perfect for highlighting a favorite line, but pretty lousy for just keeping your page. And, yeah, for a casual reader, this is a biggie.

And I would add to that that iBooks bookmarks are missing the capability to add your own commentary, a must for those of us who are used to heavily marking up our non-fiction books.

Here is another weakness Kindle could exploit for the time being, as relayed by PC World in “iPad as E-Reader: Glaring Problems, Promising Apps”:

By and large, in my reading, iBooks offered the slickest e-book navigation experience I’ve had on any device. Regrettably, however, iBooks makes a poor choice for anyone who wants to read e-book purchases on more than one device. Unless you plan to take the iPad with you everywhere, you’ll be without an e-reader much of the time. To make its bookstore more compelling, Apple needs to make desktop and phone versions of its reader. Until that happens, I won’t be buying any more books from Apple.

That’s pretty definitive, and may be a great life-line for the Kindle.

In summary, has the game just been changed?

I think we can safely assume that the ecosystem of iPad apps, accessories, and other add-ons will be a healthy one, see this example of people’s ad-hoc ingenuity… as the iPad as a design/art object is already spurring on a lot of further, often artistic ideas.

However during my tests one thing I realized is that there clearly is a learning curve for non-iPhone users as far as the basics of the interface are concerned. While that should help to rustle up Apple’s existing customers, it may prove to be a hurdle for very broad adoption. Then again, some commentators have already pointed out that very young users between say 3 and 13, are taking to the iPad like fish to water.

But plenty of adults are also ecstatic. Writes Michael Arrington in his “Unauthorized TechCrunch iPad Review”:

…the iPad beats even my most optimistic expectations. This is a new category of device. But it also will replace laptops for many people. It does basic computer stuff, like email and web surfing, very well. Applications load quickly and are very responsive – think iPhone 3GS with a 50% speed boost.

That’s what surprised me the most. The iPad isn’t just for couch computing…It’s a perfectly usable business device. And the form factor just happens to work far better for cramped places like airplanes than a normal laptop. I doubt I’ll ever open a laptop on a plane again after tomorrow…

The iPad will put significant pressure on laptop sales, particularly second device laptops.

Of course, here is the guy that was so desperate for the tablet form factor that last year he had his own tech blog delve into the device manufacturing business for a bit, and created his own Linux-based tablet prototype, dubbed “The CrunchPad”. (That project ended rather abruptly due to his overseas partners running away with the device under rather dubious circumstances.)

So, do we have a winner?

Someone on Gillmor Gang (see link above) intoned: “April 3 2010, the day the laptop died – or at least became the walking dead.”

I would concur that sub-12-13″ laptops and netbooks have just been dealt a considerable blow.

And Windows 7 based tablet PCs are just not really very far beyond a basic Windows PC with some touch features enabled, it’s as of yet not an end-to-end offering. Microsoft appears to indirectly be acknowledging this by basically ditching Windows Mobile 6.5, and going back to the drawing board:

The (still) unfortunately named (and just “renamed”) Windows 7 Series Phone is pointing in the right direction, but Microsoft won’t have it ready until the fall/X-mas, which means a tablet offering based on it is unlikely to be forthcoming until some time next year at the earliest.

That leaves many as of yet un-announced Android/Chrome OS based tablets, we will have to see if any of those materialize before the X-mas shopping season. Either way, that leaves a lot of room for Apple to run away with the entire category.

If everyone who can afford one and wants this class of device is buying an iPad now, then category leadership kicks in, and could well keep Apple in cruise-control and above 50% market-share from here. Until an entirely new category of device makes the iPad obsolete. Maybe it will be something like this Sixth Sense Technology TED Talk, for example.

Despite my overall positive views of the iPad and relative excitement about the tablet form factor, I for one decided to hold off for a bit longer due to the detail issues described above, which as you can tell are quite different from the ubiquitous and nearly reflexive complaints of “no multitasking, no Adobe Flash, no camera”.

None of those weighed very heavily for me. We will see if maybe Dell’s Streak in a 7″ version running Android and allowing the use of Swype for text input will end up being everything I ever wanted in a tablet. That such an Android device very likely would also support multitasking, Flash, and a camera (the “Big 3 Complaints” about the iPad) would only fall under the rubric “bonus” for me.

Please add your own iPad usage experiences and research in the comments below. Did you get one? Will you? How about an Android based tablet?

Predictably orchestrated with Apple’s ingenious Archetype Branding, the secrecy has continued unabated, with iPad app developers with actual units in hand apparently having to guard them in a set-up that sounds like something out of a Tom Clancy spy novel:

Blacked out windows, iPads chained to physical desks, no-one-leaks-nothing (unless we want them to), etc.

Yet the pre-sales that started a few weeks ago have been going briskly, with up to 240,000 devices pre-sold for pick-up at Apple stores come Saturday. The remainder (rumors around supply problems continue, but are they put out there by Apple deliberately?) is held back for live store sales, which Apple needs in order to generate the by now pre-requisite Apple Store “I’m getting my iXYZ” camp-out scenes.

Social proof you couldn’t buy with all of the ad money in the world…

Much of the immediate knee-jerk criticism, which was almost inevitable due to the massive pre-announcement hype, seems to have dissipated. Not too many left in the Beavis-and-Butthead gallery left to snicker…”it’s called iPad…hehe” either (no one ever complained about “notepads” or similar before).

Daniel Lyons of Newsweek, one of the early critics, even had a massive change of heart recently as he explains in the digital pre-release of his upcoming news-stand article “Why the iPad Will Change Everything”:

Jobs calls it “a truly magical and revolutionary device,” and supposedly has told people close to him that the iPad is the most important thing he’s ever done.

Which is why so many of us raced to San Francisco in January to get an up-close view of the miraculous tablet. Yet my first thought, as I watched Jobs run through his demo, was that it seemed like no big deal. It’s a bigger version of the iPod Touch, right? Then I got a chance to use an iPad, and it hit me: I want one. Like the best Apple products, the user interface is so natural it disappears.

Elsewhere, the discussion is raging as to if, and if so how much, the iPad will change the fortunes of the deeply troubled publishing industry, especially for magazines, but for e/Books as well. After all, among many other things, the iPad is being positioned, or at least talked up as, a “Kindle Killer” (referring to Amazon’s efficient, yet somewhat ungainly and black-and-white-only eBook reader device).

The opinions range from “god-sent”, to “it won’t do much”. Scott Rosenberg argues: “For The Media Business, The iPad In 2010 Is The Same As The CD-ROM In 1994“, i.e. a relative dud.

Do I want one?

So, with all of that said, here are some of my own thoughts on use cases for the iPad, and why I’ve come around to wanting one myself before long:

Having recently made a number of trips to my local Fry’s store for sound equipment related purchases, I couldn’t help but look around the laptop and netbook section each time, including both Windows and Mac devices. And what I found is that the iPad makes more and more sense to me as a transitional device.

Netbooks simply appear as clunky little things, even with Windows 7 installed. And the manufacturing is pretty poor on all but the priciest of them, at which point they get near the iPad $499 mark.

Keep in mind that no netbook has 3G connectivity unless you buy one with a carrier contract attached to it. So to compare apples to apples (no pun intended), the price comparison should be with the WiFi only iPad for $499 (the one about to ship, the 3G version will ship a month from now).

Typing on them is OK but far from great. And for slow typists like myself, the iPad may actually become a god-sent, especially if we soon see add-on apps that leverage multi-touch for custom gestures autocomplete, and even possibly handwriting recognition.

A decent sized keyboard can always be added via Bluetooth, or the iPad keyboard dock. Personally, for on the go I would much prefer the idea of using the iPad protective case that doubles as a stand, and then using one of the nice Apple Bluetooth keyboards. The dock just seems fragile somehow, and the docking cradle sticks out enough to make you wonder about damaging it in your backpack.

Which brings me to the second class of devices I was perusing at Fry’s, compact 12-13″ laptops. There are some decent devices available starting at around $500-600.

But here’s the deal: the lower end one’s truly lack in manufacturing quality, such as the otherwise pretty handy HP Pavilion DM3. I really wanted to like it, but especially the silver plastic rim appears rickety, as does the largish black bezel around the slightly oddly-sized screen.

And unlike the iPad, there really is no excuse for the bezel as you’re not meant to hold the screen with your hands. I also briefly looked at Tablet PCs, and none had the kind of responsiveness of the screen that inspired much confidence. Windows 7 STILL doesn’t really seem to be optimized for the tablet form factor.

Now the HP Envy 13″ is a major step up in manufacturing quality, really HP’s first attempt at getting to parity with Apple Macbooks. And they did a really nice job.

It’s just that those start at around $1,500. Which puts them in in a totally different league than even the priciest 3G iPads. Same is true for Apple’s Macbook 13 and Air by the way ($1,200-1,500 and up), which I also looked at.

The thing is, as a long-time Windows user, it feels like the adjustment to the Mac OS idiosyncrasies isn’t worth my effort at this point. And that is where the genius of the iPad comes into play: It’s a totally new class of device, with the multi-touch interface already proven on the iPhone. Not an iPhone user myself (yet), I’ve been playing around with plenty of them from my friends and family.

And it all works well, except that the screen size really wasn’t to my taste for Web surfing, or for entering stuff through the mini on-screen keyboard. Presumably the iPad fixes both issues.

While it likely won’t be used much for writing full-length blog posts, it can definitely serve as a great Web and RSS reader, or to curate web snippets in ways better than can now be done laying on the couch with a 15″ full-size laptop (I am hoping Amplify’s great clipping bookmarklet and similar tools will work in Safari out of the box).

Really if you think about it, despite all of the “Apple Walled Garden” talk, the Safari browser is the application that opens up the iPad to anything on the Internet, including, yes, Gmail and all of the other Google products. No Flash, yes, but I have to admit that I’m with Steve on this one: Flash video tends to slow down even pretty powerful full-sized laptops.

Typing a few words for Search, Facebook, Twitter, it should all work. The more auto-completions, pre-populating boxes, and buttons the better.

And of course all of the apps instantly available through the iPhone app store, plus any newly designed specifically for the iPad, are not to be underestimated. Already TechCrunch is crowing that “Instapaper For The iPad May Be [Its] First Killer App. And It Will Be Universal.” And by all accounts, gaming apps will be big, even though I am personally not particularly interested.

And who knows, with Skype or similar add-ons, even your WiFi-only iPad may soon double up as a phone!? Presumably a Bluetooth headset should do the trick.

By the way, for all those that thought the (current) lack of a camera in the iPad body was a major disappointment, there are of course Bluetooth video cameras available. And it would seem to be only a matter of time until someone comes up with a Video-conferencing dock or cheaper clip-on camera as well.

And of course, Apple may yet ship iPad 2.0 with built-in camera, the software does already have all of the necessary hooks. Speaking of which, wouldn’t it be right in line with Apple’s secrecy and techno triumphalism, if it turned out that your iPad will have a built-in camera on April 3 after all?

OK, maybe that one is too much to hope for.

I for one will be sorely tempted to go for iPad 1.0, even though we pretty much know that 2.0 will be improved, and likely cheaper. I think playing with one from your early adopter friends or at the store will be the deciding factor.

If the thing works well enough even now, and there aren’t any major blow-up stories coming out in the first 1-2 months, just having the first-mover advantage may be worth getting it soon.

THE MOST PRODUCTIVE thing I’ve done this week is to use Gmail’s “More Actions/Filter items like these” to rid my inbox of spam and bacon emails, which makes my inbox much more useable.[...] I so want this same feature for Google Buzz. Imagine if you could say “get rid of Scoble anytime he talks about Twitter.” Or, if you could filter out something like any message that includes the words “Tiger Woods.”

Wouldn’t you want this too?

I’ve been thinking about filtering a lot since I became a regular user of Twitter and Friendfeed in 2008/2009. Here is my riff on this question, expanded from my initial comments over on Buzz:

Yes, intelligent filtering is the future. If Google Buzz can pull off per keyword, per user (or per group) filtering, they will win. It is a huge flaw in Twitter that I basically still have to view all (follow) or nothing (unfollow or block) from a given user, and if I choose “all”, then everything arrives with the same priority.

This is simply not how we’re going to overcome information overload. Remember that in an information economy, attention becomes the only scarce resource. So it is worth saving and protecting your attention. On Twitter or any other social media or wider “information stream”-type of service.

(Yes, that includes Email as well. Your email is simply yet another inbound information stream you consume. Sometimes you reply to something, sometimes you forward something.)

Whoever does the best job in helping you to do this has a true business proposition, and will be rewarded by the marketplace. (Here is a nice summation of the problem by Louis Gray in slide deck format.)

Now the reverse case is also important: Per user (or per group) surfacing (“track”) of keywords, that pops items of key interest to you to the top of the heap of your inbound stream, past all others.

E.g. when Scoble talks about “Twitter Lists”, on ANY service I am aggregating, I want to know.

(For the purposes of this discussion, I am assuming for this to happen on Buzz. But it could be anywhere else as well. Buzz just happens to be in a position of being able to 1) be relatively unencumbered by ingrained user habits, since it is so new. And 2) have the assembled computing and engineering power of Google behind it.)

Now Friendfeed was getting close, but never put all of the pieces of the puzzle that they had together in a truly usable form. Specifically, it was (really is, as it’s still running, yet not being developed anymore) not letting saved searches be piped back into its “Friend Lists” (their name for their grouping of users).

And the saved searches (“filters” really if you think about it) themselves were stripping too much usable meta-information from the results items, as to then still be as useful in a “high priority inbound” stream. E.g. no Twitter avatars imported from Twitter Search keyword feeds, asf.

There is much heated discussion on Buzz right now on whether people’s Twitter streams imported into Buzz are polluting Buzz with noise. But this discussion is really missing the point, as information overload is never a failure of the sources, only of the FILTERING!

Because there are likely to be important items coming from Twitter that I absolutely do want to see right away, only on Twitter it’s still near impossible to manage that.

(Twitter has shown little interest in providing a more granular search experience, e.g. search on your friends only, or per List only. A current workaround is ListiMonkey.com Alerts, but that goes to your email inbox, hardly a real-time environment. And desktop clients like Tweetdeck are also of limited help, because their search/filter function for groups/Lists requires that you have those opened up as a column.)

Have you yourself experienced instances where you saw a link to a story days or even weeks after it was first published, and felt that you really would have wanted to see this information right as it became available? Tons of really useful stuff is floating by us, as we simultaneously complain about too much noise in our inbound social media.

EVERYTHING is potentially polluting your Buzz inbound stream, IF it has you miss some key item you really did want to see right away.

I am currently only following a little less than 200 users or so on Buzz, and there is already way too much to scroll through (even without Twitter items) to not waste a lot of time, and keep me from seeing the things I could/should be seeing instead.

Robert Scoble deserves thanks for tirelessly bringing this stuff up, he was already at the forefront of the discussion over on Friendfeed, back before that service was bought out by Facebook and for all intensive purposes “mothballed”.

I believe that Buzz itself will thrive or wither based on whether they can outdo the baseline that Friendfeed set with their attempts at filtering. And on how quickly they can move to iron out the considerable feature lag and mistakes before people lose interest.

Again, one would think Google could pull it off on the engineering side of things, as long as they listen to and learn on the social, user centric side as well.

While on the subject of filtering, productivity, and Email (since Buzz is – sort of – integrated with Google’s Gmail) that Robert raised, how would it be if key inbound emails on a per user basis would pop into your Buzz stream (e.g. your direct reports, bosses, key clients, spouse, etc.)?

It would really just be another surfacing filter as described above. Who cares that the text/images/content was sent to you via email/SMTP protocol. It could be just another Buzz source (like your Twitter, flickr image, and Google Reader RSS streams right now), only these email “posts” would have to be private.

You can already create Buzz posts by emailing them to buzz@gmail.com from your attached Gmail account, which is a standard that started with the mini-blogging services like Tumblr and Posterous. You can also click “email [this]” on any Buzz post, and while the interface is still a little clunky, your a Gmail message write box will insert itself under the post for you to send the message:

You can see that it is not very far from there to place your key emails (by surfacing filter) into your Buzz stream. The key to making things really usable is that Buzz would need to offer handling options intelligently based on what the inbound source is.

For email, show reply/forward/etc. but also maybe a “Rebuzz” (with caution, assuming it’s appropriate), asf. The latter could speed up the current lag of moving stuff from email systems back onto the Web.

That’s where Friendfeed was failing, because it didn’t have a Retweet button on Twitter items, etc. If Buzz were to become a better Twitter client than Tweetdeck or Seesmic, WITH good persistence, archiving, detailed discussions beyond 140 characters, WHITESPACE in comments (thank you Google!), and powerful search of everything you aggregate into it, then who’s going to stop them? They could run the table.

For right now, one has to improvise, e.g. with a little application called BuzzCanTweet.com to send one’s Buzz posts back over to Twitter. This kind of thing had really already become fundamental, and yet Buzz doesn’t have any outbound forwarding besides email to start. Instead, a young guy from Sweden had to set up this work-around.

OK, back to the integration issue: While we’re at it, why not have your Google Alerts pop into your Buzz stream, instead of emailing you as it does right now? (Or have a filter set to pop those Alert emails into your stream as described above.) The possibilities for integration of various Google services appear wide open.

If Buzz can keep driving deep integration with other Google services, and thereby out-innovate the competition, it will go far. Filtering and the email integration could make Buzz the near undisputed inbound stream to manage your social media attention, and really possibly most of your online attention.

For that to happen however, the Buzz team will have to put on the afterburners. Google should be able to pull it off engineering-talent-wise. The question is, will they have finely enough tuned social sensors & vision to do this?

The opening salvo of misjudged privacy issues, urgently missing features, or unthinking adoption of some of the most problematic features from Friendfeed, certainly made one wonder if Google can ever get social right. Is there a social tone-deafness that jinxed all of its previous attempts besides the YouTube purchase (Jaiku, Dodgeball, Orkut, Wave, etc.)?

Let’s hope for our scarce attention’s sake that Google can get it right this time, and apply its unquestioned engineering talent in ways that actually become truly useful to social media. Filtering will be the key.

Given the overwhelming, ever-exponentially-growing flood of information in the age of the Internet, being able to perform sophisticated searches is becoming so important that it isn’t too far-fetched to call it a literacy issue. Without these skills, you are in a sense in danger of becoming functionally illiterate in this brave new world.

Those individuals (and by extension businesses) with advanced search skills will be running circles around those without, because it saves so much time to search intelligently, and because a lot of answers can be found that are simply impossible to find otherwise. In a way, this separation into the search haves and have-nots has already been occurring over the last 5+ years.

And by the way, all of this isn’t simply about Google. Not at all. In a moment, I am going to walk you through a number of examples of advanced searches, and some of the tricks and techniques underlying them. But before I do, let me stress one other thing:

Even if you do only the most simple of "everyday" keyword searches, you are already going in the right direction. In fact, if you aren’t doing it already, make it a point for the next two weeks to stop yourself at every turn and ask: "Could I be doing a search right now to speed this up?"

I think you’ll find that the answer is almost always YES, and that it will be well worth your while to develop this as a new habit (a habit takes about 30 days of repetition to form).

Simply search for everything, and avoid using "manual" searching, i.e. avoid scrolling through documents, web pages, and lists both with your mouse and visually, asf. to find passages/names/etc. you’re looking for. Search options exist in Word, in your browser, on blogs, on Twitter, on Facebook, everywhere. Yet often we don’t use them, and the authors of software/Web tools don’t put sufficient front-and-center emphasis on search capabilities/ease-of-use.

For example, in your browser, never again manually search through long Blog comment threads or other large pages/articles manually, use your browser’s "Find" function and type the first few letters of your name or keyword, etc.

Granted, Gen-Yers on average are likely far ahead of all older generations when it comes to matter-of-cause use of Google, etc., however I doubt that even they know in large numbers about the kind of in depth, advanced search I am about to show you.

General Search Operator Considerations

Let’s first consider the most important search techniques by way of the so-called search operators. These may sometimes be accessible indirectly through a Web form under the heading of "Advanced Search", but originally they represent a kind of mini-programming language for telling the Search Engines what you want them to bring back. (Search Engines from here on shall include the "Search Function" in Web services other than stand-alone search engines.)

These are the "logical"/Boolean operators you may remember from math class or Logic 101 (fun, I know, but you really want to know a leetle bit about this, at least in these practical applications). Why know about these when you could also get most of the same results from using the Advanced Search forms?

Remember, this is about LITERACY. You want to become fluent in a secret language of sorts, and true command and mastery only come from truly delving into the heart of the matter. Plus, you will find that it is almost always faster to type queries into one search box than typing bits and pieces into Advanced Search forms which tend to look a little different for each service.

So let’s get started. I have made all of the examples clickable links, so that you can study the results. All results should be very similar on Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft’s Bing (formerly Live):

1) Nearly any search engine will assume by default that any separate words you type into the search box are meant as a logical AND, as in "show me all results matching BOTH this word-1 AND this word-2", though it may be in any order, and the words may be quite a distance from each other in the actual text.

You can usually place an AND operator without making a difference, e.g. for clarity in reading your search query, but mostly it will just look like this:

personal branding tips

2) To get a true phrase, a FIXED sequence of several words to match, you have to use ” ” (quotes) around the multi-word search term. Note that some search engines including Google will often bring a direct hit for a phrase to the top of the results heap, even if you didn’t use the quotes. But it’s not guaranteed, so using quoted phrases is much more precise, assuming that is what you are looking for. E.g.

"personal branding expert"

vs. personal branding expert

You can verify for yourself that this is more precise, by clicking both the quoted version and then the non-quoted one in Google, and comparing the number of results returned, in this case about 12,500 vs. 10 Million results (the count is in near the upper right corner in Google):

3) To get a logical OR (also called "inclusive OR"), as in "show me ALL the results matching this word-1 OR this word-2 OR this word-3", you simply type in "OR" between the keywords, or between keyword phrases in quotes:

"personal branding" OR "social branding" OR brand

Some search engines like FriendFeed’s Search also use a "," (comma) to represent an OR. (Either way, be sure to distinguish this OR from the so-called "Exclusive OR", which in essence says: Find only those results that have either Word-1 or Word-2, but not both". As far as I know, none of the search engines support this. Basically it would be like running to separate searches.)

4) Many search engines have an exclusion function using the "-" (dash/hyphen) operator followed by the keyword, phrase, or sometimes additional operator that you want excluded from the results. This in essence says: "Find all of the results for this word-1 except for those also containing word-2". E.g.

Yahoo: branding -"personal branding" -skin

Google: branding -"personal branding" -skin

would find all results containing branding, but not those also containing "personal branding", or those likely referring to skin branding instead of the marketing related kind. This would be a good search to narrow down results to those talking about corporate branding only (though you might find more exclusion terms to refine it even further).

By the way, there is typically no limit to the number of exclusions, though there may be a limit to the overall length of the query string you can submit to the search engine.

OK, with these preliminaries out of the way, let’s dig into the finer details of various key search engines or search functions on key services. Let’s start with Twitter, since it currently has the most buzz around its "Real-time Web Search" possibilities:

Twitter Search

Twitter Search is for now referring to search.twitter.com, as the Twitter Web interface integrated version is currently still somewhat limited/buggy in the result sets it returns. You are basically searching over every single public status update ("tweet") by any user, starting from the current moment and going backward over Twitter’s timeline. (If you are unfamiliar with Twitter or Twitter Search, read up on it here.)

Twitter Search allows all of the search operators already discussed, and additionally for the following:

1) "keyword(s) filter:links" – will seek out tweets containing the keyword or phrases and 1 or more links only. Nearly the same can be accomplished by searching for “http://”, though that will miss the few live links that Twitter recognizes from “www.domain.com/extension” type links.

It can largely be assumed that a tweet containing a link is more useful than one without, more likely to be chatter, unless the tweet is so sharp/witty/deep/inspirational that it would qualify as a quote (of course sometimes you may want to specifically look at the conversational chatter only – example of that further down):

"personal branding" filter:links

2) "from:username" and "to:username" – both of these can be very useful to query over your own tweetstream by topic/keyword, e.g. to find old tweets that you know you wrote, you know you wrote to somebody (containing certain link resources, etc.). Of course you can put any username you choose, and can therefore in principle back-trace all conversations between two users (each can only be used once in a given query).

You can also see if two users have been talking via Twitter’s so-called "@ replies" at all. If there’s no result returned, there was likely no direct communication, or at least recently:

from:unmarketing to:missive

As long as Twitter keeps back-data fully available in Search (currently, Twitter is unfortunately only letting you search back anywhere from 7 to 30 days depending on server loads), you could also use Twitter as a natural form of personal bookmarking this way. Nearly all of the “tags” are applied without extra work, simply as part of your tweets. A workaround to this problem of the backwards time limit is to also use FriendFeed and import your tweets there. FriendFeed currently places no such limitation. More below.

3) Searching for so-called hashtags – a keyword prefixed by "#" (pound sign) – is a way of detecting additional intentionality about tweets. Either it serves as a point of emphasis/visibility by the author (since a common keyword like "#branding" or "#quote" would still show up in a search results even without the specific # prefix), or more commonly, if the hashtag is a unique abbreviation, it serves as a sort of code to be specifically searched for by those that know about it.

This is most commonly done for conferences (recent examples are #140tc and #twtrcon), for ongoing weekly Twitter-based discussions around a given topic, e.g.

#journchat

is for journalism discussions on Monday evenings U.S. Time, or as a meme that becomes self-replicating enough that people participate, and the hashtag gets into the Top 10 "trending" keywords/phrases on Twitter for a while.

Either way, the authors of tweets using hashtags went to the trouble of using the # symbol and/or created a hashtag to highlight something. Use that knowledge to your advantage when searching.

4) "since:timestamp" and "until:timestamp" will allow you to segment out tweets from a specific day or number of days, as needed. This can be useful if you wanted to e.g. view only those tweets for a conference that were actually sent during the duration of the conference, and leave out the chatter before or after, which is e.g. less likely to contain "twitter-casting" of the actual conference panels.

#140conf since:2009-06-16 until:2009-06-17

5) "near:city-name" – this operator will find tweets that originated from a user account that Twitter thinks is the city name you are referring to. Since this is going off of users’ self-reported location field in their profile (and NOT off of some precise geo-tagging a la iPhone location, though Twitter is reportedly working on that), which is free text, and for some contains things like multiple cities, "everywhere", "The Interwebs", asf. this is not particularly precise, but it can still work in aggregate. E.g.

#140conf since:2009-06-16 until:2009-06-17 near:sf

will find all tweets about the TwtrCon Conference that were placed by users based out of San Francisco, though Twitter has no idea (yet) whether they were at the conference in New York or just talking about it.

5) To bring it all together, and for a special tip, we should also consider the so-called Retweet convention on Twitter, a format which allows one to quickly copy & paste a given (useful, funny, etc.) tweet from another user, and forward it on to our own Twitter network of followers, while giving credit to the original author. E.g. I tweeted

"RT @mvolpe: New Blog Post: Are Your Compelling Offers Actually..Compelling? http://tinyurl.com/mlbzw4"

giving credit to user @mvolpe, and used the "RT" prefix to signify the retweet. This is actually a convention that spontaneously arose from the user base (another format uses "via @username", used most often if the tweet text is sufficiently altered, but credit for the find is still meant to be conveyed).

What this means for our searches is that we can either search specifically for "RT OR via" to find tweets that were deemed worthy of retweeting (there are actually entire third-party services set up keeping track of these counts, and thereby surfacing tweets according to their presumed repetition popularity), or, we can exclude those tweets to avoid a lot of duplicates!

So here is a great way to cut down on overly large result sets, taking out most "link-less" chatter and Retweet duplications, as well as "psychology jobs" related postings:

psychology filter:links -RT -via -job -jobs

[As an aside, though still search literacy/awareness relevant:

I use this very example query above, and then pipe the RSS feed from the result into a somewhat more permanent receptacle such as FriendFeed or a Tumblr mini-blog. Remember, Twitter might (and currently does) cut off the backwards reach of your result sets, currently during heavy daytime loads it’s at most about 7 days back. This presents a real problem for your own research/archiving purposes.

Part of the reason may be that Twitter is thinking about making long-range backward data mining a “for pay” feature that large corporate marketing agencies, etc. may pay them a lot of money for (obviously not if they could access everything for free through Search.twitter.com). Only time will tell, though I think it is definitely important for the community to be aware of this possible issue.]

Or, here is another complex example to search for the term "mashable" while excluding tweets from the username "mashable", any @ mentions (or replies to) username "mashable", and tweets with links. Remember how I said earlier that you could do exclusions on some operators? This is an example of that:

mashable -from:mashable -"@mashable" -filter:links

This could be used so that you see what people are saying about Mashable, the blog, that is NOT one of the countless retweets of @mashable, not a tweet from "@mashable" himself, and doesn’t include links to further content. In other words, what people are saying about that brand the most raw and unvarnished form.

FriendFeed Search

OK, upon writing this section on FriendFeed power search, I realized that this post was getting to be really long. So rather than overload everyone, I figured I’d push this and the section on Google search tricks into a follow-up post in a few days.

I hope you found this enlightening, and that you take the time to practice advanced search. To become "fluent" and fully "search literate", you will need to practice. I know that saying this in our ADD world is somewhat of a bummer, but the payoff, especially for your business, can be tremendous. Remember, running circles around your competition and all of that…

1) I found a stats plugin to use that works well with the REUS install after a few custom tweaks. Some minor modifications to the database calls and the reporting page to allow for more tracking on recent links, and the WP-Shortstats plugin has been performing flawlessly. I have included it with custom changes in the new REUS .zip package (link at end of this post).

Best thing is, the stats data belongs to YOU, no one can hold it hostage (unlike e.g. Budurl.com, which wants to only allow you to download your stats with a paid account). Also note that many 3rd party services’ stats solutions tend to lack good comparative screens, overviews, or ordering by e.g. "all-time highest clicks", and so forth:

With REUS you can watch your clicks roll in in near real-time as shown here (you’ll have to hit refresh in the "Admin > Dashboard > Shortstats" screen to update). No fancy graphics like world maps, etc., but the information you really need to assess the success of your links:

2) Using your own short domain looks custom and gets attention. As you can tell from the above screenshot, people get curious about your custom/novel shorterner URL, and navigate to the "/" root quite often on first use. To make this useful/profitable for you, one key manual update that needs to be made to the "/wordpress/wp-content/themes/redirect_engine/index.php" file is to set up redirection of "/" to your blog or other page of your choice. 

So in my example an inquisitive user would type in "http://3on.us/", which for my set-up redirects them to the original REUS post on my blog.

3) You can create links that you completely determine the URL appearance of, both as to the domain (which will seem pretty custom vs. the publicly available services), as well as to the link extension, which can now be at least semi-sensible:

Keep in mind that a non-sense link is harder to process for the brain, and "a confused mind always says No!" as they say. So people are less likely to click. Meaningful URLs do have higher click-through rates from what I can tell so far, and marketing savants such as StomperNet’s Brad Fallon seem to agree (and guys like him test everything!).

Here is another bit of proof. This screen cap is a stat taken from celebrity Internet marketer Joel Comm’s TwitPwr.com URL shortening service:

What it shows is that the total average click-through for all TwitPwr.com links is just under 8 (about 160k / 20k), and his list of user includes some pretty illustrious company with largish follower counts. As my own stats screenshot from above shows, my REUS links have been pulling well above that on an average of about 1,000 followers over the last 4 weeks:

147 links have been clicked 3438 times on Twitter and a few other sources, for an average of just under 24 clicks per link. Not bad (and yes, I did subtract out the "/" root inquiries and robots.txt hits; and robots.txt disallows all further search engine bot access).

Granted there are many variables that come into play that make a simple 1-to-1 comparison difficult, including the fact that Twitter users may be slightly more reluctant to click on TwitPwr.com links due to the slightly, shall we say, "promotional" nature of that service. But the numbers are still pretty convincing, especially given the follower advantage for many TwitPwr users.

4) URLs can be shortened further on the fly due to…

…Wordpress’ post slug tolerance, e.g. "3on.us/roll-tinyurl" will still work as "3on.us/roll-t" in case you had to save even more space to fit into 140 characters on Twitter. By the way, if a duplicate match should arise due to lobbing off too much from a link extension, Wordpress/REUS will default to the earliest URL/post found:

5) Just about all of the other URL shortener Bookmarklets disallow for creating custom extensions, even if the main service does! To get this feature, you will have to manually copy/paste the URL to be shortened into their home page, etc. Try it out yourself with e.g. tr.im, their bookmarklet does not appear to allow for customizing the link the way that the tr.im Web interface does, and it cannot be edited after the initial save.

Whereas the REUS Wordpress-based solution leverages Wordpress’ own "Press This" bookmarklet to make custom extensions without copy/paste possible (as described in the original post and the new install instructions).

6) By owning your own Tinyurl service, you know that your links/stats won’t one day go out of business (in this economy, you never know…), just as long as YOU are still in business. And you can back up all of your links and stats, and could even run them locally from your own computer, just in case you were forced to give up your main hosting account and could no longer afford the $10/year for the add-on domain used for your REUS install (let’s just assume right now that that will NEVER happen…).

7) To recap some of the benefits already described in the original post, with REUS you can create links as short or even shorter than the shortest http://is.gd etc. link, because you could choose to have the link extension only be one character, e.g. "http://3on.us/x" (limited supply of those of course).

Some of the services already waste an extra 2 characters or more in the domain name, e.g. "budurl.com", "twurl.nl", "twitpwr.com", etc. With REUS, if you get yourself a 3 character .us domain to install on, you will have up to 16 charaters for the link extension and still be within Twitter’s 30 character link length limit.

I’ve also found that I was able to quickly commit to memory some of my most-used links with shorter/memorable names, so that I could easily type them in manually in certain situations, for example in some blog comments.

8) If you are using marketing related link tracker services such as aWeber.com or 1shoppingcart.com, you can in principle use your new REUS to replace those as well. For that type of use you would also not be constrained by the extension length as much (e.g. in Email), and could use even more descriptive link extensions, e.g. "http://3on.us/grab-your-free-copy-here".

9) You are free of the various idiosyncracies of other 3rd party shortener services. For example, both Tinyurl and is.gd truncate your "#[anchor name/id]" on-page-anchor entensions (not sure why), like those used to direct straight to a specific comment on a blog post page.

10) I have built a character counter into the custom "press-this.php" file (called by the "Press-This" bookmarklet), that comes with the REUS distribution. This makes it faster to create exactly the right link length (after I found myself doing a lot of counting initially) that will still display without Twitter abbreviating your link with an "…" ellipsis. As already mentioned, in the case of my example domain "3on.us", I have exactly 16 characters left to stay within Twitters 30 character limit.

All while typically having the link extension prepopulated with candidate terms and phrases from the post/page Title (if present in the Title tag) that can easily be edited down to the desired length.

—-

So, 10 good reasons to get your own REUS install. It’s completely free, no strings attached. If you use Twitter and care about the links you post there, you really might want to give it a whirl.

Here is the link for the updated REUS distribution:

http://businessmindhacks.com/v/redirect_engine.zip

Here is the link to the original REUS post again, as well as a link to an "install instructions only, no rationales" version.

Enjoy!

—

OK, haven’t posted in a little while, in part because I had been working on some pretty cool techy stuff. Here is the first result from it:

Have you been using URL shortening/redirection services like TinyURL, is.gd, etc. in order to send lengthy links to friends in a shorter format, or to fit them into the space-constricted posting fields on micro-blogging services such as Twitter?

If you have, and you’re a marketer, you have probably been wishing that you could track the number of clicks on those links you post to Twitter, or improve the appearance of the link text, etc.

While there are some services available that allow you to do some of that, such as Tweetburner.com which creates a trackable “http://twurl.nl/…” style link, they almost all have one drawback or another, e.g. they 1) don’t allow for custom link text (Tweetburner), 2) sometimes truncate your original link’s # anchors if present (is.gd), 3) don’t allow for tracking, 4) want your Twitter credentials to allow for tracking, and 5) they all end up kind of owning your data.

So I figured, if there was a fast/cheap solution to set the same thing up for yourself, so that you control all of the variables, that would be a good thing, no? You will see in a moment how it can be accomplished using a basic Wordpress 2.7 blogging software installation. Now you’ll likely still use other services to auto-shorten links as well, but when you want to make it count, and want your shortened link on your terms, I bet you’ll like what I have cooked up for you.

The Instructions

Let’s take it step-by-step. Note that I won’t get too in depth with basic technical explanations, I’ll assume that you are familiar with FTP and have already done a standard Wordpress install before. If you’re new to Wordpress, I’d recommend hiring someone to do these steps for you, they should bill you for at most 1 hour as you will see.

I am posting the expected time to complete with each step:

1) You will need to buy a .us domain to install as an add-on domain with one of your existing hosting accounts. I used a http://Bluehost.com account for this, they have reasonable prices and service, but use any hosting/domain provider you would like. Note that it’s not worth getting a separate hosting account just for this engine, and an add-on domain should only cost about $8-10 per year.

Search for short, 3-4 character .us domains, as you’ll obviously want to save space. I found that there are still plenty of 3 character semi- to non-sensical domain names available with one or two numerals in the name, e.g. I picked 3on.us for my test case.

Once purchased, …

… install the domain in your hosting account’s domain manager as an “Add-on domain”, which should also create a new directory under your public_html directory, in my case I simply chose “3on”. This is what the process looked like in a CPanel hosting account:

— Time: 10 minutes (depending on how long you search around for a domain you like :).

2) Now simply download a copy of Wordpress (WP) 2.7, and install it on the newly created directory, so that the directory structure will read “/public_html/3on/wordpress/…” (structure shown below is how it should look in your FTP client program, obviously with your own directory name)

Go through a normal WP 2.7 install including setting up the database and editing wp-config.php, if you’re using Fantastico to automate this, just make sure that the install directory is the new one you want.

Either way, make sure you select option “no search engines” during the install, as this will avoid your stats getting falsified by frequent search engine hits on your redirect/link shortening engine. The “Settings > Privacy” panel should later look as shown below, verify and if necessary adjust after the installation:

— Time: 10 minutes.

3) Upon install, log into the WP admin panel, and edit “Settings > General” as shown in the screenshot below (obviously with your own domain name).

You’ll also need to do one more manual step to copy the “/wordpress/index.php” into the new domain’s root directory, i.e. “/3on/index.php” and change the path inside the file as described in the link right next to “Blog Address URL”:

Enter the address here if you want your blog homepage to be different from the directory you installed WordPress.

The point being that you need your blog to respond at the domain level without any further path, i.e. “http://3on.us/” and NOT “http://3on.us/blog/”, etc. which would obviously be counterproductive to our link shortening agenda.

— Time: 2 minutes.

3) Now that Wordpress is installed, go to “Settings > Permalinks”, and select “Custom Structure”, placing “/%postname%” into the field by that option. This will append your redirect “post” names directly to the domain, e.g. “http://3on.us/testlink” — Time: 1 minute.

— Time: 1 minute.

4) We’re now coming to the heart of the matter the modifications needed to have your Wordpress install act as a redirect engine. I’ve packaged the necessary files as a Wordpress Theme, download them here:

http://businessmindhacks.com/v/redirect_engine.zip

Then extract the .zip file, and FTP upload the “redirect_engine” folder into your “/wordpress/wp-content/themes/” directory as you would any other theme. Activate the theme by going to “Appearance > Themes”, then selecting “Wordpress REUS” by clicking on the theme’s screenshot or link, and finally clicking “Activate Wordpress REUS” in the upper right hand corner.

If you are interested in the code that makes the redirection work, look at the “single.php” file. It’s really quite simple. Also note that “page.php” contains the same code, so you can in principle use pages to create redirect links as well. However, you won’t be able to use the “Press This” bookmarklet we’re about to discuss to do so, as it defaults to “Post”. Use the “Pages > Add” menu instead if you’re so inclined (e.g. to keep certain links separate from your everyday links).

— Time: 5 minutes.

5) Now that the redirection is in place, we just want to make it a bit more convenient. This is where leveraging Wordpress’ “Press This” bookmarklet feature comes into play:

First, go to the “Tools > Tools” menu, and there locate the “Press This” bookmarklet link as shown. Then drag & drop it onto your Bookmarks Toolbar (in FireFox, which is the only browser I’ve tested this in, but IE should work similarly).

— Time: 1 minute.

6) You are now ready to test the new bookmarklet. Simply go to any web page you would like to shorten the URL for, and then click on the bookmarklet button in your Bookmarks Toolbar (obviously that Toolbar needs to be visible):

You will see a popup as follows (and may have to give your new wordpress site permission to open pop-ups, you’ll want to do this):

Note that you will have to be logged into your Wordpress install as “admin”, else you’ll be asked to log in first. Change the “post” title at the top to your desired link name, like in the following example (the post’s “slug”, which is the actual term for the link extension in Wordpress, is created automatically; note that any uppercase letters will be converted to lowercase and any spaces turned into a hyphen (-):

Then press the “Publish” button in the right bottom corner of the pop-up. Done! Your shortened redirect link has been created.

Note that the custom code for “single.php” arranges it so that the URL will automatically be parsed out of the “post” content (the live link shown above), while the link text (e.g. “Twitter Raising Money…” ) will be used as a post title/description in case you choose to pass this shortened URL on to Twitter. You can change this descriptive text in the form shown above, just make sure that you don’t accidentally delete the entire link (and thereby the underlying URL).

You will see the following output:

Now the “TwitterThis!” option won’t be visible to you yet until you do one more custom change to Wordpress I’ll describe in a moment, but you will already be able to copy & paste the newly created short link by right-clicking on “View Post” and selecting “Copy Link Location” (“Copy Shortcut” in IE):

You will also be able to see you newly created “post” that is the basis of your short link in the “Posts > Edit” screen, where you can do the same copy & paste maneuver as above from the “View” option that appears as you hover over the individual post row in the table:

Or click the “View” link to test that your redirect actually works.

Note that you can also rename the bookmarklet itself in your browser’s Bookmark Toolbar by right-clicking, selecting “Properties”, and changing the “Name” to your desired option, e.g. “MyShortLink” in case you’re using the “Press This” bookmarklet for other Wordpress blog installations or yours.

OK, this was the long version of testing, let’s say it takes you a few minutes the first time. Once you have done it several times, this should take you only about 30 seconds anymore.

— Time: 3 minutes.

7) Now comes the last step to enable the “TwitterThis!” option on the “Press This” result pop-up as was shown above. Locate the file “press-this.php” in the directory “/wordpress/wp-admin” and rename it to “press-this.php.old” or similar. Now go to the REUS theme directory “/wordpress/wp-content/themes/redirect_engine” and find the “press-this.php” file there. Then copy that file into the “/wordpress/wp-admin” directory.

Done. I tried to find a more elegant solution for this step, but there didn’t seem to be any as far as adding the extra bit of code through the Wordpress action model, etc. If you know of a way that this could have been done in a more automated way, please contact me. Thanks.

Alright, here is what you will see when you click on “TwitterThis!” in the “Press This” pop-up (assuming that you are already logged into Twitter, else it will prompt you to log in before passing you on):

Basically, the status field will show the link text which will typically be the linked post’s title for most blogs, as well as your brand-new shortened link with the readable extension. Here is what the Twitter status (the “tweet”) will look like after you hit “update”:

As you can see, Twitter did NOT alter the link itself in any way, this will be the case as long as you keep it at a total of 30 characters or less, else it may be adjusted with an ellipsis (“…”) or turned into a Tinyurl.com style link by Twitter.

In my example, we have 7 characters for “http://”, 7 for the “3on.us/” domain name plus forward slash, leaving 16 characters for the link extension (the post name as described above). “twittervaluation” is exactly 16 characters as it happens, so we know it works. When I tested “twitter-valuation” (17 characters) the link had a bit cut off at the end by Twitter with the “…” ellipsis when the actual tweet was displayed.

— Time: 3 minutes.

So what did we gain?

First, by my count, the whole thing should have only taken about 35 minutes or so. If you are not as handy with Wordpress installs, FTP, etc. and want to hire someone to do this whole bit for you, my guess is that they’d have a hard time justifying more than 1 hour of billed time.

Second, you now have a completely flexible redirection engine / URL shortening (REUS, kind of sappy, I know) device, that

1) Can create links 2 characters shorter than even the shortest http://is.gd link, because you could choose to have the link extension only be one character, e.g. “http://3on.us/x” (obviously you’ll have only a limited supply of those…). Note also that is.gd does truncate your “#” on page anchor entensions, like those used to direct straight to a specific comment on a blog post page. Score another one for REUS…

2) Can create links that you completely determine the URL appearance of, both as to the domain (which will seem pretty custom vs. the publicly available services), as well as to the link extension, which can now be at least be semi-sensible.

If you are used to using the link tracker services of aWeber.com or 1shoppingcart.com, or have seen those in list emails sent to you, you can in principle use your new REUS to replace those as well. For that use you would also not be constrained by the extension length as much, and could use even more descriptive link text, e.g. “http://3on.us/grab-your-free-copy-here”.

3) I am working on a stats solution using an already available “Wordpress Stats” plugin as we speak, I will update you as soon as I’ve verified everything. Once that is in place, you will have stats for your REUS. In the meantime, you can use the Stats tools available from your hosting account, such as “Webalizer” or “Awstats” in CPanel, just turn them on for the new domain and you should be able to view your click-throughs. Either way, the data belongs to YOU.

I would hope you agree: Not too bad…

The “theme” is being submitted to Wordpress.org later today, I will keep you posted when it officially becomes available from their site.

UPDATE: OK, seems like this is a little over the Wordpress.org Theme Team’s heads, they didn’t know what to make of the REUS “theme” and rejected it (so far) on the grounds that “This is way too much work to setup a theme.” Even though the only truly exceptional step is the replacement of the “press-this.php” with our custom version. Oh well, no big deal, it is small enough (about 30KB zipped) to easily host from my own hosting account. Here is the link again:

http://businessmindhacks.com/v/redirect_engine.zip

In happier news, I found a stats plugin to use that works relatively well out of the box to get some statistics going for your REUS install. It’s appropriately named “WP-ShortStats” and can be downloaded here. I will talk to the creators and see if they’d like to make a small modification to the reporting page (“Dashboard > ShortStat”) to allow for more tracking on each link, i.e. showing all of the referrers. Or else I’ll make some custom adjustments myself when I find the time. I’ll keep you posted.

Related to what I wrote near the beginning, it turns out that “Budurl.com” kind of holds your click-through stats hostage, you can only download them with a paid account. One more reason to use REUS…

—

Just released UsernameCheck.com is a great way to get a quick read on how diligently you have been staking your claim to Web 2.0/Social Marketing properties.

Just go to their site, and enter your desired real name, pen names (or other, sort of "branded" usernames you like to use), company name(s), or even product name(s), and see what is still available on currently 68 services listed.

If you go to the site and enter "alexschleber", you will see that I have been doing my homework over the last year: All but two or three of the "taken" entries belong to me. (By the way, you can also use my list as a template for which services are currently more important than others.)

Here is a partial screen-capture of the results…

Why is this relevant you ask?

Simple: Think of each new service as a new "namespace" (this is a kind of techy term used for programming variables), the idea that there can only be one copy of a distinct name available per such a namespace. So if e.g. Wordpress.com offers domains for their members that look like "alexschleber.wordpress.com", or e.g. Twitter uses twitter.com/alexschleber, then you either get that one name or you don’t (same as with regular .com domain names).

If you fail to reserve it for yourself, you may be left with only the less usable "scraps": Names containing hyphens, underscores, and numbers, all of which tend to make things more cumbersome, especially for spelling the name to others via phone or in person.

Secondly, even if you don’t really want to use a given service, if it is of much relevance at all (notice that I have NOT subscribed to every service on Usernamecheck.com’s list), you may still wish to preempt someone else from owning a specific name on that service, who could then turn around and publish or otherwise create information under a that name.

In part, because most of these services, once successful, have a tendency to rank very high up in Google’s (and other serch engines’) search results. So a potential customer, client, investor, or interviewer might have to sort through reams of search listings that may or may not be about you (and that you might have to explain, which is always cumbersome and never helps with that vital first impression).

Now of course if you have a very common name, it is unlikely that you’ll be able to do much about getting it on any of these services. However, at least some of the other spellings with hyphens, etc. may still be available, which is better than nothing if you want to use a given service. However, for your company name or even products you may want to brand/promote separately, you have no excuse to not reserve these.

So, let your great "namespace" land grab of 2008 begin…

On a sidenote, this is a great of example of how to execute a presentation slide deck so that it speaks for itself. Use it as a model for your own presentations:

For several months now I have watched the discussion on the Wordpress.org support forums – especially about the much maligned admin back-end changes, run a security "back-porting" experiment to keep my heavily customized version of 2.3.3 viable, and put 2.5.x through its paces to see what it does and doesn’t do.

All along, I’ve been taking copious screen-caps to help build my case. And at least for me, the verdict is in: Wordpress 2.5.x has been largely a mistake. Here’s why:

1. The layout and design changes to the admin backend have done preciously little to solve the problem of wasted vertical screen "real-estate", even though a supposedly top-notch design firm was hired in the redesign. Not sure what they were thinking, but even though the menus were made a little more sane, I still find no real consistency in what was done.
2. Several things that actually worked well for people (and especially power-users) were taken away for no apparent reason, with sometimes additional complications being caused. Yes, I’m talking about the "Widgets" screen, as well as the needless moving around of the "post controls" away from the right hand of the write screen (wasting, surprise, surprise, even more vertical screen real-estate).
3. It doesn’t truly address several of the long-standing issues with the WYSIWIG editor and the "wpautop" function that is at the root of these (which also happens to make Wordpress slower than it needs to be). Sorry for the arcane tech reference, but it’s necessary to remind people that Wordpress overly messing with people’s HTML has gone on far too long. The current "HTML" view in the write screen is now a very strange hybrid.
4. And as I’ve argued in great detail in the posts on the security back-porting experiment, none of these rather extensive design changes needed to be rolled into the same update with the much needed security updates. They could have been kept separate, allowing users to continue using 2.3.3 for the time being. If Apache is able to do this, so should Wordpress… Stop using security fears as leverage to push your feature "upgrades".
5. Just for fun, along the way one of the more testy threads on the Wordpress.org forum was closed by Mr. Wordpress Matt Mullenweg himself, even though there were MANY, MANY complaining about issues with the 2.5 admin back-end design. Listen to your power-user base every once in a while, they are the one’s evangelizing your product for you (go read some Guy Kawasaki on this issue). They are the ones that might have to live through dozens of upgrades for clients, and their often painful aftermath.

OK, so let’s get into the details. Here is what my own customized Write Screen looks like, using the FCKEditor plugin and changes to the admin stylesheets and /wp-admin/menu.php.

(click image to enlarge in a new tab)

You can see for yourself that the vertical screen real-estate is handled with "respect". On a standard 15" laptop screen there is no scrolling necessary for me, even though the editor textarea is a good writing size.

It starts with moving the Blog Name and "User Account" info off to the right, saving tons of space at the top. Presumably as the author, we know what our blog is called… (open-to-all user registration is a security risk that should be turned off, unless you are e.g. trying to use Wordpress as some sort of membership site hack).

I do have my Firefox browser optimized not to waste too much at the top with toolbars either (it’s held to about 1" including tabs by customizing/decluttering/combining the toolbars), and my Windows bar is actually dragged over to the right edge of the screen.

But even without this one would still have a good sized editor textarea, maybe the "Tags" text-field would no longer be visible as it is now. The toolbars for the FCKEditor are also condensed down to the most important items BTW.

The point is, I can start typing without scrolling, the key controls are all within reach on the right side or at the top, and the Wordpress menu options are still within reach without scrolling as well.

(Notice also that I moved the "Publish" button away from the "Save" buttons to avoid accidental publishing, after all with your ping list, you really can’t take that back very well. Also, I added a "Duplicate" function that is the equivalent of a "Save As". Comes in handy if you write posts that belong to a series with mostly the same tags, or to break up over-long drafts into two or more posts. Also handy for duplicating pages where you e.g. want to split-test elements of your sales copy, etc. etc. "Save & Close" reliably takes you back to the "posts management" screen.)

I think since 15" screens are the de facto standard in portable (enough) laptops, it’s really useful to build screens for decent display on those. Yes, some people have much larger desktop screens, but one shouldn’t assume that.

Another issue is that text becomes harder and harder to read the wider the column size (your eyes have to move/fixate more horizontally), so going wider with the editor textarea is not helpful. I have set mine to display in roughly the same width as my posts are displayed on the blog itself.

Now compare the Wordpress 2.5.x write screen, I have put some free-hand notes in there to highlight the issues:

(click image to enlarge in a new tab)

It’s really quite a sight. In fact, the first thing that pops into my head whenever I see the 2.5 write screen is how empty it is: There is almost nothing in the top half of the screen! Also noticeable is that part of the menu/sub-menu was arbitrarily moved off to the right (not visible in my screen cap).

Settings, Plugins, and Users are now separated from the rest, even though Themes and Widgets are still under "Design" on the left. If that is supposed to be intuitive, good luck. First off, changing Themes should be the rarest of operations, so if anything IT should be moved out of sight. Second, aren’t Plugins part of the design in a way? Widgets and Plugins may get changed quite a bit more often for some, so if anything they should be closer at hand.

I am including a few other screen-caps of my set-up, just to show what the menu and some of the screens COULD be like. Obviously everyone is likely to have slightly different priorities and preferences. Which is exactly my point: If Wordpress wants most of its users to be happy, it might be worth considering drag-drop customizable menus.

I did my changes in /wp-admin/menu.php manually to get greater sanity. Dropped a few of those items I never use, and otherwise rearranged and renamed things as much as was quickly possible.

Also notice that I rearranged the posts table to sort by status first and then by "Modified" so that my drafts would be at the top. It’s like a post to-do list and brainstorm. (Don’t ask me what hoops I had to jump through to get the list to sort by BOTH "Status" descending AND by "Date Modified" descending combined.)

(click image to enlarge in a new tab)

To show how the old Widget screen could have been updated only slightly to make it more usable, look at this next screen-shot. None of the much-criticized new Widget screen functionality needed to be invented, it works great like this:

Tightened up the font-sizes/margins/padding on everything a bit, moved the Widget "tray" to the top, and thereby created space for easily handling up to 5 sidebars – I use different ones for the index.php, single.php, and page.php views.

(click image to enlarge in a new tab)

There are a few other design issues with 2.5, such as the "Manage Posts" view that will now delete posts without a pop-up warning, and a few others. But so far most of the criticism has come in response to the write/edit screen and the new Widget management screen. And frankly, I believe for good reason.

Until they do something to blow me away with in terms of new functionality, I am sticking to my custom "2.3.3 Renegade" version… can you blame me?

First, I want to emphasize that I did this largely to show that it was possible, and that Wordpress (Automattic) should consider rolling out such security fixes for older versions as patches rather than forcing "upgrades" to entirely new iterations of Wordpress with many feature changes mixed in with such fixes.

First, I did move the "Retro-fit" to this production blog of mine that is running a customized version of 2.3.3, and things have been going fine, for the most part.

Here is a screen-shot of the "no frills" login screen that is now missing the formatting that changed with 2.5.1 (as mentioned in the prior post). Since I have the user registration turned off, this is a non-issue for me, I can easily deal with not having a "pretty" login screen.

The only other thing that I found to not work was the AJAXed post/page/comment deletion sequence. There must be a part on the JavaScript of the sequence that blocks the "delete" action, returning

"You don't have permission to do that."

OK, no problem. I tracked down the JavaScript function that throws the error in a few admin files that have delete links on their screens,

onclick='return deleteSomething(... );'

but the AJAX code that it calls is too labyrinthine to mess with, so I left it alone. Instead I replaced it with a simple

onClick='return(confirm("Really Delete?"));'

which fixed it, but also turned off the AJAX effect of the red-then-disappearing post/page/comment. In case you’re "married" to that one, this wouldn’t be for you. Personally, I can easily live without it, since the only thing that might get deleted regularly are spammy comments.

The files that needed this change were

/wp-admin/edit.php
/wp-admin/edit-post-rows.php
/wp-admin/edit-pages.php
/wp-admin/edit-comments.php
/wp-admin/includes/template.php

Now, again, I want you to keep in mind that I embarked on this adventure mostly to prove a point about the possibility of having targeted security patches for past versions supplied by Wordpress.org (even though I also did get a nice security upgrade for my highly customized 2.3.3 install out of it). Obviously if they were to supply it, it should be safer/more targeted, and a hick-up such as the delete function thing would be avoided as part of the patch.

Whoever their AJAX specialist is could have likely changed just 1 or 2 lines in the AJAX code itself and solved the problem for all files/screens calling it. I simply don’t have enough experience with AJAX or the overall application logic in this case to know what to change to work the improved user authentication security from 2.5.x into it.

Incidentally, I was playing with a 2.5.1 install to collect and make more specific my thoughts on what I feel are things wrong with 2.5.x. More on that in the next post. But what I did find is that 2.5.x abandoned the delete confirmation pop-up entirely in the new admin interface, so that once you click the delete button at the top, if any posts/pages/comments have their checkbox checked, there is no going back!

Not what I consider a safe design. In all likelihood, you can add the above simple "onClick" JavaScript I devised to the button input element, though I haven’t tried it yet. I am simply unsure what their design goals were with this new admin interface. Now we have something against a pop-up preventing a possibly unwanted deletion?

Given that the post list might display well below the fold, it is in theory possible that someone accidentally checks one of these posts along with another desired check, then hits ‘Delete’ with a post that wasn’t even "in sight" now being deleted. Not good.

UPDATE:

I found one more issue that was created by the back-porting, and this one was actually a bit more of a problem: The whole-sale updating of

/wp-includes/functions.php

to the 2.5.x version actually caused the blog’s feed to fail. Took me a few days to figure this out, actually found it while adding a feed button in my categories.php and search.php templates.

The do_feed() call in the funtions.php file in 2.5.x actually calls a whole new function

get_default_feed()

that wasn’t there in 2.3.3 and throws the error. I first tried to update all of the feed[...].php files in /wp-includes, but that just produced more errors. Instead, the solution was to replace the 6 feed related functions

do_feed_...()

in /wp-includes/functions.php with the 2.3.3 versions. Then things were back to normal.

By now you are probably getting the idea that this back-porting business is NOT for the casual user of Wordpress. It should be noted however that I could have been more careful in porting only those exact changes from 2.5 that had to do with the security fixes, rather than replacing whole files and hoping for the best.

As it turned out, it mostly worked out OK, except for the issues addressed above.

And of course, it still proves that it should be easy for Wordpress.org to make the security fixes ONLY available as a small patch file package, a "Service Pack" of sorts to keep the older versions running as far as security.

Notice that this is the option chosen by many Open Source projects such as the venerable Apache server that powers most of the world’s Web servers. They still support version 1.7 with critical security updates, even though they are up to version 2.2 by now.

Why? Because they understand that there can be significant pain associated with a forced upgrades due to security issues, especially for admins that are dealing with a large installed base.

Maybe Wordpress/Automattic could choose to see this as well, and head in this direction. What’s considered reasonable at Apache.org might be worth considering for them too. We don’t necessarily always need the latest "code poetry"… but we do need critical security.

Food for thought.

You may have heard any number of things in recent weeks and months about the need to upgrade to Wordpress 2.5.x because of security issues with the older versions. In fact, it can almost sound as if some people wanted to scare you into upgrading.

Now there have been for a long time issues with the fact that each Wordpress "update" tends to be far from a smooth/pain-free operation for many people, breaking relied-upon plugins, creating issues with your (possibly custom) themes, and requiring the re-edit of any personal hacks you may have had reason to place directly into the Wordpress core distribution because some things don’t work quite right in there, and pleas to fix them are often ignored.

In this case however, there have also been a large number of changes to the Wordpress admin back-end, the usefulness of some of which has been judged to be questionable, or that have caused actual problems (2.5 could delete your text widgets among other things). One look at the Wordpress support forum tells the story. I am not going to get into all of the reasons right now why I am not upgrading to 2.5.x for the foreseeable future. That is for a different post.

Suffice it to say that many top bloggers with an understanding of the tech issues have said they won’t upgrade for a while.

What is important though is that the security fixes that came with 2.5 should in reality be made available as small, "single file copy" patches for anyone deciding to stay with the older version(s) for now. I have said as much on the support forum in several places, most recently on a very active "2.5 backend issues" thread that actually got shut down my "Mr. Wordpress" Matt Mullenweg himself.

Since they currently seem rather unconcerned with making these fixes available without a wholesale upgrade, I decided to take it upon myself to do so.

Here are the results:

After studying the ticket records for Wordpress 2.5 and 2.5.1 (the very rapid release of yet another "update" so close to the first one should tell you that 2.5 wasn’t quite as ready for prime-time as they might have wanted you to believe), it appears obvious that the biggest security issues come from WP user registration and the way it handles passwords.

As for registration, I recommend for both 2.3.3 and even the later versions that you turn it OFF in your Admin panel under "Options > General > Anyone can register" (uncheck the check-box). Unless you are using Wordpress as a sort of membership site, there is really no reason that I can see for yet another registration. Just require name and email in your comment form, those get auto-filled after the first comment for most themes and in most browsers.

If you have multiple WP authors, Admin can add those manually in a controlled way. Else, what are those users for? Since WP isn’t designed to be e.g. an auto-responder by default, those Email addresses from registration aren’t really all that useful to you. Better to use Feedburner or other means of opt-in.

By the way, even 2.5 still had an issue with their user roles security, potentially allowing "less than admin" type users to add other users. Ooops. (Aside: The role system in Wordpress is a bit labyrinthine because the application logic for it is spread all over the place in the code.)

So turning this off is a good idea (if possible for your purposes). So then the only major security issue that still needs fixing is the way that passwords (for Admin, etc.) are handled in Wordpress, both in the password database and as cookies in your browser once you are logged into your Wordpress back-end. If you are interested in the deeper technical issue of this, go here and here and enjoy…

From studying these, I simply extracted the files that were changed for 2.5, and then proceeded to copy those, one by one, into a 2.3.3 test install. To not keep you in suspense any longer, this security retro-fit for 2.3.3 works and here are the files to update:

(all files can just be overwritten with the 2.5 version, any totally new 2.5 files are marked)

/wp-includes/class-phpass.php (new file)
/wp-includes/compat.php
/wp-includes/functions.php
/wp-includes/media.php (new file)
/wp-includes/pluggable.php
/wp-includes/registration.php
/wp-includes/shortcodes.php (new file)
/wp-includes/user.php
/wp-includes/wp-db.php

/wp-admin/includes/misc.php
/wp-login.php
/wp-settings.php

The there are two files that you each have to add one line each to. In

/wp-includes/deprecated.php

add the line

function gzip_compression() { return false; }

at the top inside of the ‘<?php’ open tag. The reason we can’t just overwrite the whole file with the 2.5 version is that it actually would try to re-declare many more functions that were deprecated in 2.5 and placed into this file.

Last but not least, we need to place our own "secret key" generation phrase into your

/wp-config.php

with this line:

define('SECRET_KEY', 'put your secret key phrase here');

Note that the comment above this new code reads:

// Change SECRET_KEY to a unique phrase.  You won't have to remember it later,
// so make it long and complicated.

So that’s what you want to do.

Again, so far I have found this to work after having put my 2.3.3 test-bed blog through the paces. I run about a dozen or so standard plugins in this installation, and there APPEAR to be no adverse effects from these changes. Security should have been enhanced, which was the goal in the first place.

So far the only adverse effect has been that the "blue shield" formatting of the login screen form has gone bye-bye, likely because 2.5 wants to use it’s changed CSS to format. But since we said to turn off the user registration (and thereby login) for all but Admins and maybe collaborating authors, this shouldn’t be a concern. I might post a visuals fix for this at some later point, but right now that’s way down my listy of priorities…

Here again is the predictable WARNING/DISCLAIMER to only attempt this in a test install of your own first (with all of your plugins in it), OR if done to a live install, to do it during off hours and with back-ups of your old 2.3.3 files at the ready in case there are any problems.

Hope this has been useful to you, and that you’ll sleep better at night. If these explanations seemed too complicated many paragraphs up, PLEASE DO NOT ATTEMPT this without someone technical helping you.

UPDATE:

Before proceeding with any of this, read about some of the additional issues that came up in this follow up post.

The code for gravatar image URL is taken from Tom Werner’s simple gravatar.php plugin, the failover to Mybloglog was my idea.

Check it out in action here.

Note that the commenter email address must be URL encoded twice, because the gravatar.com script otherwise strips out the @ symbol.

Plus this makes for minimal protection from email phishing bots. Better would be to have Mybloglog adopt Gravatar’s md5 encoding of the Email address.

If MyBlogLog also had the "&default=[url]" failover support, this could be chained to support further avatar service providers. Since it doesn’t, the chain stops with their somewhat ugly and small default (the grey square with the question mark).

And this also represents one fly in the ointment: MyBlogLog could at least make the size of that default the same size as the avatars their "coiserv.php" script serves – 48 x 48 pixels. I am going to talk to someone at Yahoo about this who might be able to pass it on to the right people.

To get the code, right-click and "Select All", then copy and paste to your theme’s comments.php template where you want the Avatar to appear.