Posted 08/31/09 at 07:00:34 AM by Paul Lilly

During the same year that you sat in a movie theater chomping on popcorn watching Marty McFly bend the time-space continuum, a computer manufacturer headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts laid claim to the first ever registered domain name: Symbolics.com.

You may recall Nordu.net as the first domain name ever created, which dates back to January 1985. But it wasn't until March of that same year that Symbolics.com would go through the appropriate DNS process to be the first domain ever registered, after which it remained under its original ownership for a quarter of a century. Now almost 25 years later, Symbolics.com finally changes hands following XF.com Investments' acquisition of the domain for an undisclosed sum.

It's unclear what the future holds for the Internet's first-ever registered domain name, or for Symbolics, which largely fell out of relevance long ago.

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Posted 08/19/09 at 07:00:11 PM by David Murphy

I suppose it's not enough for a popular online service to face the reaper, come back from the brink of extinction, and turn open-source. No, there has to be some kind of controversy surrounding the whole affair--can't just fade quietly into the open-licensed light nowadays.

Such is the situation offered up by the death and resurrection of tr.im, a popular online URL shortening service whose recent entrance into the open-source community has been met with a touch of scandal. Perhaps scandal is the wrong word, though. Scathing might be better, given the tone of some of tr.im's blogging and actions as of late.

It's easy to talk about open-source as if it's some large, altruistic community that wants to do nothing but share-and-share alike. Everybody's friendly. Everybody's happy. Just a ton of developers churning out free code for everyone to use, distribute, and polish into a scintillating hunk of software that's going to revolutionize the world! Or, at the very least, stick it to Microsoft.

This is an idyllic fantasy. In the real world, businesses and developers don't always play nicely. You've already read about the back-and-forth bombing wars between the PortableApps and LiberKey developers. You can now add tr.im to the list... but who exactly are they fighting?

Click the jump to spawn onto the open-source battlefield!

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Posted 08/19/09 at 09:09:44 AM by Paul Lilly

Driven in large part by Twitter and other microblogging sites, URL shortening services are growing in number and popularity. This begs the question, is there any advantage to using one over the other?

Royal.Pingdom.com set out to answer that question by rounding up the most popular (and some less popular) URL shortening services and analyzing how much overhead each one adds to accessing the target URL, and how reliable each one is as measured in uptime.

The results are pretty surprising. Of the services tested (Bit.ly, TinyURL, Ow.ly, Is.gd, Su.pr, Sinpurl, Cli.gs, Tr.im, and Twurl), Is.gd ranked fastest with the least amount of overhead at 163ms, with the slowest service, Sinpurl, trailing significantly behind at 847ms. Bit.ly, which dominates the Twitter scene, took the No. 2 spot with 261ms overhead, while TinyURL sat squarely in the middle at 412ms.

But it's the uptime that most people are more likely to be concerned with, especially after the near-meltdown of tr.im, who recently went offline before re-opening and vowing to keep the service alive. Based on Royal.Pingdom.com's 30-day test window, Ow.ly ranked highest with 100 percent uptime, while Bit.ly was not far behind at 99.98 percent uptime. Su.pr, TinyURL, and Is.gd all recorded a 99.9 percent or higher uptime.

Take a peek at the full results here, then hit the jump and tell us which URL shortening service you use most.

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Posted 03/24/09 at 09:38:26 PM by Mark Edward Soper

Another reason why Google has left its competitors way, way behind in the search engine race: Friday, a post on the (unofficial) Google Operating System blog noted that you can now restrict Google image searches by specifying one of twelve different colors:

red, blue, green, teal, purple, yellow, orange, pink, white, gray, black, brown

Only images that contain the specified color will be listed in the search results. Officially, you must use a command-line search in your browser's address bar to use this new feature, using the following syntax:

http://images.google.com/images?q=SEARCHTARGET&imgcolor=COLOR

[Replace SEARCHTARGET with what you're searching for and COLOR with the color you want to see in the images]

Here's an example that displays train photos containing the color yellow:

http://images.google.com/images?q=train&imgcolor=yellow 

To learn how to search for images by phrase and color, and for an easier way to use this new image search method, join us after the jump.

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Posted 03/17/09 at 11:08:25 AM by Paul Lilly

According to the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA), this and other blacklisted hyperlinks will cost webmasters $11,000 a day if published on a website. The hefty fine applies to any site containing a banned URL, which was demonstrated last week when the AMA threatened the host of an online broadband disccusion forum after a user posted a link to a banned anti-abortion website.

According to The Syndney Morning Herald, the ACMA's blacklist doesn't significantly impact web browsing by Australians, but that could change if the Federal Government implements its mandatory internet filtering censorship plan.

The newest site added to the ACMA's blacklist includes Wikileaks, who drew the ACMA's ire after it published a leaked document containing Denmark's lists of banned websites. Wikileaks had also posted Thailand's censorship, noting that both lists have expanded from child porn to other material including political discussions.

"We note that, not only do these incidents show that the ACMA censors are more than willing to interpret their broad guidelines to include a discussion forum and document repository, it is demonstrably inevitable that the Government's own list is bound to be exposed itself at some point in the future," Electronic Frontiers Australia said. "The Government would serve the country well by sparing themselves, and us, this embarrassment."

The Australian Government's internet censorship trials are due to begin shortly, however none of the major ISPs have been invited to participate. O_o

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Posted 08/19/08 at 11:49:22 AM by Paul Lilly

Come December, directory assistance will hit the web in a big way, and it has nothing to do with the online yellow pages. Instead, ICANN has approved the creation of a new domain name, .tel, which will serve to offer a one-stop surfing destination to look up contact information on what it hopes will eventually include every individual and corporate entity.

ICANN says that .tel sites are stored within the DNS systems so that information can be "quickly accessed on any device from a game console to a PC to a mobile phone." Regardless of the vehicle, navigators could, for example, head over to WillSmithMPC.tel to gain access to a wealth of contact information, including address, phone, Facebook URL, IM, Twitter, and whatever else the MPC editor-in-chief chose to share. Companies can purchase a domain name too, meaning you could visit MaximumPC.tel to see who's on staff and other contact information for your favorite magazine.

The new Telnic-owned domains will go on sale this December with initial registrations reserved for trademark owners. General availability opens up to public on March 24, 2009. Pricing yet to be announced.

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Posted 07/18/08 at 03:16:05 PM by Chris Moody

ReadWriteWeb.com is letting the world in on a secret, mainstream users can’t find the address bar. If you’ve ever done over the phone tech support you know this is true. They end up typing into a search engine, or a search engine bar, or into some piece of foul malware that wiggled into their browser. They will type anywhere but in the address bar.

What made ReadWriteWeb notice this trend was a report by Hitwise that showed more than 10% of the searches for the top 10 dating search terms were URLs like match.com and plentyoffish.com and almost all of the queries were something that .com could have been added to for direct navigation.

For competitors this isn’t such a bad thing. If you buy into Adwords your site can come up on a search for a competitor. For instance, type eHarmony on Google and the sponsor links come up with Match.com and LoveandSeek.com. Of course had they just tagged on the .com onto eHarmony in their address bar they would have gone straight there and never saw the links for the other sites.

Is it a bad thing for users? Not really. I make plenty of fat fingered typos and I hate landing on some misspelled domain that is brimming with malware. You avoid that altogether by searching. It is also human nature to take shortcuts. Users know they’ll get there whether they add the .com or not.

It’s not so hot for the companies that shelled out big bucks for the domain name. Domain names haven’t worked so hot since they came out and squatters snatched up as many as they could to sit on waiting for a huge offer. It’s led to some creative names for companies that desperately wanted their domain name to match their company name however.

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Posted 07/09/08 at 03:08:41 PM by Paul Lilly

Paring down an extraordinarily long web address into a manageable hyperlink makes it possible to share line-breaking URLs via email, text messages, Twitters, or any other medium without overwhelming the recipient, and therein lies the beauty of TinyURL. Unfortunately, the ugly truth is that while TinyURL makes short work of long URLs, they're also exceedingly difficult to recall for anyone not fluent in Nerglish. Or at least they were.

At long last, TinyURL has finally given users the ability to denote a custom alias to shortened links instead of a random list of characters. That means you can focus on remembering http://tinyurl.com/YouTubeAds instead of trying to recall http://tinyurl.com/688o7d.

Of course, standard safe practices still applies. Don't click on hyperlinks from untrusted sources no matter what they're labeled as. And you know that buddy that still finds it amusing to send you a Rick Roll for the umpteenth time? Don't click on his custom TinyURLs either.

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