Adjix has a breakthrough idea in URL shorteners 

Sometimes it's funny how you're led to an interesting idea when you're not expecting it. This idea arrived at the end of a chain of events started by inviting Guy Kawasaki to use my 40-tweets app. Here's the story.

1. Guy asked if I could make the app work with his favorite URL shortener, Adjix. I said I'd check it out.

2. Joe Moreno, the CEO of Adjix, emailed me and showed how to get hit stats from his service, in a manner similar to what I was getting from tr.im.

3. When I tried to deref one of his short URLs I found he was using the meta-refresh technique. I was irritated, why isn't he using the HTTP redirect mechanism like everyone else. He said it was so they could use Adsense to track clicks. Some of his users wanted it. I found a way to work around the issue without having to parse the HTML and then forgot it. (Here's the text of the page they return.)

4. A few days later Moreno mentioned in an email that another advantage is their shortener could be served statically from S3. This hit me like a ton of bricks. Say what!

Think about it. When you shorten a URL, what if instead of generating a record in a database that requires a dynamic server to stay up indefinitely, you generated static HTML and saved it somewhere likely to survive the apocalypse. It's not a complete answer to the problem presented by URL shorteners, but it's pretty great half-step. Maybe even a 3-quarters-step.

Joe wrote it up here.

Jake Jarvis calls this an Apocalypse-proof URL shortener. I like!

How to get started with Facebook's new API? 

I'm reading the docs for Facebook's Open Stream API, with fascination. It sounds like an app can read and write to a user's stream, something like the way one writes an app to access the Twitter status stream. That's something I want to do!

But...

Say I want to write an app to access my own stream. What's the process? How do I give the app permission? What's the endpoint?

I assume FQL is Facebook Query Language? What do I do with that? I don't know.

I have a feeling these docs are written for developers who have been working with Facebook. I have never written any code to call Facebook's API.

If they want to go after Twitter developers (no one is going to like this, but it's the truth) read their developer docs, and make your API work like that.

I say no one is going to like that except Twitter developers of course.

This is why I say that to compete with Twitter you must start with item #0 in the wishlist.