Tweeting behind the firewall 

I just added a new feature to 100twt.com tonight, with the help of Daniel and Jason at Disqus: You can now comment on the tweets of people in the Top 100. That's just the first toe-dip into commenting on tweets in general, a starting point.

To kick it off I posted a comment on a tweet by @ev, where he talks about a tweetranet at a staff meeting at Twitter HQ today. This is a topic much in the air these days after a blog post by Matt Mullenweg at wordpress.com about a behind-the-firewall Twitter-like system they're using there.

Lots of opportunity here, we did something similar in 2001 at UserLand. It's all coming back around folks.

The cool thing about comments, they're not limited to 140 chars!

Amazon's new URL-shortener 

In March, I observed that Amazon had already done some URL shortening on its own, meaning that a link like this:

http://amazon.com/wii

actually works. Now, apparently they've gone further and have a shorter domain, amzn.com and a huge number of short URLs in that domain that take you to product pages on amazon.com.

Mike Koss wrote a script that worked its way through a dictionary trying all the different words, and published the list. (That's what I call investigative journalism, so much for bloggers being lazy.)

I'd love to see an official word from Amazon on this. How is a user supposed to go from a page on Amazon to a short URL? Even better, suppose they had a bookmarklet that would automatically populate the Twitter "What are you doing?" box with some text and a copy of the short URL? Might be a real money-maker, and we know that Amazon likes to make money! (And Bezos is also an investor in Twitter.)

Nothing from nothing