Shortened

Yesterday I was asked why I went to an ice rink, to stand around while people skated. The reason is that I wanted to go for my daily walk while the sun, or at least daylight, was still around. If I had set off later, then I would have been caught by the night, and I would have missed walking in daylight.

At this time of year, if you don’t go for a walk before 17:00 you’re likely to walk in the dark. In a city walking in the dark is fine, because there are usually quite a few lights, and because in a city night is lively, whereas in a village or town things are quieter.

Next year all goo.gl shortened links will be dead due to the planned obscolence of hyperlinks. Any website, blog, or social media site that used Goo.gl shortened links will find that their links are worthless from that point on.

The SMS Era on Twitter

URL shorteners thrived for a while because Twitter had a 140 character limit. This limit was put in place to allow for all tweets to be sent as SMS. Quite quickly Twitter found that sending SMS was too expensive so they abandonned the idea but the shortened URL stuck around.