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tr.im Throws In the Towel

Nambu Network, the company behind tr.im, pic.im, and the Nambu social application for Mac OS and iPhone has announced that tr.im will no longer be shortening URL's for the public. According to a blog post, the reason behind the decision is Twitter's decision to use bit.ly for their URL shortening, as well as the cost for servers and development while there are many other solutions for URL shortening. Nambu Network will now focus it's attention on Nambu for Mac OS and iPhone.

Since I joined TechCrunch I've seen more Twitter clones and derivatives then I'd care to remember, most of which haven't really gone anywhere. But there are a few gems that have managed to tackle markets that Twitter has, for whatever reason, ignored. One of these is Yammer, the "Twitter for businesses" that won the top prize at last year's TechCrunch50. And in the last few days, it's become increasingly clear to me that there's another niche market just waiting for a Twitter-like service: Family. Earlier this week I was talking to TechCrunch alum (and rockstar dev) Henry Work, who told me he was thinking of setting up a Yammer account with the sole purpose of keeping in touch with his immediate family. It's a fantastic idea — Yammer allows for secure, private communication, offers an iPhone app, SMS support, and a web client, and is free for basic functionality. Even better: the company has just comfirmed that it's planning to offer Push notifications for its iPhone app in the near future, which would help cut back on SMS costs.

I've had a half dozen or so longer posts about Apple brewing in my head the past couple of weeks. There is no shortage of controversy surrounding the company right now thanks largely to the hugely popular and hugely unpopular aspects of the iPhone. But Jason Calacanis' post yesterday entitled "The Case Against Apple-in Five Parts" serves as a great springboard for bringing up a lot of it. The Backstory While my story with computers doesn't go back quite as far as Calacanis', our stories are pretty similar. He said that 6 years ago he made the switch to Apple products after a 20-year affair with Microsoft. I made the same switch 5 years ago after a roughly 15-year affair with Microsoft. Regular readers may have heard this already, so forgive me if I'm repeating myself, but in the 1990s I loved Microsoft products and hated Apple stuff. I grew up on DOS, installed Windows For Workgroups because I thought it was cooler than regular Windows 3.1, bought Windows Bob, made my dad take me to the midnight launch of Windows 95, bought Windows 98 the day it came out, actually bought and used Windows ME, and bought Windows XP the day it came out. I could fill that timeline in with many other pro-Microsoft details, but let's just say I was hooked.

At the end of July I declared my intention to quit the iPhone and AT&T, port my mobile phone number to Google Voice and use any mobile device that I pleased (or lots of them at once) in the future. Like others, I will no longer blindly follow all things Apple. Today I'm pleased to report a status update on those efforts: complete. I am no longer a member of the Cult of iPhone. Porting my phone number to Google Voice was a three day process, which I was pre-warned about. The mobile carriers in the U.S. have made the porting process between them fairly easy, and it occurs over a couple of hours. But they are in no hurry to help customers move their phone numbers to Google Voice, and so it took a few extra days. Also, I'm one of the first people to port their phone number to Google Voice, and there are always a few hiccups when you're a guinea pig. A week ago I was an unhappy AT&T iPhone customer. I couldn't get cell phone reception here at my house and so I was always missing important calls. Today I'm a happy Google Voice customer. My old mobile number, which all of my contacts already have, now rings simultaneously on my home Vonage phone and the TMobile myTouch 3G Android phone that I've started using (and, by the way, TMobile works just fine here at home, too). If I want to start using a new phone, I can make a switch in the settings at Google Voice and calls will ring through to that instead. no carrier will ever have a stranglehold on me again.

It is the end. Jason "The Animal" Calacanis is thinking about maybe quitting using Apple products, reporting that the company has gone all corporate and mainstream and that Steve has lost his hippie, dippy LSD edge. Look at this language, people:

Years and years after Microsoft’s antitrust headlines, Apple is now the anti-competitive monster that Jobs rallied us against in the infamous 1984 commercial. Steve Jobs is the oppressive man on the jumbotron and the Olympian carrying the hammer is the open-source movement For folks in the tech industry, this is not a new discussion. Another radical visionary, Steve Gillmor, has been hosting this discussion since Apple’s draconian iTunes updates led smart people to *downgrade* their software. Think about that mind bomb for a second: people downgrading their software to maintain their freedoms–is this a William Gibson novel? Steve Jobs is on the cusp of devolving from the visionary radical we all love to a sad, old hypocrite and control freak–a sellout of epic proportions.

This is not the thought process of a well man. Perhaps Jason spent too much time next to his Tesla roadster or maybe the stress of running Mahalo has finally gotten to him but someone needs to send Jason an iPod Shuffle STAT. Intra-cardial insertion of the Shuffle, much like the needle in Pulp Fiction, has been known to snap anti-Apple zealots out of their madness.

Dell has retired their 12-inch Intel Atom-powered netbooks, they said today. The official reason - "It really boils down to this: for a lot of customers, 10-inch displays are the sweet spot for netbooks...Larger notebooks require a little more horsepower to be really useful." That makes absolutely no sense, since it requires no additional hardware horsepower to power a 12-inch netbook v. a 10-inch netbook. The only difference is power usage from the bigger screen. And the two extra inches more than makes up for the shorter battery life or slightly heavier device from packing in more batteries. It only costs a few more dollars to build a 12-inch v. a 10-inch netbook, and users get a bigger screen with the same performance. In fact, Intel's official position on 10-inch netbooks is almost exactly the opposite of Dell's. Intel says “If you’ve ever used a Netbook and used a 10-inch screen size–it’s fine for an hour. It’s not something you’re going to use day in and day out.” So why is Dell really discontinuing 12-inch netbooks?

File sharing services are not as popular today as they were four years ago. It's not that people are sharing any less. Rather, they just found easier ways to do it. Would you upload a funny video from a friend's email to any of those services or would you search for it on Youtube and share only the link? Would you upload an MP3 file in order to share with whomever, or would you search for it online, grab the link and then share it? And finally, would you use a file-sharing app just to share a picture on Facebook when you can do it directly from your desktop to your Facebook profile? Of course, you wouldn't! So why would you use an file-sharing app anyway? Actually for many reasons: for larger files, for privacy, multiple files, file format support, and more. In this post, I compare 16 file-sharing services. I took three main issues under consideration when creating the comprehensive app list below: Free, Fast, and Useful . . .

Have you tried out this blind search tool yet? It provides results from Google, Yahoo and Bing in three columns but doesn't tell you which column is which search engine. You then tell it which one you think shows the best results, and you then see which answers are from which engines. I keep choosing Yahoo as the best results. A few search engine experts we've spoken with over the years say that users tend to think Google results are better just because they're from Google. If you take any search engine and put the logo on top, it tests better. So Yahoo results with a Google logo will always test better than, say, Google results with the Yahoo or Bing logo. People are just used to thinking about Google as the best search. This search tool strips out all the branding, so you're forced to really think about which results you like better. And early results showed a much more even distribution than Google's 70% market share would suggest: Google: 44%, Bing: 33%, Yahoo: 23%.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg had planned to take the entire day tomorrow to use Twitter to send out mundane updates about his life. Unfortunately, the Hudson River accident today has forced him to reschedule his Twitter plans, so he can, you know, actually do his job. So those who were hoping to know what Bloomberg was eating for lunch, what he's thinking about while walking his dogs, and updates about the Yankees game, will have to wait. Why was Bloomberg planning to tweet for the day? Well, because he's running for re-election and undoubtedly heard about the power of social media in campaigns these days.

As anyone who has read my critically acclaimed, Pulitzer-Prize-winning book will know, I have not always been the paragon of honesty I am today. Truth be told, in the past I have been guilty of prevarication on an Olympian scale in almost all aspects of my life. In business, in relationships, in friendships and even - during one epically drunken evening in a London pub a couple of years ago - in all three at the same time, leading to hilarious consequences, no small amount of heartache and the beginning of my journey of self-improvement. It's a long story. You should buy it. Given my past indiscretions, then, it's both perfectly fitting and deliciously ironic how much I hate being lied to. Or rather, how much I hate discovering that I've been lied to. I really can't put into words how furious it makes me; with the liar, the lie and with myself for believing them both. I could probably forgive you for cheating on my sister (I don't have a sister) or running over my cat (I don't have a cat), providing you're honest with me about it. But the moment you lie, and I find out about it, we're done. So you can imagine how I felt this week when I found out I'd been lied to multiple times by not one but two separate people, regarding two different stories I was trying to report. I won't name names on this occasion, for reasons I'll get to, but the details are important.

This is completely a rumor, but an awesome one. Citing a "pretty reliable" source, Boy Genius Report is saying that the next version of iTunes will add a bunch of new, highly requested features. Specificially, BGR's source says iTunes 9 features Blu-ray support, a new way to organize iPhone apps within iTunes, as well some kind of integration with Twitter, Facebook and possibly Last.fm. Each of those features have been talked about for some time now on the web. But as BGR notes, the talk of Blu-ray does line itself up well with an AppleInsider report from yesterday that very vaguely suggested Apple has new iMacs due shortly with features that have long been on the wish-lists of Mac owners. Blu-ray is certainly on that list, and seems like a pretty good candidate, despite Steve Jobs' calling the format a "bag of hurt" as recently as October of last year.

It has now been over a month since we first wrote about GPush, an iPhone app that uses Apple's Push Notification system to alert you when you have new Gmail messages. Like so many other apps, it was starting to look like Apple simply may not accept it. But a surprise came to developers last night: An email from Apple accepting the app. Now, before you get all excited, it's not live just yet. The developers had an issue with the Amazon servers they use to run their system, so they temporarily took the app down, but the team expects things to be back to normal and the app to be in the store in the next 24 hours, we're told. Again, as far as Apple is concerned, the app is good to go.

Ever since the new Firefox 3.5 came out about a month ago, I've been using it as my main browser. Generally I am very happy with it. Pages load a lot faster than they did before, the plus-sign feature in tabs which launches a new one is a godsend, and I am very excited about the prospects for all of the open video technologies built into it. But there is one persistent bug that might push me to another browser: it keeps crashing on me.

As one of the most popular applications on Apple's popular iPhone platform, a lot of users are eagerly awaiting the next version of the app. And that wait is almost over. "The app is pretty much done - we're just working on translating it into a bunch of languages," Facebook developer Joe Hewitt wrote tonight on Twitter. That means that shortly, we'll have access to the much-improved app which is scheduled to have features such as a News Feed that is more like the one on Facebook's site, the ability to "like" items and a new customizable home screen. More importantly, it will also have video support for the iPhone 3GS, something which Hewitt threw-in at the last second, unexpectedly. And perhaps best of all, the app will have the ability to manage events, finally.

While Google CEO Eric Schmidt was on Apple's board of directors, the two companies had an agreement not to hire away each other's workers, a former Google employee with knowledge of such matters has told us. We have since confirmed this with other ex-Googlers. This was not a written agreement, and was considered non-official, but it was well-known and followed within the recruitment division of Google, we're told. This news follows a report by The Washington Post in early June that the Justice Department was looking into this very issue. That report cited sources close to the investigation stating that the government was looking for possible antitrust violations among several tech companies, including Google and Apple, with regard to their hiring policies. But that report didn't say whether or not it was actually taking place. According to our sources, it is.

Scribd, the so-called 'YouTube for documents' that's recently also become an Ebook store, has been seeing a major drop in traffic over the last two months. Since June, the site has lost over 48% of its global traffic, falling from a peak of 58.3 million monthly visitors to 30.1 million less than two months later. These aren't fuzzy stats, either— Scribd is Quantcast Quantified, which means the traffic is directly measured (you can see their full stats here). We reached out to Scribd CEO Trip Adler, who says that the site is currently toning down its SEO efforts and further reducing pirated content. He also writes that there's a dip associated with the summer season:

Predictify, a prediction market that launched back in 2007, is closing its doors. The service allowed users to vote on potential outcomes for current news stories (it likened itself to a "fantasy sports for everything else"). Users could have their accuracy measured across multiple polls, both on the site's central hub and on partner sites, and the most clairvoyant of them were featured on the Predictify leaderboard. Last year, the site seemed like it was starting to pick up steam: by summer 2008, it had forged partnerships with The Washington Post, The New York Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle, and it subsequently got CBS News as well. News sites liked Predictify because it could potentially increase reader engagement. Along with its media partnerships, Predictify also offered "Premium Questions", which allowed businesses and market researchers to pose questions to the Predictify user base for a fee. The most accurate users would receive a portion of the money generated by the Premium Questions, and marketers were entitled to all of the resulting data (including demographics).

This guest post on the struggles of online music services to reach profitability is written by Michael Robertson, the founder of music sites MP3.com and MP3Tunes, as well as a number of non-music related startups like Gizmo and Dealipedia. As one of the first entrepreneurs to battle the music labels over an online service, he has a unique perspective on the scene. A new music service called Spotify has attracted millions of users in a short time with the enticing lure of listening to any common song on your computer free. Meanwhile, the digital music grandpa Napster has quietly launched a $5 service that offers unlimited streaming plus free MP3 files. A closer examination reveals that Spotify has raised tens of millions of dollars, given equity to the record labels, is under constant attack by hackers, uses clever P2P technology, is accruing enormous per song royalty obligations and has the seemingly impossible task of figuring out how to generate enough money from a free ad model to satisfy the music companies. Here's my admittedly biased look at both companies:

Anyone who has ever used Google's automated translation service knows that it's not exactly perfect — generally you'll wind up with words that are close approximations of what you started with, but Google inevitably decides to change the meaning of at least a few sentences, just for kicks. Today, there's a new site that taps into Google Translate's under-appreciated creativity and magnifies it to the point of greatness : Translation Party!. The site is incredibly simple: you enter any English phrase you can think of, and it uses Google's automated translator to convert it into Japanese. And then it translates it back into English. And back into Japanese. At each step along the way, the words you began with gradually take shape to form something entirely different and (hopefully) awesome. The retranslations continue until you reach what the site calls 'equilibrium', when the English and Japanese words translate back and forth into exactly the same thing. Fortunately, it usually takes at least a few steps for your words to reach equilibrium, and the resulting sentences are often hilarious.

As we noted early this morning, Twitter is still having some major issues getting its service stabilized following the DDoS attacks. Co-founder Biz Stone has posted a new update on the situation on Twitter's blog today. Apparently, the attacks are still ongoing, and while Stone refuses to speculate on the motivation behind them, he does note that they appear to be "geopolitical" in their nature. Says Stone:

The ongoing, massively coordinated attacks on Twitter this week appear to have been geopolitical in motivation. However, we don't feel it's appropriate to engage in speculative discussion about these motivations. The open exchange of information can have a positive impact globally and our job is to keep Twitter services running reliably to the best of our ability.

TechCrunch

tr.im Throws In the Towel

Hey, Where’s Twitter For Families?

The Case Against Apple Is Just As Much A Case For Apple

How I Learned To Quit The iPhone And Love Google Voice

If Jason Calacanis Is Against Apple, Who Can Be For It?

What Is The Real Reason Dell Is Discontinuing 12-inch Netbooks?

16 Apps That Make Sharing Large Files A Snap

Which Search Engine Do You Choose In The Blind Test?

NYC Mayor Postpones His Day Of Tweeting To Actually, You Know, Do His Job

NSFW: Don’t bullshit a reformed bullshitter; the off-the-record gravy train stops here

iTunes 9: Blu-ray And App Organization And Twitter, Oh My?

App Store Thaw? Apple Accepts A Gmail Push Application

I Want To Love Firefox 3.5, But It Keeps Crashing On Me

New Facebook iPhone App “Pretty Much Done”

Source: Apple And Google Agreed Not To Poach Workers

Hey, What Happened To Scribd? Traffic Down Over 48% Since June

Outlook Not So Good: Predictify Heads To The Deadpool

Spotify, Napster and The Quest For Premium Music Dollars

Translation Party: Tapping Into Google Translate’s Untold Creative Genius

Geopolitical Attacks On Twitter Intensified Almost Tenfold Last Night