In 1990 the Canadian rock band “Tea Party” made a decision that they couldn’t possibly have known would net them $1 million 21 years later, buying the website name “TeaParty.com” to promote their namesake.

At this time group members, who recently reunited after breaking up six years ago haven’t decided to sell, telling BusinessWeek:

“As Canadians we’re somewhat sensitive to all the criticism of socialized medicine,” while adding, “We’ve considered lending the name to Stephen Colbert or Jon Stewart to have them dispel some of the stuff that the Tea Party says.”

The group says they won’t sell to a right wing leaning organization but would consider selling the URL to a left winging columnist like Arianna Huffington.

One band member thinks they need to act quickly before interest in the Tea Party and the TeaParty.com name wane. His response about the sale “We’ve got families.”

So there you have it, the Tea Party is being blacklisted by a Canadian rocker group who would rather give up a million dollars than see the party take control of the domain name. Could you imagine how much worse the U.S. would be viewed if we had a Tea Party president in the oval office?

Who do you think should buy the Tea Party domain name from the band?

Tea Party Domain Name Owned By Canadian Rockers, Could Fetch $1 Million is a post from: The Inquisitr

I am not fan of McAfee, or Norton, security products due to the fact I consider them to be some of the biggest purveyors of bloated software to inhabit the security software business. Now I realize that it is a little hard to fatten up an URL shortening service so hope remains that McAfee’s newest service, McAf.ee URL shortener, will be able to remain on a diet.

While it may seem a little strange to have a security company like McAfee’s branch out into this are is does kind of make sense when you think about. Given that as shortened URL proliferate throughout the web they are increasingly being used to direct innocent users to sites that serve up all kinds of malware.

It was this reasoning of keeping users safe that got McAfee’s going down this route.

To help ease the minds of those who may be clicking on shortened URLs, computer security firm McAfee is offering its own URL-shortening service called McAf.ee.

The service will shorten URLs right away–without scanning them to make sure that the linked-to site is secure–but when a user clicks on a McAf.ee link, the security firm will examine the destination to determine if it’s likely safe. The company will use some of the same databases it uses for its SiteAdvisor service and other security products to help ensure that the destination isn’t malicious or spammy.

In an interview (scroll down for podcast), McAfee Vice President and Chief Technology Officer Simon Hunt said, “It seemed to us pretty obvious that we could offer this kind of service with a level of confidence beyond just, ‘click here and hope.’” McAf.ee, he hopes, will be adopted by those who want to reassure users that their shortened links are safe to click on.

Source: CNET News

McAfee to launch URL shortener – no word yet on bloat is a post from: The Inquisitr

Well I guess it’s all done except for the whining and crying from those that couldn’t jump on the next great SEO bandwagon by getting the vanity URL they wanted last night when Facebook through open the doors. From what the folks over at Bloomberg.com are saying members of Facebook were registering new user names at a rate of 550 plus a second. Within the first seven minutes 345,000 people had managed to grab the vanity URL of their picking.

Some of the talk immediately following the Great URL Grab of 2009 was about the silliness of some of names that were grabbed as well as one post that requested that Facebook setup a vanity URL marketplace which he argues could be a good money maker for Facebook. Of course this whole thing was prefaced by some excellent posts, both humorous and serious – sometimes both at the same time, questioning why we needed this option in the first place.

Primary among these post was the one written by Anil Dash who gave us all a timeline of what would happen following this mad dash for our URLs

June 13, 12:45am: TechCrunch discovers that one of its writers can’t get his preferred spelling for his name, and notices that registrations in the system are running a bit slow. A Twitter search reveals four other people discussing the same problems, and one person that can’t get to the feature at all. The phrase "The Facebook Username debacle" is first used, and becomes the preferred sobriquet for the feature forevermore. 70% of commenters mention that "Facebook Username" can be abbreviated "FU", and each thinks he is the first to think of it.

Funnily enough this happened but at the same time there were some serious points being raised about what Facebook was doing and really who would benefit in the long run. One such person was Chris Messina who echoed Tim O’Reilly when he wrote

So, this is happening, and companies are racing to achieve namespace dominance over your online profile. This is what Tim O’Reilly warned about in his definition of Web 2.0. He said that one of the new kinds of lock-in in the era of [cloud computing] will be owning a namespace. There you have it — who are you going to trust to own yours?

The thing is that this chase for a vanity URL has to be looked at on two levels. The first one is what effect, or importance, vanity URL have for the mainstream users – whether they be coming online for the first time or are just a happy surfer with now interest in building a business on the web.

For these folks something like a Facebook vanity URL is probably a perfect thing to get. It’s much easier to pass around to all their friends. It makes them searchable as far as Google is concerned. So any real concerns as raised by some in the tech blogosphere doesn’t really apply to this groups of users.

It does however apply to people like myself, fellow bloggers and just about anyone who wants to create a brand, or business identity on the web. The biggest point that most of the bloggers I read on this are trying to make is that if you really want to make a strong presence on the web then you need to go the route of getting your own domain. Once you do that then you have created a sound foundation for your own namespace on the web.

As Chris Messina quoted Brian Oberkirch in his post your namespace is key

It’s ridonk. Own your namespace. Get a domain, pivot from there. If your domain is your name, so much the better. Please don’t come crying to me when the Goog owns your ‘@’ and that whole namespace gets deprecated.

Paul O’Flaherty puts it this way

If you really want to carve out your place on the web you have to secure your own domain and preferably your real name (not some made up name that you may not want, or may not fit 5 or 10 years down the road).

With your own domain you can have your own space on the web, where you are in control and you own everything. Nobody can take it away, nobody can change the rules, it’s your identity and your place.

Allen Stern adds to the conversation about this in his post prior to the URL Rush

My take is (and has always been) that you should brand yourself and/or your business and never brand another company in an attempt to backdoor your brand. Whether it’s Twitter, MySpace, Yahoo Pages, Geocities, GoDaddy or now Facebook, you need to always do what you can to control the flow. Controlling the flow is very, very easy and here’s how it’s done. And the control I am talking about is from your customer’s perspective.

You see, that’s the big deal here for services like Facebook and Twitter. If they can get your namespace within theirs it increases their pageviews but nothing for you. Typically for every post you might make to your own blog you probably will make countless updates to Facebook, Twitter or Friendfeed. In terms of SEO and search your Facebook or Twitter profile stands a better chance of being at the top of search results than your own domain.

In this case the beneficiaries of your name isn’t you but rather services like Facebook as people will click on the first link containing your name. Now Facebook and other vanity URL based services have basically stolen what Google juice you might have for themselves.

You could almost say that with every claimed vanity URL made on Facebook last night Zuckerberg and company laughed a little louder on the way to the bank.

Coming up for air after the Facebook vanity URL deluge is a post from: The Inquisitr

With the proliferation of social media services the use if URL shorteners has escalated to a point that you can’t turn around without another one popping up. Everyone and their brother it seems whants to be a copycat Web 2.0 service and what easier one to pick that some silly assed URL shortener. One would hope that at some point the thought would sink in that maybe – just maybe – we have enough ways to shorten and track a URL.

It would appear now that the newest riff on this disease on social media is for us to create our own in the hope that this will cancel out the fear that if some URL shortening service goes down it won’t leave dead links that should be pointing to your site ending up instead looking like littered used water bottles across the web. Hell even my good buddy Mark has rolled his own URL shortener and while I’m sure he has his reasons I can’t figure out why we need even the number of shorteners we already (sorry Mark ).

A lot of fuss was raised recently over a new breed of URL shorteners hitting the web when Digg released its Diggbar that wraps your site within their frames code and provides a URL shortener as part of the deal. This is similar to what Facebook has done with their web based toolbar and follows along with what Hootsuite, a toolbox of goodies for Twitter users, does with the integration of the ow.ly URL shortener. Now we find out today that even The New York Times has gotten into the act with their own shortening service.

As I thought about writing this post I wondered just how many URL shortening services there were out there so I did a couple of quick searches and this is what I came up with

Doiop
TinyURL
ReadthisURL
MemURL.com
dwarfURL.com
http://snipurl.com
http://shorl.com/

Is.gd
Snurl
Snipr
NSFW.in
QurlyQ
icanhaz.com
Tiny.cc
URLenco.de
bit.ly
PiURL.com
LinkBee.com
TraceURL.com
Tweetburner
rubyurl.com
tnij.org
abbrr.com – Spanish
fon.gs
2big – German
twurl.cc
Knol.me
Tr.im
Bloat.me
cli.gs
Short.ie
kl.am
POPrl
idek.net
budURL
DiggBar
buzzup
chilp.it
krz.ch
shortna.me
ow.ly
zi.ma
nn.nf
rt.tc
sn.vc
lnk.in
pnt.me
yep.it
23o.net
fly2.ws
ne1.net
w3t.org
www.x.se
Xrl.us
Short.to
Notlong.com

http://metamark.net/
http://shurl.org/
6url.com
canurl.com
decenturl.com
easyurl.net
elfurl.com
fire.to
flq.us
freak.to
ix.lt
krunchd.com
miklos.dk
nanoref.com
qicute.com
piurl.com
rurl.org
shorterlink.com
shortlinks.co.uk
shorturl.com
smarturl.eu
tighturl.com
tinylink.com
urlcut.com
urlhawk.com
urlpass.com
yuarel.com
xaddr.com
yatuc.com
yweb.com
UnHub
Lnk.by

91 different URL shortening services and that was only after looking for about half an hour, most of which was spent copying them to the list. It’s like URL shorteners has become the new “Hello World” for wannabe web developers.

The problem is all they are really doing is creating a potential black hole of broken links at some point in the future. While some like bit’.ly have been able to con convince some VCs that there’s money to be made in all those shortened URL the vast majority of them will assuredly disappear. As they do they will be leaving a mess behind them but unfortunately like herpes there will always be some new shortening service popping up.

All this doesn’t even take into account the obvious abuse by spammers, phishers and virus writers that things like URL shorteners will allow. As we become blindingly use to clicking on all these shortened URL because of things like Twitter and other social media services it is only a matter of time before shortened URLs blow up in our face.

Update: at the time of posting the URL shortening service from The New York Times has been taken down due to abuse.

Like we didn’t know that wasn’t coming.

URL Shorteners – the herpes of the web is a post from: The Inquisitr