Predicting the future. Corporations Add Shortening to the Mix
As I continue to hone my abilities of predicting the future, I’d like to submit another one for your amusement.
I see an interesting twist on URL shorteners becoming a direct part of corporate web strategies.
We first caught a glimpse of this on April 19th 2009 when a New York Times enthusiast created NytUrl.com, a URL shortener aimed at The New York Times web site articles. Promptly there after, it was shut down.
Shortly there after, Tech Crunch launched its own Short URL: http://tcrn.ch
Today, Amazon jumps into the game with their Short URL: http://amzn.com
Amazon actually has a very unique opportunity in their short URL offering to the web community with their product ISBN Numbers. All you need to access a product on Amazon is http://amzn.com + ISBN
Its time for companies to add URL shortening to their web strategy, now.
My corporate job reminds me, daily, that the reality of an average web strategy is no where near such an agenda - They’re still talking SEO/SEM/PPC/BLOG/ECT.
So, go while you can and register all the cleverly shortened and truncated URL’s.
My lottery ticket to you.
Retweet Button is the New Digg Button?
We’ve all seen the Digg buttons on websites and blog publishers to encourage their audience to submit or digg their content on Digg. Lately you may have noticed a shift from Digg buttons to Retweet Buttons by TweetMeme!
The retweet button encourages blog audiences to retweet the content on twitter. Its available in standard javascript code snippets, much like Digg’s, as well as a WordPress plugin - Which I need to install 
I can easily see this capturing a large share of blog real estate which currently belongs to Digg. As more and more surfers of the intertubes turn to Twitter for their ‘news’ this will become the fastest way to spread your blog post message.
It will be interesting to continue to watch this movement as it evolves.
What are CoTags?
Twitter’s 140 Character limitation inspires us to become more creative in our use of these characters in messaging. Jam packing as much information as possible into those 140chars often comes in the form of abbreveations, Shortened URL’s, and HashTags. But now we have a new means of squeezing more information into our messages in the form of a signature, with CoTags.
CoTags are a new convention for using signatures when tweeting from a brand account. It’s really simple—just the carat (^) character followed by the person’s initials, or other identifying set of characters.
The concept is like #hashtags. But while #hashtags provide a way to track tweets topically across many users, ^CoTags create a way to associate individual tweets within a shared brand account. And in the process, ^CoTags bring “humanness” to otherwise monolithic branded Twitter accounts.
While ^CoTags can exist by themselves, they’re much more useful if there is a legend that associates them to the information they represent. The question is where to put that legend. For now, the Twitter profile page is the most logical place. But the current limitations that page—only one URL, a 160-character bio, and a background image—pose a challenge.
Here is an example of CoTags both in action on MediaTemples Twitter Profile page as well as their legend:
While the majority of this information was taken directly from a CoTweet Blog post on their CoTags, I felt it was needed to help spread awareness of CoTags on Twitter.
Twitter Relevant Indexed Google Results
While the reason varies, I often find myself using Google to look people up on Twitter. Today was no different, having forgotten Dan Schawbel’s Twitter Username, I performed a quick Google Search so I could send him a Tweet regarding his latest Mashable Post.
A Thought for Social Media Immigrants
The following is a food for thought moment, brought to you by @SIGEPJEDI. Call it a connection of the present and future to that of our historic past. This is specifically for all you old media types out there who have yet to connect the dots. Today I wont be connecting any of those dots for you, just sharing what goes on in my brain.