BudiPutra.com

URL shortener thing is really a big deal, thanks to the needs to the microblogging services, mobile phones and any kind of manual text-entry. It's "a renaissance in the age of Twitter," according to Danny Sullivan. URL shortening is a technique where a provider makes a web page available under a very short URL in addition to the original address.

Twitter has just announced that it will be launching its own URL shortener, while Amazon has launched it’s own shortened URL, amzn.to, powered by bit.ly’s new Pro service.

By the way, how useful of the URL shortener for you? Which shortening service did you use frequently?

This is a brief history of the Internet: Initiated by the ARPANET in 1969; the protocol used on the Internet called TCP/IP was developed in 1974; Domain Name System (DNS) designed by Jon Postel, Paul Mockapetris, and Craig Partridge in 1983; a Massachusetts computer systems firm registered the first .com Internet domain name on March 15, 1985; and Tim Berners-Lee creates the World Wide Web in 1990. 

First 10 .com domains:

• Symbolics.com - March 15, 1985
• BBN.com - April 24, 1985
• Think.com - May 24, 1985
• MCC.com - July 11, 1985
• DEC.com - Sept. 30, 1985
• Northrop.com - Nov. 7, 1985
• Serox.com - Jan. 9, 1986
• SRI.com - Jan. 17, 1986
• HP.com - March 3, 1986
• Bellcore.com - March 5, 1986

[via SFGate]

Just discovered an interesting list, 18 first different things on the Internet [brief] history, thanks to the TechReaders site!

1. The First Email: Ray Tomlinson sent first email and also made use of @ symbol in email addresses in 1971.
2. The First Ever Domain Name: "symbolics.com" registered by computer manufacturer Symbolics (now obsolete) on 15th March 1985.
3. The First SPAM Email Ever: Gary Thuerk sent spam email messages to 393 people on ARPANET on 3rd May 1978.
4. The First Ever Mobile Phone with Internet Access Facility: Nokia 9000 Communicator (launched in 1996, Finland).
5. The First Ever Website: Info.cern.ch which was launched in late 1990.
6. The First Ever E-Commerce Website and Transaction: NetMarket that claims to process first ever secure transaction on the web on August 11, 1994.
7. The First Ever Online Bank: Stanford Federal Credit Union that provides Online Internet Banking services to all of its customers in October, 1994.
8. The First Ever Search Engine: WebCrawler.com which was launched in 1994.
9. The First Ever Blog: Justin Halls is considered the first blogger who started a web diary in 1994. [The term webblog was introduced in 1997 which later led to “blog” in 1999].
10. The First Ever Podcast: Dave Winer added audio content into the RSS feeds on January 11, 2001.
11. The First Item Ever Sold on eBay: A broken laser pointer worth $14.83.
12. The First Book Ever Sold on Amazon: Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought by Douglas Hofstadter [1995].
13. The first edit on Wikipedia: Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia founder when doing a test edit with text “Hello, World!”
14. The First Ever Video on YouTube: "Me at the Zoo" video put by the the cofounder of YouTube Jawed Karim on April 23, 2005.
15. The First Ever Message on Twitter: It was a demonstration message with text “just setting up my twttr” by the creator of Twitter, Jack Dorsey on 21st March 2006.
16. The First Ever Voice Chat Service: Rocket Messenger.
17. The First Ever Website Hacked: Federal websites that included US Department of Justic, U.S. Air Force, CIA, and NASA in 1990.
18. The First Ever Social Network Site: Friendster.com which was launched in 2002.

If you frequently misspelled site addresses, it means you already sent cash to others --in this case, Google! A report says that Google supplied ads to almost 60 percent of these sites and earning some $497 million a year!

If these typo domains were treated as a single website, that site would be ranked by Alexa as the 10th most popular website in the world. It would be more popular, in unique daily visitors, than twitter.com, myspace.com, or amazon.com!

Yeah, it doesn't look like a valid link but OMG TRY IT. Just visit http://to./ then type your long URL on the box provided and click on Shorten that URL; or like my colleague Harry Sufehmi suggested, just type http://to./[your long URL] on the browser's bar!

Your call! :-)