Marketing Pilgrim

Last weekend I visited my father at his home in Hartsville, South Carolina. Hartsville is a typical southern small town that the likes of Andy Griffith would be proud of. So you can imagine the buzz around town when a new Italian restaurant opened up. There wouldn’t be much debate, this is where we would be going for dinner.

I am not a food critic by any means, but I like Italian food. My mother’s side of the family is from Malta so while I am no expert on Italian cuisine I like to think I have a pretty good grasp on Mediterranean culture. Overall this place did a good job representing a Mediterranean style, but that wasn’t enough to save me from what was to come.

Don’t you just love how every year, someone predicts that “the mobile” will “arrive”? (Me too! I love these crazy forecasts! Must be my penchant for fiction.) Well, today, Read Write Web takes a hard look at mobile eCommerce and the challenges that stand between us and buy-anytime-anywhere.

A couple years ago, about 6 months after the iPhone came out, I sat on a panel about the mobile Internet, and the final question was something along the lines of “When will the mobile Internet arrive?” My answer was when we had large scale adoption of a browsing experience like what the iPhone provided. Well, smartphones have come a long way in technology and adoption in the intervening years, and the mobile Internet is gaining in popularity worldwide—and yet m-Commerce is still lagging behind.

In a world of 140 characters, URLs are a thing of the past. As Twitter has grown and gained in hype popularity, the URL shorteners have seen a similar rise—but the sprint for shortest URL may actually be over.

Back in May, Twitter abandoned its default support of TinyURL, a URL shortener that reduced URLs to 25 characters. Twitter moved to bit.ly, saving its users 6 characters to create 19-character URLs. (Yes, now you can add ROTFL with impunity.)

Now bit.ly is announcing an even shorter URL shortener: j.mp. J.mp will use all of the same tools that bit.ly has, but without all those extra characters. That’s right, now your URLs can be shared in just 17 (or 18) characters. Now you can add that extra ! (and/or 1) to give your tweet the oomph it needs.

Earlier this week we told you of Fox and Twitter teaming up to create some buzz about repeats of the shows Fringe and Glee. Well, hopefully there is no such thing as bad press because the comments we received about the experiment were unanimous: FAIL! Check out our impassioned reader feedback.

Ginger Says:

September 3rd, 2009 at 10:02 pm

When I watch television I’d like to see the program, concentrate on the program, and not be inundated with superfluous trivia such as the content of the Twitter being shown on Fringe. This format does not allow the viewer to see the movie. I simply decided to change the channel, as did most of my friends.

Debbie Says:

September 4th, 2009 at 12:20 am

Gmail had a rough week with its downtime. We talked about that already and here at Marketing Pilgrim, at least, have decided to forgive them – just this once! Maybe as a make good to all of you still steamed about the failure of Google to be perfect you can take comfort in the new themes that have been released for Gmail!

As we ease into a much needed three-day weekend (speaking strictly for myself here but I suspect others can relate) let’s take a look at the pretty new scenes you can look at if your Gmail happens to be working. Just go to settings in your Gmail account to use these and other themes and if you get bored easily set it to Random and Google will make more decisions for you! Thanks to Mashable for the heads up!

Over at TechCrunch Michael Arrington has been doling out portions of his interview with Google’s Grand High Pubah (that’s code for CEO) Eric Schmidt. It’s interesting to see what one of the more influential people in the space (and in business overall) sees for the future of the industry / service. There is even some evidence that the folks at Google get some chuckles internally discussing mind control and connecting directly into brains for the real “intent of search”. Man, they sure know how to ’yuck it up’ out in Mountain View, don’t they?!

On a more serious note Schmidt talks about where search is now and what the next 10 years may hold