Marketing Pilgrim

At some point in your career you start asking the question, “what am I doing here?” Maybe you’re not there yet, but trust me, you’ll get to the stage where you wonder if you’re on the right career path, if you should perhaps change direction, or if you can turn that passionate hobby into something that pays the bills.

Once you discover it, there are countless books that will help you Get Things Done or cram it all into a 4-Hour Workweek. The problem is, how do you discover what your IT is in the first place?

That’s where Scott Wittig‘s Holy IT comes in.

So you are bit.ly and you just suffered through the announcement that your already crowded area of the Internet space has been sat on by the 800 pound Google gorilla with their announcement of the arrival of their own URL shortening service. That can make for a rough day. Sure competition is a good thing because all ships rise with a rising tide. Google makes those tides rise so fast sometimes though that the little ships get tossed in the air and don’t always land well.

Well, bit.ly is trying to do its part in making the URL shortening industry a little more interesting. They have announced their new Pro service. One wonders if they needed to announce it a little more hastily than anticipated considering the new “Google’s in the URL shortening house!” scenario. At any rate they are offering a chance for users to provide customized / personalized / whatever-ized shortened URL’s for those looking t stand out from the crowd. Their blog’s description goes a little something like this:

If you are Twitter you have to be feeling a bit dizzy by now. 2009 has been a year of tremendous growth, more than a little success followed by more than a little criticism. There are always questions hovering over why Biz did that or if Jack really meant that or if Evan is saying something that isn’t supposed to be public or whatever.

Meanwhile, the rest of the market is flying around at a rapid rate. Google has come up with nearly forty innovations in the past 70 days alone. Some of which involve the real time search genie that Twitter represents.

Well, while not innovating at Google-like speeds (who does that anyway) there are some things emerging from Twitter like their announcement yesterday about a new ‘business’ feature. On the Twitter blog we read

Have you noticed how most bloggers are at their meanest best early in the day? Come 4:20pm, they simply don’t have the same energy levels.

You’ve not noticed? Well Google has! And the search giant has a growing tendency to announce potentially polarizing news late in the day.

Exhibit A: Google’s launched its own URL shortener called Goo.gl. As the search giant describes it, Goo.gl offers:

• Stability: Google’s scalable, multi-datacenter infrastructure provides great uptime and a reliable service to our users.
• Security: As we do with web search, shortened URLs are automatically checked to detect sites that may be malicious and warn users when the short URL resolves to such sites.
• Speed: At Google we like fast products and we’ve worked hard to ensure this service is quick. We’ll continue to iterate and improve the speed of Google Url Shortener.

Let’s face it: nobody has the attention span to read more than 140 characters anymore. So WordPress’s latest effort—mobile microblogging cross posting to a regular blog—totally makes sense.

Actually, it’s really not a bad shot. Based on an API interface, you can now cross post Twitter updates (with geotagging) to your WordPress account. And really, if all you have to say fits in 140 characters, that’s pretty cool.

Of course, this also shows that WordPress’s tech team isn’t too worried about Twitter. And honestly, why should they be? Yeah, Twitter is popular and gets a lot of hype, but really, it serves a different purpose than full-sized blogs. Twitter is great for one-on-one, fast conversations (like public IM, I guess), and for interacting. It’s less great for . . . well, anything that takes more than 140 characters, for one.

Friday, Google announced new Universal Search features for Google Suggest. The query-finishing prompter used to only suggest completed or related queries as you typed:

The new Google Suggest has way more than just words to offer. Google announce ten new Universal Search shortcuts available right in Google Suggest.

Just start typing in a query that falls into one of these categories, and you’ll get the answer to your question before you can even click.

Many of the suggestions also feature more “universally” features including weather icons and links in addition to the answers. These suggestions are available for weather, flight status, local time, area codes, package tracking, answers (like [what is the capital of Belgium]), definitions, calculator, currency and unit conversions.