Linked List: March 5, 2009

Thursday, 5 March 2009

You Just Know This One’s Getting Filed Away in the Claim Chowder Folder ★

Bloomberg:

Palm Inc.’s new Pre smart phone will lure customers away from Apple Inc.’s iPhone when subscribers’ contracts start expiring in June, Palm investor Roger McNamee said.

“You know the beautiful thing: June 29, 2009, is the two-year anniversary of the first shipment of the iPhone,” McNamee said today in an interview in San Francisco. “Not one of those people will still be using an iPhone a month later.”

McNamee isn’t just some crackpot:

McNamee is a co-founder of Elevation Partners, the investment firm that agreed in December to pay $100 million to lift its stake in Palm to 39 percent from 25 percent.

Not sure why he’d want to raise expectations like this.

Tinyarro.ws ★

New URL shortening service; uses Unicode domain name and Unicode characters for the slugs to produce the shortest-possible URLs. E.g., here’s a link to the DF home page: http://➡.ws/.

The obvious use case for ultra-short URLs is Twitter, where every character in a URL counts against the 140-character limit. But be warned, despite the fact that these are legitimate URLs, some Twitter clients don’t parse them correctly — Twitterrific for one.

John Battelle: ‘Twitter = YouTube’ ★

Smart piece by John Battelle on Twitter as an acquisition target for Google.

Excuses ★

John Paczkowski on Steve Ballmer’s answer to questions about how poorly Windows Mobile compares to the iPhone and Android.

‘Public Enemies’ ★

Johnny Depp as John Dillinger, directed by Michael Mann.

Opera Fingertouch ★

New mobile touchscreen browser feature from Opera:

Fingertouch provides visual feedback when you hit a Web link, and assists you when you come across multiple links or other selectable elements in close proximity to one another.