FPL's 23 Things

Tiny URL & You Send It (Things 13 & 14) by EAChase

This week we will explore two things that help you meet the expectations of Web 2.0 users. Now that you have tried tweeting and communicating with friends on Facebook, you understand the expectation of brevity in these social media communities. You may have also noticed the expectation users have for interacting and consuming pictures, audio, and video as part of their online experience. Also….we might be looking at these because I geek tools.

TinyURL and YouSendIt are handy tools that can help you keep those web 2.0 expectations of working with multimedia files and keeping things brief.

TinyURL  allows users to take impossibly long URLs and make them short. (This is handy if you only have 140 characters to get your point across.) Not only does TinyURL make it easy to shorten things, but allows you to make them more memorable. If I had to share with a friend the following URL:

http://www.friscolibrary.com/youth/kids/Collections_and_Services_for_Kids.htm#LittleKids

Would they ever remember it? Could I remember it? Would anyone actually type that into the address bar of their browser?! TinyURL also allows you to come up with something more memorable like:

tinyurl.com/kidscollections

For  Thing 13 you will need to:

1. Copy a long or confusing URL you wish to shorten.
2. Go to TinyURL.com and paste the URL. (Enter the long URL under the “Welcome to TinyURL” paragraph.)
3. Click “Make TinyURL.”  The shorter URL will be http://tinyurl.com/ followed by a short series of numbers and letters. Short…but not memorable.  -OR-   Try making a custom TinyURL by entering a key phrase into the box labeled “custom alias” as in the example above.  Short and memorable.
4. Share it. You can blog it, tweet it, facebook it, text it… or all four!

 On to our fourteenth thing: YouSendIt

Web 2.0 places a premium on graphics, audio, and video. Those multimedia files can be very large and hard to share with someone you are collaborating with online. Most email servers strictly limit file size making it hard to send someone a high quality file you are wanting to share. YouSendIt allows you to send up to a 2GB file of virtually any type. This makes collaborating with those bulky multimedia file much easier.

For Thing 14 you will need to:

1. Go to YouSendIt.
2. Upload and send a file to a friend using “Try Sending Now.” If you don’t have a friend…send it to yourself.
3. Download the file to your desktop.

What are your impressions of these services?

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