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Great discussion of legal issues surrounding publishing of confidential Twitter documents. Thanks John Furrier for sharing this. - http://www.citmedialaw.org/blog...

July 16 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

Anne Bouey, John E. Bredehoft, Susan Beebe and 42 other people liked this

Whether it was illegal or not, certainly publishing the documents rec'd from a hacker was unethical. - malackey

82 more comments

Would we see the docs if Arrington had put angel $$ into Twitter? - Dave Hodson

malackey, that depends on the situation, wouldn't it be ethical to post something of grave public concern regardless of the source? - Mike Chelen

malackey: journalists publish stuff gotten through illicit means all the time. Did you read the article? You'll notice that in the legal issues Techcrunch wasn't mentioned once. Lots of stuff journalists do is questionable. In journalism school we were taught to bias toward "publish the info." - Robert Scoble

Must say that I did think it was not right for Techcrunch to reveal those docs yesterday, but I did not take it all that seriously. I did think that Twitter should have been careful about security since they were getting so much press. After reviewing the legal discussion, I think this should be a concern for all moving forward. - courtney benson

Courtney: that's why I published it, just so someone could see a good discussion of the legal issues at hand here. - Robert Scoble

Man see I was all sorts of geared up for some seriously *Popcorn* shit and they break the super secret news.....hold breath......financial data......who the f cares. 2013 estimates seriously? Hold on let me get my crayons out and make up a number it should be about as accurate. It was inappropriate to "leak" these docs simply because they had no societal benefit. If it had been blowing... more... - Geoff Schultz

If we can agree that TechCrunch = The National Enquirer (a gossip rag delivered via blogs) then we can agree that Arrington is a journalist. Then your argument is valid. - jcunwired

Geoff: sorry, Twitter's business strategy is of a pretty sizeable community concern. Lots of developers I know are trying to decide whether to spend resources developing for Twitter. Knowing where Twitter is going, or expecting to go, will have an impact there. - Robert Scoble

jcunwired: TechCrunch breaks more news stories about the tech industry than any other tech blog I know. Yes, Arrington does have a nose for the sensational, but that's demanded in today's real time world where getting attention is damn difficult. It's one reason why I don't try to do much tech news anymore. - Robert Scoble

Sorry Robert I don't see any moral or ethical high ground in that argument that makes the case for these being important enought o leak' - Geoff Schultz

Geoff: that's fair. I do. But then I went to journalism school and we were taught to publish information, even stuff that was gotten through questionable means, and not hold back when it comes across our desk. Even stuff that pisses off our readers. - Robert Scoble

Hmm, like those breaking stories "______ offered $X billion for Twitter"? Gossip. Every once in awhile they guess correctly, I will give you that, but the vast majority of published material is opinion, its not news. - jcunwired

Robert, the question malackey raised was what difference exists between legality and ethics. are the arguments the same for both? - Mike Chelen

jcunwired: those are the TechCrunch stories you remember. I'm a more careful reader than that. 90% of TechCrunch is straight up news reporting on new companies coming out with new stuff. But that stuff is, admittedly, boring so we remember the fun stories that get on TechMeme. - Robert Scoble

Mike: no. The legal world exists in a completely separate world from our human one. If you think they are the same you'll make poor legal decisions. - Robert Scoble

Scobles has a point, people should be aware of what they do when they get confidential info. just becuase it's in your email does not mean "its fair game" as per Mike A !! . Remember its criminal (In most places) to accept such "collateral" that has been obtained by unfair means, this means 'stolen'. I am pretty sure that the true colors of TC are now coming too light and off course the... more... - Peter Dawson

Peter: that is NOT true when it comes to journalists. If you read the article I linked to above, you'd see that journalism is judged differently than if you were to, say, receive a stolen TV. - Robert Scoble

I think, as Malackey points out, the key issue issue is the definition of "issues of public concern." I don't think Twitter's popularity makes it a de facto matter of public concern. And TechCrunch and other blogs that traffic in info that they know to be stolen are simply encouraging hackers to do it again. - Kevin Pedraja

Scoble - were you an advocate of publishing all the emails stolen from Sarah Palin's acct that was hacked? I don't see how the Twitter docs are any different. - Dave Hodson

Peter: when startups approach TechMeme they only care about one thing: the size and influence of TechCrunch's audience. If that goes down, then they'll be approached less often by companies. - Robert Scoble

Dave: I didn't have an opinion on Sarah Palin and don't know the facts of her case. I care about the tech industry, not the political one. - Robert Scoble

Cheap dodge, Robert. You really don't have an interest in the son of a TN congressman phishing into Palin's Yahoo mail account that she used for state business and then leaking it? It's a good parallel. - Daniel J. Pritchett from IM

I think mostly I am annoyed because the data was boring. :( - Geoff Schultz

But, Dave, my bias is to publish information. If you are a journalist that's your bias. You have to have a damn good reason not to publish information that comes into your hands. Why? More in next comment... - Robert Scoble

Here's the link http://www.knoxnews.com/news... - Daniel J. Pritchett

Daniel: I would use the methodology discussed in the article above to decide whether to publish information. Does it serve a public good? - Robert Scoble

Outside of giving info to a relatively small group of people (developers) what "public good" did the disclosures serve? - Kevin Pedraja

So, what's really funny is lots of people are bashing TechCrunch, but TechCrunch was NOT the first to publish the info. The French guy was. And I saw lots of TechCrunch competitors like Business Insider linking to that guy. THAT is why you should publish when info comes across your desk. - Robert Scoble

Scoble - same deal. Hacked account, info people care about. By your logic, they should have been published. - Dave Hodson

Kevin: seems to me that falls into "public good." If only one of you is helped by my publishing of information, that seems to me to be a "public good." - Robert Scoble

Just because the someone else does something, doesnt mean its right to do it Robert... - Rasmus Lauridsen

Robert, if you read the article it also sez "I'm not sure how the First Amendment would impact a possible prosecution for receipt of stolen property because it is receipt of stolen material, not publication, which is criminalized" !! and pls dont tell me that Mike A was NOT in receipt of Stolen material ?? Come on.. deepthoarting does not get one far !! - Peter Dawson

Dave: again, if you are a journalist, you will bias toward publishing information. - Robert Scoble

Rasmus: right and wrong are political issues between humans. Not legal ones. It's why journalists often are not liked. - Robert Scoble

Rasmus: if you worry about whether you will be liked you won't make a good journalist. It's why I don't generally do news. I care too much whether you like me or not. - Robert Scoble

Robert, if I steal a car and give it to you, will you park it on your property ? Yes/no ? If its NO, then why would any1 do the same for stolen documents ! - Peter Dawson

Peter: again, stealing a car is DIFFERENT than stealing information for journalistic purposes. This is covered VERY CLEARLY in the legal argument above. - Robert Scoble

Peter: stay on topic. Being a journalist means you are judged under different societal and legal rules than if you are a car thief. I know this is hard for some people to understand. - Robert Scoble

Robert , stealing is stealing !! If you saying different , then your an arse for saying it ! - Peter Dawson

Peter: no it isn't. Sorry. Under First Amendment stealing is NOT stealing if it serves the public good. - Robert Scoble

I'm amazed at how much discussion this is generating given that the documents published thus far are pretty benign. An out of date financial projection and a pitch for a Twitter TV show? zzzz... - Bill Kinney

That is a BIG "if" by the way and not one I'm comfortable with in the case of the Twitter documents. - Robert Scoble

Bill: I don't think the argument we're having is really about the Twitter documents. It's about the First Amendment and the role of journalism in our society. - Robert Scoble

Robert, this is good convo, yes were a grad as journalist and are working in the new media stream of life.. but something stolen is something stolen.. and when you know its stolen the questions remains what are your actions. The defination of being a good person is doing the right thing even if no one is watching ! - Peter Dawson

Peter, did you steal that line ;) - Micah Wittman

Peter: sorry, there are two conflicting legal problems with theft of information for purposes of conducting journalism. That's what you aren't getting. Theft of a car is clear. Theft of information is not. First Amendment wins in many of those cases and causes the theft to be disregarded. - Robert Scoble

Peter: define "right." Some people define right as having a religiously-run government like that in Iran. That's wrong to me. - Robert Scoble

I'd rather just discuss the LEGAL issues because if we get into wrong or right then we're all screwed. - Robert Scoble

And here in the USA the legal issue is that stealing information for publishing is not considered theft if there's an overriding public good. The First Amendment comes first and wipes out other concerns. - Robert Scoble

Robert, agreeded !! " See Mary T. Jean v. Massachusetts State Police, 492 F.3d 24 (1st Cir. 2007) (First Amendment barred criminal prosecution for posting illegally recorded [..]". The second part is that it was published due to 'public concern" and you/TC say Twitter info is a public concern. However, how are you defining public concern ? Twitter employees/ Biz etc are part of the public too and are very concerned about the publication of such notes ! - Peter Dawson

Peter: when you have conflict between two parties (the public good, and Twitter's employees concern of publication) then it gets muddy. That's why we have courts and lawyers. The publisher has to argue that publishing of the information served a bigger good than keeping them private. Deciding that in this case is pretty difficult but is probably why we haven't seen many of the 300+ pages of information supposedly that was sent around. - Robert Scoble

Robert " the 300+ pages of information supposedly " - I would like to say "perpetrated" as being around.. fwiw..it could just be 7 pages and the rest is just fluff ! - Peter Dawson

Peter: I haven't seen the zip file, so I have no idea. - Robert Scoble

Robert, neither have I and/or any1 else.. welcome to the club of new media ..and miss-infomation tactics !! - Peter Dawson

Peter: that's why I would rather just discuss the legal implications of publishing such material in the future. It's a good thing for bloggers to think about the law, before they get stuck in a courtroom with $100,000 of legal bills. - Robert Scoble

Tis a good discussion indeed. I'm also really interested in the security ramifications.... - Bill Kinney

Bill, DNS routing / posioning is an old technique.. shame on Twitter for mismanging their properties. - Peter Dawson

More from Arrington - http://www.techcrunch.com/2009... - Dave Hodson

@Scoble - I don't see how you can defend what Arrington just published - Dave Hodson

Dave: I don't know what Arrington just published, I'm off to see. - Robert Scoble

@Prasoon, the Leak was on a french site, long before TC pub'ed his info !! - Peter Dawson

@Peter - check out what TC just put out. Way more than the French site - Dave Hodson

I think what might be stake here is ethical integrity. Yes, but that is (as Scoble says) not what would bother a journalist. Journalist's don't care if people like them. - Kevin Costain

interesting to note " Erick Schonfeld" actually has pub'ed this and not Mike A.. why ?? - Peter Dawson

Mike's probably recharging his batteries in his basement lair. - Daniel J. Pritchett from IM

Wow, well, what Arrington just signaled to the world is that if information comes into his hands he will publish. I guess he also got Twitter's buy in. Good stuff. - Robert Scoble

I wouldn't exactly call it buy in. Twitter has no say in the matter whatsoever, that's been made apparent. - jcunwired

Legally, I would think TC or any other journalist that would have done the same in this situation, is in the clear. Since the information is internal corporate communication, it could definitely run into espionage concerns. Who would benefit from knowing Twitter's internal plans? The public? I hardly think that's of concern to anybody, and it's not like there's any grave public concern... more... - Pete Delucchi from iPhone

Robert, yes he must have got twitter buyin and better pub';ed from aknown devil then an unknown devil :)- But I will still like to see what Twitter has to say about this latest release and if was blessed ! - Peter Dawson

I would say its probably just about money. How much money is Techcruch going to make off publishing these documents? Is there a link between the thief and Techcrunch? Is Twitter about to sue - likely not if they approved these docs - but maybe? Is Twitter going to pay Techcrunch to stop publishing? Will Twitter's business be effected by the leak? I'm sure if there is justice for the the theft of information not intended to be public - they'll follow the money.. - Kevin Costain

These leaks definitely air out a lot of Twitter's short-term business strategy but it's really just confirmation of rumors rather than any revelations. - Daniel J. Pritchett from IM

Techcruch do have some good material, but with how they obtain Twitter material, very questionable, I don't even know they done it for money at all. I think they r doing it for hyping their name, Techcrunch. It won't stop me from reading them. - polou/indigo_bow

I think it's pretty clear that TC did what any journalistic effort would do. That's a no brainer. And receipt of leaked information is not remotely the same a stolen goods. The 1st Amendment issue TC encounters isn't at all related to publication. That's protected and well within rights. Whether or not to disclose the source is an oft-tested question and the real test of journalistic... more... - Ken Camp

I still don't think that twitter would co-OPERATE with Techcruch, very smelly fishy. Techcruch with law enforcement, ? - polou/indigo_bow

I wonder if those up in arms about the situation would be so agitated if it was some other company other then Techcrunch who received the information. I think that Techcrunch had every right to publish the documents. People, leak company information all the time to newspaper and magazine that they aren't suppose to, just because the stuff wasn't written down doesn't mean its any more legal. I wrote a short blog post at http://musingandgadgets.squarespace.com on what I thought of the situation. - Kim Landwehr

Where there is money there is always vice - Sam Mbale

Of note: @ev says "@TechCrunch @arrington "we have been given the green light by Twitter to post this information" What?! By whom? That's not our understanding" - Kevin Costain

Link to Kevin's source: http://friendfeed.com/evhead... - Daniel J. Pritchett

If the documents contained info on how twitter were involved in global terrorism, money laundering or some heinous activity like then fine, publishing would be in everyone's interest. But publishing the documents that were about company strategy, employees diaries and so on is patently not in the public interest and should be treated accordingly. It seems like 'Arrington published because he could. A decent person would've simply returned the documents to the rightful owner. - Paul Nash

Paul, why would the company strategy fall into the same category as employee diaries? one may have significant public interest, while the other is of little importance outside certain individuals. - Mike Chelen

Mike my point was that the documents were all private and not in the public interest. If someone had broken into twitter's offices and stolen paper documents, surely that would be seen as a crime. Because they were stolen electronically then the attitude seems to be they are fair game - Paul Nash

Paul, the legality of the theft is not at question, breach of computer systems is as surely a crime as physical access. a newspaper may still publish stolen documents if they are important, what is the basis for determining that none of these are in the public interest? - Mike Chelen

Question - how would the issues change (if at all) if Twitter were a publicly-traded company (like Apple)? If Twitter were public, then certain disclosures would fall under the domain of the Securities & Exchange Commission. Much of the debate regarding Steve Jobs' health has to do with its potential impact on Apple's stock price. Or, to put it another way - if Ev and Biz visit a yogurt shop, would anyone care? - John E. Bredehoft

Bengt Wendel

Are These Three Words Ruining Your Life? | Zen Habits - http://zenhabits.net/2009...

May 3 from StumbleUpon - Comment - Like - Share

Joe Buhler liked this

From the page: "How can we stop letting obscurity keep us from becoming successful? " - Bengt Wendel

Tim O'Reilly

RT @aseidman: Awesome iPhone App stats available on O'Reilly http://radar.oreilly.com/2009...

April 18 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Mustafa Tan, Kirill Petrovsky, Joe Buhler and 2 other people liked this

mashable

Reading: "100 Awesome Facebook Apps for Productivity & Learning" http://www.selectcourses.com/blog...

April 11 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Gregory R and Joe Buhler liked this

I'm kinda shocked that there are any FB apps for productivity or learning! Aren't they mostly polls about what tree you are? - amygeek

Bret

The New Banking Bailout Plan Reconstitutes Some of the Same Ingredients That Touched Off the Financial Crisis - http://www.moneymorning.com/2009...

February 12 from Money Morning - Comment - Like - Share

Joe Buhler liked this

Richard

Feedly Mini Updated: Now with More Twitter and FriendFeed Interaction http://www.readwriteweb.com/archive...

February 11 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Riaz Kanani, Rick Powell, Ivan Pavlov and 26 other people liked this

I have a video with Edwin uploading right now to http://www.kyte.tv/scobleizer that shows off these new features. One note: the article makes it sound like I was working for Feedly. I was not. I did not receive any compensation for inspiring Edwin. - Robert Scoble

11 more comments

@Robert: updated post to read "inspired" not "helped" - It was unclear in Edwin's original wording (see his post), which read "With the help of Robert Scoble...". - Sarah Perez

Hi Sarah. Thank you very for the write-up. I apologize if the wording of my post was misleading. What I really meant was that we are leveraging Robert and the video he is publishing to launch/announce feedly mini. I will update the post to address this. Regarding Amazon and NYT, they are not yet integrated in the mini but they are integrated in digest: the Amazon module provides product recommendation (you need to opt-in) and the NYT search API is used in the Explore page. Many thanks for the review! - Edwin Khodabakchian

Thanks Sarah. Edwin, the video should be up in a few minutes. It'll get posted here when it's up. - Robert Scoble

I'm impressed - and I don't get that impressed about too many things :) - Ian Betteridge

I'm now trying it out and first impressions are very good. Looks like a great tool once I've changed my previous Google Reader habits. - Joe Buhler

Holy cow. The direct conversation feature is a killer! - Toni @ NavinoT

does it work with chrome - Prakash

Prakash: not yet, only Firefox. - Robert Scoble

I have the mini installed which is great, where is the start page though. - Chris Frost

Great FF add-on and it still gets better and better. - Dave Vanhoudt

Didn't like this at first. Wow, very cool now! - Alex C. Williams

this is v cool.. - Riaz Kanani

Robert Scoble

New Feedly combines Google Reader, friendfeed, Twitter in great way for social network addicts - http://scobleizer.com/2009...

February 11 from Scobleizer -- Tech geek... - Comment - Like - Share

Phil Ashman, Susan Beebe, Yan and 84 other people liked this

Here's the video I did yesterday with Edwin who shows me what Feedly is all about. Edwin talks about the real time web (Steve Gillmor alert) and demos the latest. - Robert Scoble

37 more comments

This is really great. I tried Feedly when it was released around the FF 3.0 release and struggled with it's magazine metaphor. I was very much used to the inbox metaphor of google reader. However, the new real-time search integration with Friendfeed and Twitter is amazing. It has really become a conversation awareness tool for browsing. - Dave Senior

Used Feedly before. Gonna have to give it a look again. The idea of everything in one place is very appealing. - Paul Wade

Not to mention the great little Feedly mini bar at the bottom of every page - easy to share, tweet, email whatever you find - even outside of Feedly. INtegration with delicious, tumblr, google reader, friendfeed - it's fantastic - James Hull

off to have another look. I was using Feedly for a while till I switched to Chrome. - Sharon Hurley Hall

OMG, this seems to be gorgeous oO - Dennis R.

Just to add here to the love - the documentation is kind of confusing at first. There are a ton of great shortcut keystrokes that I've been able to find - 'd' while reading an article, automatically opens up the delicious tagging extension (if you have it installed) - 'gg' will open a window with quick access to your feeds, and so on - James Hull

I love feedly use it all the time especially the new features - Kim Landwehr

Cool. I got here from the Feedly mini that popped up while I was reading Scoble's blog post about this. - Tom Landini

I really want it to figure out the most popular posts for me though. The digest should show conversations like Kosmix does, based on my FF/twitter/digg/reddit friends. - Brandon Titus

gonna have to give this a try asap - andy brudtkuhl

Wow, when I tried Feedly I wasn't using FF actively. Integration with FF is really nice. Still a bit confusing in buttons - bnoise

Been having fun playing with the new Feedly mini. Not working consistently on sites, and I have yet to click a link in Twitter and have the Twitter integration kick in. Still a very nice little tool. - Sean Brady

Feedly is very good. I just wish I could use it on Safari. - Louis Gray

Sean: re: consistency. we are adding a button to manually pop up in the cases where the metadata does not pass the "interesting" bar. Regarding twitter, can you please open a bug on getsatisfaction.com/feedly and let us know which twitter page you are clicking through from and if you have any other twitter extension which might interfere with the topic detection and we will track the issue down. - Edwin Khodabakchian

thank you Louis! Today reminded me of the launch you helped us detonate back on June 16th (and hope that we have learned our lessons and nothing will backfire this time!). Thank again for the initial push! - Edwin Khodabakchian

My social network workflow is a recursive loop of images and information that now passes between >> Feedly - Tweetdeck - Friendfeed << Feedly has become a keystone. - Brad Kligerman

For me, Greader is to Feedly as Twitter is to Friendfeed. Rss stream provides the data source, its inertia, but it requires another workflow modality to actually begin to understand its dense, complex meaning. - Brad Kligerman

completely automatic - if you're already signed in to those services. Freaked me out at first - but then loved it. - James Hull

use feedly since some monthes and LOVE it! Reading much more feeds since using it. Its much more "sexy" to go through the feeds now and easy share+discuss - natadd from twhirl

If you're looking for the Feedly mini-bar at the bottom, try opening a new window, I've found sometimes that helps to show it. Plus, I think it only comes up on feeds that you're subscribed to, or something like that. AGain, it's not perfectly clear. The buttons for sharing with friendfeed and twitter on individual posts should appear below each headline... - James Hull

How did I get 5 hours behind the eight ball on this?? Awesome, thanks Robert! - Phil G

Feedly is excellent and the team work really hard to put in new features every week, and then release it! - Scott Davies

Part of feedly sounds sort of like dai-sy http://is.gd/jgt1 - KyleHase from twhirl

I can't quite see what is new, we already have add ons that do these things - what am I missing? - Joelle Nebbe (iphigenie)

@Joelle can you list the other add ons? - bnoise

will have to look it up, don't use firefox much anymore - but I had add ons for sharing, finding, looking up things like digg popularity - there's glue and Shareaholic and stumble upon and I forgot some of the other names. The only really new thing is the friendfeed stats, and I am of mixed feelings about it, because I wonder what effect tens of thousands of people doing a friendfeed search for every web page they visit will have on the cost and performance of the service? - Joelle Nebbe (iphigenie)

@Joelle Well, to me FF integration is the very useful feature of Feedly (maybe the only one). I don't know about performance issues, I suppose we can't predict it. - bnoise

It's confused me so far - Richard A.

I'm reading this inside Feedly right now. Couldn't imagine keeping track of all the news without it. Hope it comes to Google Chrome. - Kris Haamer

@joelle. nice you meet you. Next time you are in the San Francisco Bay area and have some time, please give us a heads up and we will be happy to both show you how feedly is different and is built differently. - Edwin Khodabakchian

@edwin thanks for that - although I doubt I'll be in the area soon unless i get a surprise recruitment of some sort, being in Europe. Now I can see the interest of feedly as a well integrated and featured feed page/reader, I think, it's just some of the claims in this thread were a bit... much :D - Joelle Nebbe (iphigenie)

The "much" part is probably due to the euphoria of the launch (and Robert's touch!). But if you do a search for feedly on twitter you will notice that different people like/dislike different aspects of the experience (which allows us to continuously learn and improve it). If you have the chance, next time you have firefox up and running try the twitter sharing/re-tweeting feature of mini...you never know, you might be surprised! - Edwin Khodabakchian

This is totally amazing! Fantastic work guys - not too sure what is going on under the hood, but the output is great! - Stephen D

Just because you have taken the time to explain I will install firefox and give it a good whirl :D - the only ff i have at the moment is ff2 on the linux mininote, so i need to install ff3 somewhere - Joelle Nebbe (iphigenie)

I've been trying it since yesterday. Impressed with flexibility and ease of use. Mini is great for forwarding to others. - Joe Buhler from twhirl

and of course the twitter posting. - Joe Buhler from twhirl

Twitter has fallen Angel Falls in my eyes, and not in the fun Base jumping way. - Richard A.

Didn't even realize it until the recommendations started popping up in Google Reader .... Cool Stuff. Congrats Edwin ... again - Charlie Anzman

Steve Rubel

The White House is Liveblogging - http://www.micropersuasion.com/2009...

February 10 from Micro Persuasion - Comment - Like - Share

Joe Buhler, Nicholas James, Phil G and 11 other people liked this

Guy Kawasaki

what one person learned on jury duty http://adjix.com/g8u

January 2, 2009 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Joe Buhler and Peter Warnock liked this

Robert Scoble

Can someone tell @RJ0hnson what the best URL shrinking site is lately? I want to know too. I've been using tinyurl.com

December 29, 2008 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

bit.ly by far is the best IMO - Sachin Balagopalan

30 more comments

I've been sticking to @trimurls.. Love the stats they provide - embee

Cli.gs lets you shorten url and also to track stats. - Ramkarthik

I have the least amount of issues with tinyurl but the one built into @tweetdeck is pretty good as well. bit.ly - Kevin Murray

Said this in a different tweet: http://is.gd/ is very tiny! - barl0w

I'm working on a URL shortner, it needs to be prettied up some. test it and give me some feedback: http://shorty.openskymedia.com - Jason Shultz from twhirl

"Spedr" is the best for me. It's a very useful Firefox add-on. You don't even need to go the the website page to shorten urls. It's a 1-click-application. - Smeerch

I've found tr.im pretty good, as of late. - Tyson Key

bit.ly has to get the nod, not just for the click thrus but the twitter/FF conversation tracking and other nifty info http://bit.ly/info/YcN6 _ I do have to say they could make their click-thru graph a little easier to read/use... - Scott Lockhart

I ride with http://bit.ly :) - ~C4Chaos

I'm very partial to my service called Cligs ( http://cli.gs/ ). It has very deep analytics, social media monitoring (Twitter, Friendfeed, blogs, blog comments, delicious, etc), and also geotargeting of the destination (only service that does this). - Pierre

Cli.gs is No. 1, followed closely by BudURL and idek. Just how many of these URL-shortening sites are there? I'd like to use 'em ALL!! :) I use TinyURL, Cli.gs, BudURL, idek, Snipr, bit.ly, is.gd, TweetBurner (Twurl.nl) and Twirl.at. - J. D. Ebberly

http://moourl.com - not only is it uber cute, but it allows you to customize the ending too - Susan Beebe

I use is.gd. IME, it's the only one that works with copy/paste and is still valid days/weeks/months later. - Admiral Anika

if you like bacon, bacn.me - Jeff Quinton

I like http://www.budurl.com thanks to Jim Stroud! - Jack Humphrey

I use http://notlong.com - Martin Lindeskog

bit.ly - Chris Luckhardt

http://is.gd - Dennis R.

I've been thinking of creating one called http://www.can-you-please-make... - Glen, Bespectacled Elder

Why not roll your own URL Shortener with Shorty: get-shorty.com - you can see my self-made one at cnvg.us - Roger @ CineVegas

bit.ly with a hat tip to @davewiner for first suggesting it vs other options. However, I still use tinyurl.com from time to time. - Dave Martin

I use is.gd for two reasons: It's 5 characters long (tinyurl.com is 11) and it's the default for TweetDeck (which keeps resetting it to is.gd whenever I launch it). - Chris, Taskerrific Guy

I use tinyurl and it works good enough that I aint making time to try anything else... Sometimes good enough is good enough. - Cody Heitschmidt

No one sheds a tear for the early ones with long names like tinyurl.com. tr.im and bit.ly are both great. "adjinx" sucks, because they insert ads right on top the destination site. - randulo

tr.im's stats are great! - Hugh Donagher

If I read it right it appears its either http://bit.ly or http://cli.gs/, what are the pros and cons of both? - Kol Tregaskes

If you want to make a short Amazon link or eBay link on the fly, I have LinkFeed.com just add the ASIN for Amazon or the Item ID for eBay (you can also use a search term) http://linkfeed.com/am?moose or http://linkfeed.com/ebay?moose This works well when you are typing in a IM or similar and just don't want to go to the site to make your short url. - RAD Moose

tr.im is one character short, so it gets my tweet vote for url shrinking - Ernie Oporto

I find tinyurl is good for preview feature. It helps prevent unwanted redirection! - Paul

is.gd has that as well, just add a - to the end of the URL (that is one feature that I really like due to the amount of abuse of short URL services.) - RAD Moose

Robert, I'm a huge fan of Cli.gs. Its free, has metrics, hits by date, country, referer statistics, if a search bot found your URL, when your URL gets RT, or on FF. When the destination URL is on Delicious. Plus one URL can redirect to a different page according to country IP. http://cli.gs/jcf - Julio F ~ @SocialJulio

Charlie Anzman

Steve Case just shared this on Facebook. If it doesn't having you rolling on the floor laughing ... well...... - http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...

December 28, 2008 - Comment - Like - Share

Rob Brammeld, Michael Lehman, Brian and 4 other people liked this

Extremely funny year in review - Charlie Anzman

This best sums up the weird mess '08 was! - Joe Buhler