Starting today anyone can sign up for a domain name ending in .ASIA on a first come, first served basis. For the past month or so, DotAsia, the organization overseeing the new top level domain was accepting registrations on a limited basis.
But that .ASIA domain might not be as valuable as you'd think. Well, sure, first of all, it's going to take a while before anyone even thinks of typing .ASIA into their browser's location bar. Nothing beats .COM for that right now. But blogger Cabel Maxfield Sasser also noticed an interesting trend during a recent trip to Japan. Many companies aren't advertising their URLs anymore. Instead, they're providing keywords that you can type into a search box to find their company.
It makes sense. After all, most of the good, easy to remember domain names were sold years ago. Sure, you could post your incredibly long URL on an ad in the subway, but what are the odds that people will remember it when they get home? If you're pretty confident in your search engine optimization techniques (or if you've paid for placement), why not advertise a keyword or two? But if the trend does take off, it means that we might all start placing a lot less importance on domain names in the future.
Pasting long multipart links can be an unsightly waste of space when you're talking on IM, text, or Twitter. There are dozens of web services that will cut a URL down to size, but when you're dealing with a group of links, it can still take multiple copies and pastes to share everything.
LinkBunch is a service that does exactly what it sounds like it should do: condenses multiple URLs into one short address. Just paste them all into one text box, hit a button, and your new, slimmer URL is ready to go. Your days of sending just one LOLcat picture at a time are over!
When someone clicks on your LinkBunch, they're directed to a page that shows all the links you included. This would be handy by itself, but the LinkBunch developers took the obvious next step and added an "open entire bunch" button, which pops each link into a new tab.
The major feature we found missing from LinkBunch was a bookmarklet to automatically bunch all open tabs, which would mean even less copying and pasting. We'd also like to see direct links to open an entire bunch, without first going to the page and clicking. Fortunately, it looks like the developers plan to release a LinkBunch API, which means these features might not be missing for long.
Why do we assume we only get one homepage? For those willing to explore the potential of their browser, we'd like to show you a little out-of-the-box thinking in the form of Morning Coffee.
Though Firefox can set a series of tabs as your "homepage" (select "Use Current Pages" from the preferences menu), this free add-on (shout out to all the free software coders out there) gives you the ability to choose when to open which homepage.
Say, for example, you like to read the NYTimes on days when you work, but you prefer Google Reader on Saturdays and your church's weekly bulletin on Sunday mornings. This program, as you may have already assumed, does just that.
If you've spent more than a few minutes on the internet, you probably know that it's not usually a good idea to click on a link if you don't know where it takes you. The last thing you need is to visit a site that wants to install malware on your PC. Or almost as bad, a link that takes you to a site with explicit contact while you're at work, or perhaps using your mother's computer.
But popular URL-shortening services like TinyURL ask you to do exactly that: click on a link without really knowing where it will take you. Fortunately, TinyURL also offers a way to preview links before visiting them. All you have to do is visit TinyURL's preview page and click "enable previews." The service will add a cookie to your browser so that every time you click on a TinyURL link you'll first be taken to a page showing the complete URL. You can click "disable previews" to remove the cookie if you don't feel like going through a two step process every time you click on an abbreviated link in the future.
If you want to share a shortened link with others but make sure they always see the preview page, just add preview to the URL. For example, http://tinyurl.com/by8fm will take you to the Download Squad home page, while http://preview.tinyurl.com/by8fm will take you to a page letting you know that you're about to visit the Download Squad home page.
Woops, seems like our friends at Apple had left a back door open for hackers to enter through QuickTime. It seems like no matter what companies do, hackers always find a way to penetrate and drop harmful code in. Don't worry, Apple has it fixed now with a patch, but the issue in question stemmed from a concern about a buffer overflow. When QuickTime processes a Real Time Streaming Protocol URL it directs the player to a streaming file, and allows the user to play and pause the file. During the buffer overflow, a hacker could have penetrated through a malicious RTSP URL embedded into a web page that would open a door to run code on the user's machine.
You can grab the patch now at Apple's download page, or through the Apple Software Update service.
You feared it, and now its here. Google Ads on mobiles. Google's new mobile ads are shortened versions of AdWords that will appear when users search from Google on mobile devices. The users then have the option of connection to an advertiser's business phone after clicking on the ad. The mobile ads will be limited to 12 or 18 characters per line depending on the language used, and the destination URL will appear on the third line. Currently, Google Mobile Ads are only available in the US, UK, Japan, and Germany. Only drawbacks for advertisers, no tracking ability, and they are only available to be bought by advertisers with a billing address in Japan.
UPDATE: Christian Cadeo in the comments has just informed us that he was able to set up Mobile AdWords being based in the US, with a US address.
del.icio.us
has given a serious upgrade to its URL info page. This is the page that used to
just list everyone who bookmarked a particular URL in one big, long, more-or-less unuseful list. Now it has a brand new
interfaced designed with all the information you want right where you expect it. There's a tag cloud on the right to
show you common tags people have used for that URL, a unified list of descriptions for a given URL, a "posting
history" that shows how many people have bookmarked it this month, last month, and so on, and perhaps most handy
of all, related URLs. Of course the most obvious use is the venerable ego search, so here's del.icio.us' URL info for Download Squad. And to
make it even handier, Lifehacker has posted a bookmarklet
for quick access to info about any URL.
This one couldn't be simpler: grabbing URL's from
a page of text. Ever get a newsletter or article with a bunch of links? Ever try to cut and paste, then go back through
and extract those links in some other document? URL Bandit
automates this process a bit. Xteq, makers of a bunch of other neat little apps, created URL bandit to be pretty simple
and effective, and I'll say it is. It actually monitors your clipboard for copied text with embedded URL's, and proceeds
to log those. Even a power outage will keep them, as it saves this info to a temp file. You can see all those URL's in a
little window, and URL Bandit stays down in the tray for later use. As I always say, free, fast, and simple apps are
gold.
This one couldn't be simpler: grabbing URL's from
a page of text. Ever get a newsletter or article with a bunch of links? Ever try to cut and paste, then go back through
and extract those links in some other document? 
