Lauk.me Launch and URL Shorteners

[THE GIST]: I'm announcing the launch of lauk.me, a URL shortening service with an authentication layer. Read on for more.

[THE HISTORY]: In the last several years a popular service has cropped up to fill a niche on the internet. Status updates on social networks, comments on blogs and whatnot, are often limited to some small number of characters. Many URL's are sufficiently long that they take up most of that space. Thus, the URL shortener was born, TinyURL being one of the first, followed by a myriad of copy-cats.

The service works as follows:
1. give tinyurl your massive cat video url
2. tinyurl stores your cat video url and gives you a really short one back, like tinyurl.com/yblpt5m
3. you spread your new, shortened cat video link like crazy and the internet loves you for it

Upon clicking your shortened link users arrive at tinyurl for a brief moment, tinyurl looks up your link in its database, then it forwards them to the original, longer url. Yay kitty cats in boxes. It's all very invisible to the user and it cleans up the link-sharing process by providing a succinct, easy-to-copy-paste URL for sharing.

Not too long after TinyURL, URL shorteners multiplied like crazy. There are dozens of them available today (check out the list). I'm about to introduce you to another.

[THE IDEA]: Alex came to me with an idea several months back (read: 10+ months ago). He had a particular need that was not being met. He often wanted to share a URL via Facebook or Twitter or whatever the kids are using these days, but didn't necessarily want the entire world to see the page to which he was linking. He wanted to add an authentication layer (fancy phrase for password) to the shortened url redirection path. He tasked me with implementing his idea, which I did quite quickly by modifying RubyURL, an open-sourced URL shortener written by Robby Russell. Style-wise, the two are quite similar because in all honesty, I'm not a very good front-end developer.

Anyways,

A typical use-case goes like:
1. you want to share a Google Picasa album of family pictures with your other family members
2. you visit lauk.me and give it the url to your album, a security question, and a passphrase
3. we give you back a shortened url

You can freely publish that url wherever you want that your family might see it -- Facebook message, Twitter, a blog, a Facebook Wall Post, instant message, etc.

When someone clicks your link, the following happens:
1. they get directed to lauk.me and are presented with your security question
2. if they know the passphrase, they get directed to your family album
3. if not, they get an "invalid passphrase" page.

Bingo. Bango. Bongo. Pretty neat huh.

It should be noted that using lauk.me does not make your URL private, so don't be sharing all your dirty secrets with the world thinking that it's hidden behind your uber secure passphrase. This little app takes advantage of two principles on the internet:
1. there are billions of links
2. links are often very obscure and long

The manifestation of these two principles is that URL's are usually not guessable. That is, no one would guess the url to your family album. For instance, http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/3GPA0m7Q-yytpvvJUuVWZQ?feat=directlink, links to a scenic photo of a lake and some hills I took while on a motorcycle ride. But the link I share with the world will look like http://lauk.me/897djT. As far as probabilities, no one will ever guess that crazy long URL without some creative "googling". The only way to get to your family album is through the your short URL that forces the user to have a passphrase.

[THE CREDITS]: Most of the credit for this service goes not to me, but to Alex Spencer who came up with the idea, and to Robby Russell at Planet Argon who wrote RubyURL, a minimalist URL shortener. He made this code readily available on github. I merely added the authentication layer.

[THE CAVEATS]: The style of lauk.me will likely change in the next several months, so don't be shocked if it looks entirely different next time you visit. More important, it's being hosted on heroku for free and I doubt it will fair well under a large amount of traffic. I plan on upgrading hosting as it's needed but until then, it may be rather slow. I'll try to keep this in check.

Pinker on The Age of the Informavore

This is a cheap post, admittedly. I came across this (no permalink) excellent essay by Steven Pinker that really resonates with the Utopian Realist mantra. In short, Pinker remarks on immediately-available information, collective intelligence, and techno fear-mongers. An excellent read, in my opinion.

"You're at a dinner in a restaurant, and various things come up in conversation — who starred in a movie, who was president when some event happened, what some religious denomination believes, what the exact wording is of a dimly remembered quotation. Just as likely as not, people around the table will pull out their iPhones, their Blackberries, their Androids, and search for the answer. The instant verification not only eases the frustration of the countless tip-of-the-tongue states that bog down a conversation, but offers a sobering lesson on how mistaken most of us are most of the time.

You'll be amazed at the number of things you remember that never happened, at the number of facts you were certain of that are plainly false. Everyday conversation, even among educated people, is largely grounded in urban legends and misremembered half-truths. It makes you wonder about the soundness of conventional wisdom and democratic decision-making — and whether the increasing availability of fact-checking on demand might improve them.

I mention this because so many discussions of the effects of new information technologies take the status quo as self-evidently good and bemoan how intellectual standards are being corroded (the "google-makes-us-stoopid" mindset). They fall into the tradition of other technologically driven moral panics of the past two centuries, like the fears that the telephone, the telegraph, the typewriter, the postcard, radio, and so on, would spell the end of civilized society.

Other commentaries are nonjudgmentally fatalistic, and assume that we’re powerless to evaluate or steer the effects of those technologies — that the Internet has a mind and a will of its own that’s supplanting the human counterparts. But you don’t have to believe in "free will" in the sense of an immaterial soul to believe in "free will" in the sense of a goal-directed, intermittently unified, knowledge-sensitive decision-making system. Natural selection has wired that functionality into the human prefrontal cortex, and as long as the internet is a decentralized network, any analogies to human intentionality are going to be superficial.

Frank Schirrrmacher’s reflections thankfully avoid both extremes, and I would suggest another way to look at the effects of technology on our collective intelligence. Take the intellectual values that are timeless and indisputable: objectivity, truth, factual discovery, soundness of argument, insight, explanatory depth, openness to challenging ideas, scrutiny of received dogma, overturning of myth and superstition. Now ask, are new technologies enhancing or undermining those values? And as you answer, take care to judge the old and new eras objectively, rather than giving a free pass to whatever you got used to when you were in your 20s.

One way to attain this objectivity is to run the clock backwards and imagine that old technologies are new and vice-versa. Suppose someone announced: "Here is a development that will replace the way you’ve been doing things. From now on, you won’t be able to use Wikipedia. Instead you’ll use an invention called The Encyclopedia Britannica. You pay several thousand dollars for a shelf-groaning collection of hard copies whose articles are restricted to academic topics, commissioned by a small committee, written by a single author, searchable only by their titles, and never change until you throw the entire set and buy new ones." Would anyone argue that this scenario would make us collectively smarter?

If social critics started to scrutinize the immediate past and obsolescing present and not just the impending future, our understanding of the effects of technology on intellectual quality would be very different. The fact is that most of our longstanding, prestigious informational institutions are, despite their pretentions, systematically counter-intellectual. In the spirit of the technophobe screeds, let me describe them in blunt, indeed hyperbolic terms.

Many of the articles in printed encyclopedias stink — they are incomprehensible, incoherent, and instantly obsolete. The vaunted length of the news articles in our daily papers is generally plumped out by filler that is worse than useless: personal-interest anecdotes, commentary by ignoramuses, pointless interviews with bystanders ("My serial killer neighbor was always polite and quiet"). Precious real-estate in op-ed pages is franchised to a handful of pundits who repeatedly pound their agenda or indulge in innumerate riffing (such as interpreting a "trend" consisting of a single observation). The concept of "science" in many traditional literary-cultural-intellectual magazines (when they are not openly contemptuous of it) is personal reflections by belletristic doctors. And the policy that a serious book should be evaluated in a publication of record by a single reviewer (with idiosyncratic agendas, hobbyhorses, jealousies, tastes, and blind spots) would be risible if we hadn’t grown up with it.

For all their flaws, media such as Wikipedia, news feeds, blogs, website aggregators, and reader reviews offer the potential for great advances over the status quo — not just in convenience but in intellectual desiderata like breadth, rigor, diversity of viewpoints, and responsibility to the factual record. Our intellectual culture today reflects this advance — contrary to the Cassandras, scientific progress is dizzying; serious commentary on the internet exceeds the capacity of any mortal reader; the flow of philosophical, historical, and literary books (many of doorstop length) has not ebbed; and there is probably more fact-checking, from TV news to dinner tables, than an any time in history. Our collective challenge in dealing with the Internet is to nurture these kinds of progress."

Virus Scanners and the Like

every time i sit down at a family or friends' computer, it has 27 icons running in the system tray. Not only do these slow down your startup time, but they most of them are entirely unnecessary.

Norton, McAfee, PCDoctor, link scanners, email scanners, blacklist site blockers, etc., all bloated pieces of software meant to protect you at all costs with prompts, redirects, update notices, and the like. Moreover, most people ignore warnings from their anti-virus software, failing to ever scan or confirm update requests from the software vendor, rendering your big bloated protector absolutely useless.

Do yourself a favor and uninstall these pre-installed tools. Next, download and install AVG Free. Be careful here...during the install, be sure to uncheck all the options except the core AVG. You don't need the link scanner, email plugin, or anything like that. Schedule AVG to update and scan daily at 4am. It will never get in your way. It will update automatically. And your computer won't run slow.

you are much less likely to contract viruses if you practice safe browsing. that is, avoid sponsored links, pornographic web sites, or any other questionable material on the web. if you're not sure, don't open it!

Save Keystrokes With Ctrl + Enter

This week's get-with-the-program computing tip will be short and quick.

Want to save yourself 15 characters every time you type a web address? Use ctrl + Enter after entering the base of the address. Chrome and Firefox browsers will wrap the word with "http://www." and the ".com".

for instance, type 'cnn' in the address bar then press ctrl + Enter. the result is http://www.cnn.com, and you're off!

or 'facebook', then ctrl + Enter.

it's the simple things in life, really.

Best Email Client - Gmail!

Continuing with my advice series for best practices concerning technology...

Today's Topic = Email Clients

Definition.
Email (or SMTP) is a protocol (standard) for sending messages to people on the internet. On the interwebs there are clients and there are servers. Email servers provide an email service. An email client is a program or interface to the service provided by the email server. Confused?

Email can be accessed in a number of different ways: Microsoft Outlook, a web interface like Hotmail, Apple's Mail.app, Yahoo!'s web interface, etc. These programs/interfaces simply provide easy access to your email account. For instance, Microsoft Outlook can be set up to get your email from ANY email server -- Outlook is just the interface. All interfaces are not created equal though.

The gist.
Today's piece of advice is to drop whatever email client your using and switch to Google Mail (Gmail).

The problem.
Yahoo is old, and the interface is incredibly noisy/chaotic. Hotmail would be fine except 'search' is horrible and it lacks any sort of archive feature. Ads are also intrusive.

The solution.
The differences are subtle, I'll admit. But Gmail's web interface is clean. It's fast. I can 'archive' mail that I'd like to keep, but clear out of my inbox. Search in Gmail is fantastic. Need to archive a list of passwords or other important info? Email yourself and tag it with several keywords at the bottom! Simple search for a keyword and your email will pop right up. If you're worried about the hassle of informing friends about your new email address, DON'T! In the Settings menu are options for accessing all your other email accounts through Gmail.

Anything other than Gmail feels archaic!

That wraps up today's advice on making the most out of technology. Hopefully more advice to be had tomorrow!

Chris