I just read a review on TinyPaste on Techcrunch. TinyPaste is considered “tinyURL for text”. The idea is an interesting one: just the other day my coworker Jay Donavan (@getdonavan) was musing: Twitter needs an inline thesaurus that automagically finds short synonyms. Words over 10 chars offers suggestions. Wouldn’t that rock?. The 140 character limit may sometimes seem just a little light, which is why often tweets will consist of links to “go read what I have to say that’s longer than 140 characters”.

However, there’s one difference. Often if someone shares a URL via twitter, they also give some description of what they’re sending (at least, I hope they do, or generally I don’t bother following). TinyPaste would effectively do away with that, since the idea would be that it links out to the entire idea.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t assume that everyone who follows me on twitter wants to read EVERYTHING I have to say, to the point where they’ll follow a link to get there. Not to mention the fact that I use twitter extensively on my phone, and won’t follow a link anywhere.

In the end, twitter was intended to be a quick and dirty communication medium. The more we extend it, the less of its essence and purpose is retained..

Lately I’ve been doing some reading on mobile apps. I came across a review for Cameron Moll’s Mobile Web Book on 456 Berea Street and then today I stumbled upon an article on “How to make any website a mobile site, with google. The results are pretty interesting! It’s interesting to see how the People’s Choice Awards site, which is very graphic and flash-intensive, came out [link here]. I was happy to see that the entire manifesto on the right was showing up in text — we used the SWFObject technique which had the content written to the screen and then replaced with the flash via javascript. Obviously, this mobile version doesn’t support javascript (or flash) but the content is still available. Nice!

We had had some questions about whether or not google would be able to access/index this information, but my impression based on the fact this came from google is that it is available to them. Good to know!