Around 6 months back or so, we moved to Goo.gl URL shortner for the tweeted articles and now, Goo.gl has announced that its url shortener is open for everybody (via).

What’s impressive about the url shortener is the analytics part (check out screenshot of a URL)

Goo.gl URL shortener gives you great insights into visitors profile as well as referrers (you would agree that Half Life of a Popular Tweet is less than 1 day).

Adding to awesomeness is the QR code implementation – simply add .qr to any goo.gl URL and you will get the QR code!

Awesome. We expect Analytics integration pretty soon and a much better aggregated view of data will add to the experience.

Windows Live Essentials 2011 Launched

Windows Live Essentials 2011 for Windows 7 and Windows Vista is now available for download! Windows Live Essentials 2011 was designed and built to connect your PC to the services you use every day. – details

WebP, Image Format for the Web

Google has previewed a new image format, WebP that uses image compressor based on V8 codec.

“Images and photos make up about 65% of the bytes transmitted per web page today. They can significantly slow down a user’s web experience, especially on bandwidth-constrained networks such as a mobile network. Images on the web consist primarily of lossy formats such as JPEG, and to a lesser extent lossless formats such as PNG and GIF. Our team focused on improving compression of the lossy images, which constitute the larger percentage of images on the web today.

To improve on the compression that JPEG provides, we used an image compressor based on the VP8 codec that Google open-sourced in May 2010. We applied the techniques from VP8 video intra frame coding to push the envelope in still image coding. We also adapted a very lightweight container based on RIFF. While this container format contributes a minimal overhead of only 20 bytes per image, it is extensible to allow authors to save meta-data they would like to store”  [blog].

OpenDNS Secures $4.5 million Funding

OpenDNS has raised $4.5 million funding from Sequoia Capital and Greylock Partners (via).

December of 2009, Google launched its free DNS service and while that was touted as OpenDNS killer, they both exist now!

[Read : Do Big Companies Really Kill Startups? (Or is it about Speed)]

LinkedIn Launching Signal

LinkedIn is launching Signal that will help users manage their news feeds on the main website. The news feed will enable users to show links/content from people in networks and filter news feeds by keywords.

Recently, LinkedIn Crossed 7 Million Members Mark in India.

Video of the Day

Watch this super powerful video about stuff we never knew.