Plum.com, launching soon…Well it’s about time.
Happy to see that plum is opening soon to public. (At least that’s what’s said on their home page). That’s one service I’m really looking forward to using. I’ve pre-signed up for an account about 6 months ago, but I’m still waiting for that reminder to tell me the service is out… I gotta say the long wait sort of discouraged me from checking back every week or two like I used to do before. You know when you get all hyped up for something, then the interest wines down as the wait lingers and lingers… I guess I’m not the only one feeling that way, check out alexa’s statistics [ http://www.alexaholic.com/plum.com ] to see that the number of hits has been dropping quite strongly in the past few months..
Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that this delay will affect in any shape or form the popularity of the service, or how well it’ll do soon after the public launch… I’m no marketing or web trends guru… all I’m saying is that a lot of potential users might not even look back on Plum again (even after being reminded)… and all the pre-marketing effort (a demo conference presentation, a techcrunch article…) haven’t quite achieved the expected results.
Plum, for those who never heard of it before, was introduced last year at the demo conference, it’s an online social bookmarking service that lets you bookmark, share all your files and finds (not only URLs). Even stuff on your desktop might be shared, merged in a blog, sent to friends, etc… One of the cool features I like about it is the easiness with which you can drag and drop from your desktop to your plum account..
Well, as of this writing, I still haven’t seen tested Plum. But I’m definitely going to…when it’s launched… Only not with the same eagerness.
A note or two about TinyURL
Did it ever occur to anyone, how the guy behind tinyURL might make a living out of his service. The idea is cool, the service’s been around for quite some time now (though I have only heard about it about a year ago), but could there possibly be a way to monetize the service besides the ads that I believe are only viewed by first timers. The service gets apparently a lot of hits according to alexa.
On a different note, I think having a short URL without a hint on where it might redirect you is a little un-neat and sort of diminishes the user friendliness of urls… Instead I easily see TinyURL suggesting relevant keywords instead of a random string…these keywords could also bear the name of the website …
As a future improvement, TinyURL could also give away some sort of plugin to be installed on the web server the url orginates from (for those who might be interested in offering the service to their users). The plugin would allow users to copy a meaningful short form of the URL directly on that web server. Having the domain name sort of puts the URL in a context at least…
Just a rambling of course!
