Thoughts

Global Housing Management

This post is for reference for those who also receive this call,

Emily from Global Housing Management called asking about the company who I work for and our accomodation for the Energy Solutions event in October 2010. She left the telephone number of: 808 234 2584, I asked if this was a UK number and she said yes. (It is – apologies) When you call the number you get put through to GHM Travel.

The lady who called me was in experienced and the issue has been kindly sorted by Robert Kneeland of Global Housing Management to explain the situation thoroughly.

For those interested in global housing management you can find their website at www.globalhousingmanagement.com

Twitter – The first 3000 tweets.

It’s fair to say that Twitter has had a trememdous impact on the world we live in now, every TV show, Organisation and Celebrity has a Twitter account (and some of the ‘normal people’ have them as well) so as I write this I’m approaching my 3000th tweet so here is my thoughts on my time on Twitter.

Are short url services sending us to odd places?

Twitter, 140 characters. You want to tell someone about an awesome site and post the link as well. Visit http://www.ryanmcdonough.co.uk/201

Oops ran out of characters.

So thankfully we have URL shortening services such as bit.ly, tinyurl, is.gd and stro.ma (well that last one is a private one made for my employer) so now for example:

http://www.propertyweekdirect.co.uk/dirAgentResults.asp?provider=1&keywords=&fTType=ALL&specialistcategory=367&specialistcategory=389&specialistcategory=400&specialistcategory=388&specialistcategory=394&specialistcategory=375&specialistcategory=365&specialistcategory=370&specialistcategory=415&specialistcategory=374&specialistcategory=416&specialistcategory=385&specialistcategory=2373&specialistcategory=410&specialistcategory=409&x=37&y=7

goes through bit.ly and becomes:

http://bit.ly/aob2Ap

A caterpilla to butterfly transformation.

However these services can take your odd intrigue and send you to a website that has a reputation for posting anything or turns out to be a virus ridden website aimed to infect users.

Twitter is now blocking bad links however not fully, but my issue lies more with the none destructive websites rather than virus ridden ones. An odd link such as the possibility of a new Smurf Movie at:
http://bit.ly/aob2Ap , where I end up being taken to the Sun Newspaper website, not known for it’s facts.

It would be nice to see browsers build in short url detection allowing for the full URL to be shown on hover, until then I may just write my own Firefox plugin to do so.