You may have noticed that we’re starting to use the Tell.im service in some of our links, including in this post.

What is Tell.im?

It is a URL shortening service, similar to many of the others floating around that help to take a very long URL and dramatically chop-it-down-to-a-shorter-length (hopefully). This will make some of our outbound links more uniform and reasonably shorter, so they are ready-to-digest by other services like Twitter. When you activate a Tell.im link, you are redirected by Tell.im to the real destination, whatever that may be.

Admittedly, this may make trackbacks and pingbacks toward Javamancy and other blogs unsightly or unavailable, depending on the other systems’ ability to follow and manage transitive linking.

N.B.

Other related Javamancy mini posts (in reverse chronological order):

• Tell.IM is Now Tell.im
• Tell.im Activity is Becoming Noticeable…

Ooh, it's General Knoxx calling-- er, tweeting... hmm...

Just when you thought you’d be able to keep your fictitious game characters separate from your, ahem, characters, there’s a bit of bleedthrough, as reported at Destructoid, about General Knoxx and his newly discovered Twitter account.

It looks like he’ll be taking a bit of a tweeting breather for an unspecified bit. It’s likely that the activity will resume as the launch date for “his” content approaches.

N.B.

Yes, yes, we know: it’s a good way to drum up interest in the third Borderlands DLC, which still hasn’t materialized yet.

Still, getting a Twitter account for one of your game’s NPCs… Is this just a fad, or a new trend? And who is “alphonso”, again?

• General Knoxx’ Twitter page (as “GeneralKnoXX”, or Alfie to his buddies)

And what is Gearbox Software’s fascination with two X’s in names, anyway?

“Say it isn’t so!”

Well, for those of you who have been following this event intently– and who isn’t, if you’re an avid Twitterer, right?– Twitter appears to be the victim of a DoS attack that started around 9:00 AM ET today.

In a cruel twist of fate, in which other companies use Twitter to announce their own system outages, Twitter has resorted to its Tumblr-powered blog (yeah, it’s a tumblog) to report that today’s outage is a denial-of-service attack; they have not reported (yet) any estimated service reactivation.

N.B.

• Dan Frommer (SAI) has a post about this topic, from earlier today, that he’s been updating.
• Javamancy mini‘s post about the Twitter outage (earlier today).

In case you’re wondering, gentle readers, even Javamancy’s Twitter feed is impacted by the Twitter outage (‘natch).

You may have seen the TV commercial for this thing by now. It starts out interestingly enough, with talk about how it is time to get liberated, with imagery of people doing different things, and what appears to be vacation spots that you may like to try and venues that you would like to see.

But it’s for Microsoft’s [MSFT] relaunched search service, Bing. Bing replaces Microsoft’s older Live Search offering, which in turn had replaced other previous Microsoft search products and aggregators.

Many people have voiced disappointment over the quality of Google’s [GOOG] search results, primarily too many results that are only peripherally related to what they are interested in and with very little differentiation in categorization. And then there’s the problem of too much search advertising that obstructs the searcher from the tasks at hand. Bing presents an interesting proposition: in addition to general search, more specific searches are available along the left sidebar of the “Explore” menu, which visually brings the user experience a bit closer to the image that dominates the center of the display area… which in turn attracts the attention toward the hover hotspots that offer a nice meandering around the presented contextual data about the image. Of course, this would position Bing as a casual-visiting site because of the meander feature, which may dilute the intention of the current marketing. But while the hover technique (AJAX-y, eh?) is something that has existed in other Microsoft products before, applying it for search result drilling is vastly more appropriate than some of the past uses.

Whether Bing provides a better search experience is still not known, since people have to get their eyeballs on the revamped service and learn a bit about the history of the service. But if this provides another alternative to Google and Yahoo [YHOO] search engines, then it’s a case of “the more, the merrier”. Unfortunately, Microsoft does still have to break away from excessive Silverlight usage: after all, the objective should be to make Bing more accessible to the public, not less accessible.

More Reading

• Bing (Wikipedia)
• Companion site about Bing itself : Be careful of the embedded video plugin and Silverlight requirement complaint popups! But it goes over some of the reasons behind the search engine’s overhaul and its history.
  • Bing search challenge : See how Bing compares against Google Search, on the same Web page.
  • Bing Developer Blog : Of course, we knew you’d want to know about this destination! After all, how are you going to integrate Live Search/Bing into your own apps?
• Bing’s search results about “Bing”
• Bing on Twitter : You didn’t think Microsoft would miss the Twitter opportunity, did you?

First, it was an inkling of an idea…

Then, it was a lil’ Web app that the techies lurked on…

Then, it was experiencing some early growing pains as more mainstream Web users landed on it…

Then, it became notorious during the 2008 election year and has continued to even earlier this year, as various politicians got in trouble for spending too much time using Twitter and spilling the ‘beans, but not enough time focusing on the business at hand…

… And then the TV media got wind of it, and all sorts of folks (and their moms) got onto the service to see what it was all about…

More recently, the Twitter heads have been making the rounds of various get-togethers, like this week’s D Conference…

And now: Twitter makes its splash on CNBC, with Evan Williams taking a few minutes to chat with Julia Boorstin, and some more time getting questioned by the CNBC lunch-time roundtable. Fortunately, Evan spent some time letting the public know a brief summary of Twitter’s history, including its character limit and how it has helped, rather than hurt, the service.

Plenty of talk about who would buy Twitter, how long Twitter will last independently, how will Twitter get monetized (if at all), where is Twitter really going… These are things that buy-out folks are always looking toward, despite Twitter remaining a privately-owned company. Although Evan was playing the interview game fairly close to his proverbial vest, it is very clear that Twitter as a brand has a lot of perceived value at this time.

Is there anything that Twitter can’t do?

These days, a lot of people are raving (and sometimes even ranting) about Twitter. But several years ago, after E-mail was “acknowledged” as the Web’s super-app, AOL’s [TWX] instant messenger service was the new front-runner for super-app status. Sure, there was that massive dilution/fragmentation of IM users between AIM and all of the the rest. But many news outlets kept saying that AIM was still the biggest IM service, based upon the total number of active subscribers and daily traffic.

So it was quite a shock this morning (around 8:15 AM, to be a bit more precise) to be passing by the Mac Pro and seeing the familiar buddy list replaced by the AIM login panel, requesting that I enter my password. That only happens in Adium when it loses the IM connection to the service and wants me to re-establish my credentials. After several attempts at trying to re-login via Adium, I fired up a Web browser and hit aol.com to see if I could reset any hijinks with any flaky SNS tokens and thereby get back into AIM. Unfortunately, while I did get into aol.com and was able to verify that at least the E-mail service was operational, I was still unable to log into AIM from the common panel.

So I was left with just waiting it out…

And AIM eventually came back several minutes later (around 8:30-ish)… But, that was a frantic several minutes!

N.B.

In case you’re wondering: yes, those are actual AOL-AIM T-shirts that are hanging in one of my closets. I never realized that the logo on the back of one of them (the left one) matches the front of another (the right one). It was just fortuitous that the two happened to be hanging adjacent to each other today.

I was actually looking for a fresh T-shirt this morning during the AIM outage… curious that I noticed this, right?

Other title candidates were:

• AIM Outage
• Outrageous AIM Outage
• AIM Outage (for Me)
• AIM Outage? Boo!

Well, some of you actually thought I was playfully joking.

Well, I wasn’t joking, although there was definitely a playful ‘tude to the statement.

In light of the weblog’s momentary outage, we’ve had a Twitter account established to manage the ins-and-outs of Javamancy, Twitter-wise.

You can now keep track of Javamancy at http://twitter.com/javamancy.

So, follow the tweets as they happen! (Just don’t expect the next great American novel, 140 characters at a time!)

Twitter as a viable source for jobs and job-hunting advice?

Sure, why not?

That’s the premise behind the JobAngels bunch and its Twitter account. People helping people during these scary economic times, especially with the looming fear of losing one’s job or actually having suffered the sad fate, is both encouraging and adventurous. Using the broadcast nature of Twitter with the ability to follow, retweet, and send directed messages in a quickfire manner have already captured the hearts and minds of millions, and with so many unemployed and soon-to-be-unemployed swelling the masses of the social networking crowd, it only seems natural to extend that social aspect toward the burgeoning community of job seekers.

Management Perspective

Even better is the opportunity for employers to reach out to the community of Twitterers and sample the quality of potential applicants, as well as supply these possible hires with the necessary information they need to make their own suitability decisions. Plus, you and/or your HR folks can provide helpful coaching tips to pave the way for the initial contact and vetting procedures.

For recruiters and ‘hunters, tapping into Twitter and getting involved with JobAngels is a no-brainer. Improving the quality of applicants makes your services much more attractive to employers, and you would be providing valuable skills and advice to people who may be technically strong and definitely worth a look-see by employers but who just need a bit of help in making that connection possible.

More Reading

• How JobAngels (And You) Have Changed My Life

For those of you who are not aware (yet), I– and many other Mac users– am a frequent user of the Adium (or AdiumX) messaging client. Originally, I used it for AIM, but eventually branched out to the other supported services.

As Zac has mentioned, however, Twitter support will be making an appearance soon as an Adium feature, with the next major release: 1.4. This is apparently a frequently requested feature and, since the massive upsurge in tweeting among the Washington insider crowd and reporters, this will be a much desired capability.

A Little Bit:

Mentioned on Mashable yesterday, Six Apart bought up Pownce, but announced yesterday that the service is being shut down and the staff sucked into the rest of Six Apart to work on other projects. If you’ve been using Pownce, you may be considering Twitter more than ever…

In their company blog post about the imminent closure, the service is expected to be lights-out on December 15, 2008. Time to get a-hopping (and a-shopping), Pownced-folks.