Our Apologies to @BreakingNews

Some of you may have seen the following tweet which unintentionally ended up in the @BreakingNews Twitter stream:



I have to take full responsibility for this mistake (including the typo in the tweet). This tweet was intended for my personal Twitter account which feeds into my Facebook account.

The Adjix system has several code paths that support features dedicated to special Twitter users such as @GuyKawasaki and @BreakingNews. While testing some new features, I received a text message for free food. Just show the cashier your cell phone coupon - no purchase necessary. At the restaurant, I noticed customer after customer showing their cell phones to the cashier. When I returned to work, I tweeted this out from a development machine which inserted the tweet into the @BreakingNews Twitter stream instead of mine.

I didn't even notice the error until about 15 minutes later when Michael van Poppel, the founder of @BreakingNews, contacted me. There wasn't much I could do except apologize.

Unfortunately, mistakes like this can't always be avoided especially when rolling out new features. I worked for Apple Inc. for more than eight years, including a stint at the Apple online store. Once, the online store accidentally released an upcoming feature set to the public too early - about a week before Apple's World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) in 2003. During the WWDC keynote, Steve Jobs referred to this as "premature specification". Accidents happen.

Cheers,
Joe Moreno
President
Adjix

Startup Story Radio Interview

Rob McNealy, over at Startup Story Radio, just posted a podcast interview that he conducted with me. It's about 40 minutes long and, in addition to interviewing me, Rob shares some of his experiences regarding social media and advertising:
http://adjix.com/ehkn

Repeat Tweeting & Top 40

Adjix is pleased to announce two new features:
Repeat Tweeting which allows you to schedule the same tweet to be sent multiple times and Top 40 which allows you to view stats on your top 40 links without needing to login.

Repeat Tweeting
Repeat tweeting allows you to schedule a delayed tweet to be sent more than once, using our Adjix2Twitter Bookmarklet. For example, if you want to send out a tweet every day, for five days, reminding people to register for an event then you can easily do this by selecting the tweet to be sent once, every 24 hours, for five days.
Click to enlarge
To get your Adjix2Twitter Bookmarklet, just log into your Adjix Linker account and click on Bookmarklets. Here's a 40 second video demo of how it's done: http://adjix.com/g869


Top 40
With Top 40, you can now see how many people have clicked on your Adjix links without needing to login each time. You can also sort your links by either the time the link was created or by the number of hits it's received. We look back at your last 100 links and display the top 40.

Just bookmark one of the following links to see your stats (both links take you to the same place):
http://adjix.com/Top40
http://top40.adjix.com


You may have to authorize your computer, the first time you visit you Top 40, by logging into your Adjix account. But, once your computer is authorized, you're all set.

Kobayashi Maru - Dealing with downtime

One of the worst things that can happen to an online business is downtime. It doesn't matter if the servers crashed, the network connection "broke", or the data center was compromised; your users can't access your service which is bad.

Theory vs. Practice
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice - in practice, there is.

Ideally, a website should never suffer any downtime. In reality, downtime can't be avoided and it will happen whether planned or unplanned. Unlike brick and motor structures which are designed to withstand storms and earthquakes, online businesses are very fragile with many single points of failure such as DNS, loss of power, failed hardware, the easily cut T-1 or OC-3 cable, etc.

Implementing a contingency plan isn't an easy task and your plans will only work well when systems fail as you expected them to fail. You not only have to figure out what you're going to do under certain circumstances, but you have to rehearse it on a regular basis - this is what the military refers to as "exercise training". Not exercising such as pull-ups or push-up, but rather wargaming the scenarios which are most likely to occur and then actually executing the planned response.

Contingency Planning At Adjix
Adjix is a small company with limited resources, so we've implemented a simple solution to keep links running if our servers go down. We do this by relying on Amazon's web servers.

Every time our users create a shortened Adjix or ad.vu link, we implement it as a meta-refresh web page instead of the industry's more common HTML redirect (sometimes referred to as a 301 or 302 redirect). Should our servers go down, we can make a quick DNS change which takes about five minutes to propagate throughout the Internet. We believe broken links are a bad thing and although we may not be able to capture detailed link click data when this happens, our links will continue to work. We've tested this plan, at Adjix, a few times without skipping a beat - of course that's no guarantee that it will work perfectly in a future crisis, but it does lower risk while increasing confidence.

Serving up shorten URLs in this manner is not the industry norm, but we believe it gives us the security, should bad things happen, that we can continue to keep our links working. No plan is perfect - it's foreseeable that both our servers and Amazon's servers could go down at the same time – but we believe it's a solid plan commensurate with our budget.

Data Migration

This week, we are in the process of migrating your link click data to CSV format. This process will continue for a while since there are many millions of hits to migrate.

You'll know that your data has been migrated when you see a CSV file, next to your link, on your link stats page. We've migrated link click data up to April 15. Link clicks received after April 15 will show up where they always have: under your hits detail page.

The DiggBar Solution

Digg has received a lot of attention since launching their DiggBar a couple weeks ago. Sites like Engadget block the DiggBar which seems fair - engadget.com is their real estate and blocking it is trivial requiring a simple line of Javascript.

Of course, Digg could retaliate and block any story submitted that links to engadget.com (or, more simply, any link that leads to 207.200.75.1 or 207.200.95.1). But, I could never see this happening nor would it be productive.

However, I can envision a couple solutions that would allow the DiggBar to coexist with sites like Engadget.

1. Simple Solution
One issue that people have with the DiggBar is that users cannot see the domain name of where the content is hosted. To solve this problem, Engadget could set up a DNS alias such that digg.engadget.com points to the Digg URL.

This is a technique we allow people to use at Adjix. For example, the following two links point to the same resource located on ps-enable.com's servers:
http://adjix.com/35zs
http://partner.ps-enable.com/35zs

Note, in the ps-enable.com link, that the URL in the address field of your web browser corresponds the actual domain of the content. Now imagine replacing the ad, at the top of the page, with the DiggBar.

When using this solution, Digg could simply redirect http://digg.com/1234 to http://digg.engadget.com/1234. Although this isn't a perfect solution it does give the reader an idea of which website has published the content.

2. Partnership Solution
A more elegant solution would be if websites partnered with Digg. Digg could provide their partners with a JavaScript snippet to drop on their website much like Google AdSense.

In this solution, a Digg URL, such as http://digg.com/1234 would redirect to the partner's website which would display the DiggBar "organically". In other words, the DiggBar would be served up by the site where the content is hosted.

This partnership solution is win-win since the content provider gets the traffic from Digg and the DiggBar is displayed at the top of the page making it easier for people to digg stories.

Adjix Links on Twitter

If you've been posting Adjix links to Twitter, you'll notice something interesting. Within a minute or two of posting a link ten or twenty bots will click on your link to see where it leads. This is most noticeable with Adjix links that don't contain any ads since they are simple redirects.

Due to Twitter's popularity and API every time a link is posted to Twitter it can register dozens of clicks from these third party bots which automatically index every tweet. These are usually easy to spot, when reviewing your Adjix link stats, either due to their host name containing something obvious like crawl or bot or due to the fact that they usually don't have a referrer.

So, even though it seems that your links, posted to Twitter, receive a dozen clicks off the bat - it's not always people who are clicking on them.