Thanks to the rise of microblogging, URL shorteners have become a league of their own. Sites like Bit.ly, TinyURL and others have managed to turn mile-long URLs into short, concise (and customizable) nuggets of text. So what’s the latest news with the tr.ims and is.gds of the world?

Recently, the big players have announced tools of their own. Google now has goo.gl, however they plan to monitor its use in the Google toolbar and Feedburner before deciding to make it a standalone tool. This could tone down its use for now, since other shorteners are highly accessible.

Facebook also just jumped on the train with FB.me. Mobile updates for Facebook are already using it to save characters in your SMS field. With more people tweeting and posting media to Facebook from their smartphones, FB.me URLs are starting to draw more visibility on Twitter, and in general. This could make it a more popular alternative to the other contenders soon enough.

But what can shorteners do for brands? From a content standpoint, it’s a great way to keep your messaging consistent with your campaign. In the old days, common practice would be to attach a long URL to the end of your copy, but that was such a mess for your audience. Bit.ly makes it very easy to customize your new URL. By tacking on a keyword at the end, you can help prevent your messaging from getting lost in translation. And just like hashtags, shortened URLs can be easily tracked, too.

A few sites have even adopted custom shorteners for their domains. Awe.sm is a platform that has made it possible for publications like TechCrunch and many others. When you consider the wide variety of platforms you’re utilizing to share your content, it’s a very impactful approach.

There’s no reason leave your URLs as a cryptic 2 to 3 lines of text. Create your own and share it!

Watir, pronounced water, automates web browsers. It is an open-source library that simulates link clicks, presses buttons, fills out forms and more. If it takes place in a web browser, you can probably make it happen with Watir.

Although it’s a family of Ruby libraries, Watir is a little different to set up and use — but it still supports all web applications, regardless of what you use for development. The library can connect and query databases, read spreadsheets and export XML files. It’s hard to imagine what this looks like when it runs. After you use it once, you realize how nice it actually is.

You can use Watir to perform repetitive testing tasks normally handled by a human user. For example, it can repeatedly click around a page and generate a spreadsheet of results. It can also input data from an Excel spreadsheet into a form and submit it. While it was initially created as a testing tool, you can Watir to accomplish most tasks handled in a browser.

Watir will work on any system, and it works with most of the popular browsers out there, including Internet Explorer on Windows, Firefox on Windows, Firefox on Mac, Firefox on Linux, Safari on Mac, Chrome on Windows and even Flash testing in Firefox. That’s right, Flash testing.

So why Watir?
•    It’s free
•    It’s open-source
•    It supports any type of website or web application
•    It’s easy and fun to use
•    It’s very lightweight
•    It has multi-browser and multi-platform support
•    It allows you to test Flash applications

Why not install Watir now? If you already had, it could click the link for you!

What is fun, funny looking, reasonably priced, and totally fantastic? For those of us who adore both the camera and the iPhone but not so much the camera in the iPhone, check this pup out.

An 8X telescopic zoom lens and tripod (and hard case) that attach to your iPhone, for $28.99!! Between that and Adobe’s FREE Photoshop app, your on-the-go pics can be both worthy in content AND quality. Can you tell I’m excited? Santa, are you listening? 

Need a Mobile version of your website? All signs point to yes. 

Apple released the iPhone, named Invention of the Year by Time magazine in 2007, and this October Motorola released its DROID phone, which Time named No. 1 of its Top 10 Gadgets of 2009. BlackBerry can be Bold or Curve, and Palm has its Pre. Chances are you have one of these phones and are just an index finger away from browsing the web.

According to Frost & Sullivan, the Growth Partnership Company, “Of the more than 1.2 billion mobile phones expected to ship globally in all of 2009, nearly 190 million will be smartphones.” They estimate this number to increase to 250 million in 2010.

Thanks to the smartphone, and other handheld devices such as Kindle and Sony’s PSP, the web has evolved to become mobile. Per Mary Meeker, Technology Analyst at Morgan Stanley, “People are underestimating how big the mobile Web will be in the coming years.” If you already have a mobile website or are considering creating one, you are way ahead of the curve. Here are a few resources available for developing a mobile version of your website sans coding skills.

MoFuse – A mobile-software start-up working with companies to create and maintain a basic site on all platforms, which is key due to lack of platform standardization.

Zinadoo – Received the Mobile Internet Innovation Award for 2008. It offers a free mobile site creation tool, free hosting and a free .mobi domain name. For these free services, Zinadoo mobile websites will display ads that can be disabled for a small cost.

Contec Innovations – A web content aggregator delivering current news, sports, finance and entertainment via its patent-pending BUZmob Mobile Media Network.

While the resources above will certainly get your mobile presence up and running, it’s important to develop a mobile content strategy beforehand. Springbox has found that condensed, simplified versions of primary sites — designed for navigating content on a smaller screen — are your best option. Next time you are on your smartphone, check out Facebook, Target, YouTube and The Weather Channel to see a few companies who are doing mobile right.

 There goes the web evolving again. This time be ready.

Arial. Georgia. Verdana. Courier New. The list of safe, compatible fonts for the web has been very short, for many years. See them in action at Typetester. Much to the delight of designers, developers have been coming out with ways to remove the barrier between all typefaces and HTML. Although this might not be a good idea, let's take a look at:

@font-face CSS
The Solution: This CSS code allows visitors to download fonts from the site's server and display them on a webpage. When it's not supported, users see alternate html text (Arial, etc.) instead. Pretty neat stuff. Check out Font-Face.com, Mozilla's article, ALA's CSS-at-ten article, Tangerine's post, and this W3 page.
The Challenges: Licensing and compatibility are the biggest roadblocks. Many foundries don't license their fonts for the web, so you're stuck with free fonts (good luck!), this short list, and maybe these, too. Some browsers support @font-face and others don’t, and some take fancy footwork (Internet Explorer 4.0+ —  I'm talking about you and your EOT file format. Check out this post about how to achieve cross-browser support.

Typekit
The Solution: Using @font-face, Typekit offers a library of licensed fonts that consumers pay to use on their websites.
The Challenges: Browser-compatibility issues. Moderate pricing. Fonts may render poorly at 72-100 dpi screen resolution because they were designed for 300 dpi. And, while they have about 400 fonts available right now, they're missing good ones — the entire Hoefler & Frere-Jones library, for instance.

Foundry Example: Typotheque
The Solution: Typotheque is a font foundry that offers web licensing directly to their customers, who can use @font-face to implement them.
The Challenges: Browser compatibility issues. High prices  — a web license for one font runs around $26, so you better really love the way that font looks!  Also, all your favorite foundries will need to have a web license option if you want to use your favorite fonts.

sIFR (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement)
The Solution: sIFR is a flash-based solution that uses a .SWF, CSS, and JavaScript to render typefaces in HTML. Learn more: Davidson's overview, see an example, browse the official forum, and generate sIFR online.
The Challenges: Although it's compatible with 90% of browsers, it won't display your custom fonts if users have Flash or JavaScript disabled. They'll see standard HTML text instead. Plus there's no support for mobile, yet.

Typeface.js
The Solution: Typeface.js is a simple JavaScript-based solution that embeds custom fonts into a webpage.
The Challenges: You have to use fonts in TrueType/OpenType, so the JavaScript can read it. Licensing is still an issue. Very poor cross-browser compatibility: Anything before Firefox 1.5, Safari 2.0, or IE 6.0 doesn't work. Also, body copy will bog down page loading, and there's no link-hover support.

So, what should designers do? Since @font-face and sIFR both support standard HTML text replacement in the event your custom fonts don't display, I recommend trying it on the headers of your next web project. See if it's worth the extra effort for you and your client.