Google have released a URL shortner at http://goo.gl/ – following in the foot-steps of sites like http://bit.ly/ and http://pig.ly/. However, Google’s URL Shortner is only for use within Google Toolbar and FeedBurner.

More news in the press release here : Google Blog

Facebook – somewhat of an arch rival of Google – have been rolling out a URL shortner for a short while on their mobile system. Any link in the m.facebook.com stream is auto-shortened using using fb.me. For example – fb.me/chickenland would take you to my page on Facebook.

The subject of HTML emails usually ends up in a 2 hour long discussion about all the hacks and work arounds that need to be put into place to get it working in the series of test mail clients and online “clients” that you’re supporting.

That list of course could be tiny, or very extensive.

Whilst trying to find out why Hotmail wanted to fill my email with lots of margins breaking the layout, I Googled to find an answer and came across http://www.viget.com/inspire/hotmail-image-problems-in-html-emails/

From here, I visited the Email Standards Project which gives a good overview of mail clients and their current ability to ignore all the code you’ve been slaving over.

And I’ll leave you with a Flickr group depicting the hatred of GoogleMail’s current rendering:

http://www.flickr.com/groups/project-gmail-grimace/pool/

I mentioned yesterday that Google Chrome Extensions are in the here and now as opposed to a distant figure on the horizon.

You’ll need to go grab the beta of Chrome from http://www.google.com/landing/chrome/beta/ as it’s not in the release version yet, but once you do, you can play to your heart’s content.

I have a feeling that innovation may be a little few and far between since Firefox has been out for so long, there is such a base of extensions there. It reminds me slightly of a conversation Gina Trapani and Matt Cutts were having on Twitter regarding the lack of truely original apps on Android. Almost everything has already been covered by Apple’s iPhone.

Chrome may also struggle as Android’s market-place has with getting the volume of content on the site in the first place as adoption by programmers may take some time.

However, I’m sure that won’t put developers or users off using Google Chrome extensions- as its still (for the time being) lightning quick. There are already some great extensions to get started, like:

Speed Tracer
https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/ognampngfcbddbfemdapefohjiobgbdl

Chromed Bird
https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/encaiiljifbdbjlphpgpiimidegddhic

Google Wave Notifier
https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/aphncaagnlabkeipnbbicmcahnamibgb

I recently uttered the words “If Chrome supported the web developer tool bar, I’d switch from Firefox”.

Suppose it’s only a matter of time :)

https://chrome.google.com/extensions

It won’t have escaped note that Google are updating their PageRank algorithm soon to take into account the speed of the web server that supplies the information.

This throws up many questions like whos going to define how quick “quick” is? – what happens if Google indexes your site which is on a shared host when another site is taking a pounding? Alot of Google’s recent announcements have all involved “speed” as a central issue, and as such, Google have released a series of tools over at http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/

Anyone wanting to know more about the algorithm hanges can check out http://www.blogstorm.co.uk/page-load-speed-may-be-in-google-2010-algorithm/

I think we can all expect this to become a big selling point for server providers – such as UKFast who already make great play of the fact in their documentation. Remember though, this isn’t an official announcement of intention as such – they ould still implement this in a different way if they wanted to.

I assume we’ll all hve to go back to text heavy sites with ascii art now.

Noticed an article over at Smarterware – http://smarterware.org/3898/namebench-benchmarks-dns-services – which introduces “NameBench” – a service for determining whether your DNS is services are quicker or slower than alternatives.

Great thing is, this is from YOUR machine and location – not just usage statistics and speed improvements you SHOULD see by switching.