A poignant email from VM:

I only wish my parents would have lived to see it.

Don’t worry, VM … they’re using it. In heaven.

http://urlshorteningservicefortwitter.com/79rmf

This SeniorJournal.com article from January says senior citizens don’t like social networking sites:

Just 7 out of every 100 senior citizens – Americans age 65 or older – have a profile on an online social network – well below the 35 percent of all adult internet users …

No surprise there: Why would senior citizens sign up for twitter, if they’re going to be barraged by intimidating bit.ly links? (If there are other social networking sites, I’m not aware of them. I don’t have time to poke around the internet all day; I’m trying to solve problems.)

Anyway, it’ll be interesting to watch the percentage of seniors using twitter rise over the next few months as more seniors learn of urlshorteningservicefortwitter.com.

Have you told your grandmother about us?

The movement has started … I have received more than five four emails from readers who are excited about my latest venture! (And again, many thanks to webmaster and professional computer programmer Paul Charles Leddy for all his help … Paul, you are truly the king of URL shorteners.)

Anyway, reader AA hits all the hot-button references for this new age of URL shortening:

holy shit it’s about time you expanded your empire from being the hottest blogger around to being the hottest url shortening device for the twitter machine around. finally we’ll all have time to finish our metamucil before murder she wrote ends so we can go look for our bifocals and finish reading that letter to the editor we wrote about how we don’t want the government messing with our medicare!

Reader MC sings our praises:

I am ultra-excited about URL Shorteners LLC … amidst the explosion of lookalike “me-too” URL-shortening services, I am refreshed to see a newcomer that stands out from the crowd.

Exactly! He gets it.

Think about it: Most URL shorteners are just too short and plain’ ol’ BORING to be memorable:

http://bit.ly
http://tr.im
http://is.gd

Yawn … half those those things aren’t even real words… “is.gd?” hello, that sounds like Aztec gobbledygook … but what’s this? … a new kid on the scene … turning heads …

http://urlshorteningservicefortwitter.com

Finally, a URL-shortening-service URL you can pronounce! Made of real words everyone can pronounce!

Feel the change … it’s coming … time for me to eat some ice cream …

Change is coming to the internet … at long last … urlshorteningservicefortwitter.com’s twitter page is now at 75 members! I might hold an emergency ice cream party to mark the occasion!

If we can get 100 followers by the end of the week, I think we can all agree that it would have been the most dramatic surge in twitter followers in any twitter account in history. (I think the grammar got a little tangled back there, but I’m excited– I don’t have time to bust out Skrunk & White and make sure I’m typing words correctly…)

Ice cream party!

Please tell your grandparents to follow us! Please spread the word to all the members of your local Matlock Fan Club (LOL, Matlock jokes never get old … just like Matlock fans [because they’re already as old as possible].)

It’s called urlshorteningservicefortwitter.com, and it’s changing the way people link to stuff on twitter!

If you’d like to stay up-to-date with all the latest news re: urlshorteningservicefortwitter.com (the hottest new URL shortening service for twitter), you can follow us here.

We’re at 40 followers and going strong! Thanks to all beta-testers and senior citizens!

www.urlshorteningservicefortwitter.com … change is coming to the internet …

Let’s get short!

Guys, I just sold my first-ever bottle of Sake (special candy wine grown only in Japan? I think).

Could this be connected to Yom Kippur somehow? It wouldn’t surprise me … the world is a mysterious place.

PS: This is an outrage.

My CTO and I are tweaking the homepage design of our new product that we’re rolling out this week (it’s a multi-staged stagger-beta-launch, culminating in an ice-cream party at my house).

Anyway, since this is a service for senior-citizen internet users I’ve been thinking a lot about usability issues. Does anyone know if the internet offers a large-print edition for the elderly, where all the sites are printed in bigger type?

By the way, beta-testers can check out the power of our service here:

http://urlshorteningservicefortwitter.com/n7drq

Thank you for being a friend …

Forgot to mention that since it’s Monday, I’m in the wine store. But it’s Yom Kippur, so I expect traffic to be a bit light.

(That’s the kind of statistical analysis that keeps people coming back!)

Metamucil + Bifocals = Gold
Senior citizens + Twitter = Gold

HOWEVER …

Senior citizens + Traditional URL shorteners = Not Gold!
(“Honey, what’s a bit.ly?”)

More soon …

I haven’t been doing much political blogging recently, and I never blog at night, but I’ll make an exception because of how stupid John McCain is. Look at his dumb-ass twitter page.

“just finished taping an interview with Hannity re: Afghanistan – watch tonight at 9pm.”

SHUT UP. Whatever, gramps.

(Actually, I shouldn’t dog McCain too hard; he’s the core demographic for our latest project… more next week …)