Connecting the Dots / An Agency Blog

During the creative phase of any project we spend hours doing interviews with our clients, collecting reference and doing creative explorations that usually result in what I like to refer to as a total mess. Through the ungentle process of elimination, arguing, late-night epiphany and revision what we distil is still a dog’s breakfast of ideas. In the days following we start becoming more attracted to certain elements and as we continue to remove what isn’t working we start to find out what does. It’s an ugly process but by the process of elimination we’ve end up with a cohesive message that will eventually end up on a screen or device somewhere and hopefully in front of the audience for who it was intended.
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Whenever one of the big tech co’s does something even remotely of interest, and even more often when it’s under the radar, the tech blogs light up with speculation and criticism instantly. Even when it’s as insubstantial as the Microsoft Bing.com team’s recent internal use of their new Binged.It URL shortener.

Microsoft seems far less
concerned with an extra
character in their URL
shortener, or even the
prospect of using a truly
short URL than they are
about building a solid and
recognizable brand around
the Bing product.

The service isn’t yet public, and for all we know, it may never be. But with URL shortening becoming commonplace and creating some interesting business opportunities – tracking audience interest for example – it would be surprising if the Google’s, YouTube’s, and Microsoft’s weren’t exploring the space with some level of interest.

Microsoft’s Binged.It URL shortener caught some heat recently on TechCrunch.com, with the blog and most of the commenters jumping all over the fact that Bing’s short URL (Binged.It – 8 characters) is longer than the service’s main URL (Bing.com – 7 characters). Fair point, considering a URL shortener should, er, shorten a URL, right?!

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