Archive: December, 2009

Back in the early days of Twitter,  also known as the ancient times of 2006, sharing links on Twitter was a huge problem. A link to a particularly insightful blog would look like this:

http://www.metamend.com/blog/2009/12/01/metamend-replica-watch-and-discount-online-pharmacy-diploma-tm

Having only 140 characters at your disposal, this means that posting that great link just took up over 100 of your available characters to tweet about it.

Soon, the micro-blogging service realized the issues and as a result, automatically started shortening long URLs to make its users save on space for their 140-character updates.

To accomplish this end, Twitter used TinyURL, ( www.tinyurl.com) a service that shortens URLs. How does this work?

Every long URL is associated with a key, which is the part after http://domain.tld/. For example http://tinyurl.com/m3q2xt has a key of m3q2xt. There are several techniques used to shorten names; keys can be generated numerically in base 36, which assumes 26 letters and 10 numbers.

The keys in order would be 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9,  and then the alphabet a, to z. If uppercase and lowercase letters are accepted then the number should be in base 62 (26 + 26 + 10).

Let’s say that you have figured out a great domain name, checked for availability and to your amazement, no one has purchased it yet!

After finding this needle in the haystack, you have dreams of the next hot Internet business or the virtual millions that you are going to make by monetizing this property! Then you suddenly remember the last time you were served with a cease and desist letter, and an unhealthy depression sets in.

Suddenly your dreams are being flushed down the toilet, because you realize you don’t possess a trademark of any sort.

Well, don’t lose hope just yet; here are some things that the USPTO says that you can legally trademark:

Any names, like your company names or say a product name, or any images, symbols, logos, slogans, phrases, unique colors, product design and packaging (trade dress) and finally:  domain names! (if they label a product or service.) Depression is now gone and the sky is the limit; you are back in business!

So now you are set and you can get on with registering your name, registering your trademark and begin suing the pants off anyone who has a mark similar or just like yours, right? Well, not so fast.