Dutch web monitoring company WatchMouse has done a thorough analysis of uptime and performance of 14 major URL shortening services, with quite disheartening results . As it turns out, only two of these ( goo.gl and twt.tl ) have had a perfect uptime record between 02/14/2010 and 03/16/2010; the rest of the pack mostly …

If you’re a user of Opera Mini, chances are you’ve already switched from Opera Mini 4.2 to Opera Mini 5 , beta tag be damned. The new version brought many improvements (tabs and speed dial probably being the most important) that made its predecessor look pale in comparison. Same goes for Opera…

While most of the world happily enjoys the Internet’s free services such as Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and Google, in China these are either inaccessible or might become so in the following months. And, as shown by Google’s recent squabble with the Chinese government, it can be very hard to operate in the…

What do you do when you first fire up your browser? Most probably, you log into various sites that require a username and password – Facebook, Gmail, Twitter and the like. For me, personally, it’s quite a chore, as I need to log into over 10 different services before I start doing…

If you’ve never been to Hong Kong, and you’ve heard legends about the busy streets of the city, you can now see how it looks for yourself without leaving your comfy chair, as Google has launched its Street View service for Hong Kong . The huge city has been covered …

Opera Mini 5 Beta was first introduced about 5 months ago, but owners of Android-based smartphones had to wait until now to get their hands on Opera’s nifty mobile browser. This version is nearly identical to the Opera Mini 5 Beta for other handsets; biggest improvements are speed dial, tabbed browsing, password…

Last week, an App Store error got the latest version of Foursquare for the iPhone into a few users hands a little bit early. That hiccup resulted in the app briefly disappearing from the App Store before finally returning early yesterday . Now the newly designed version of the app is in the App …

This post is part of Mashable’s Spark of Genius series, which highlights a unique feature of startups. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here . The series is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. Name: Scordit Quick Pitch: A social site where you share the …

It’s a bit funny to hear Microsoft referring to any other company as the “Goliath,” but when it comes to the business of search, there’s no doubt that Google has managed to overshadow Microsoft’s efforts, which prompted Microsoft to ditch Live Search and start anew with Bing . …

Tumblr , one of the simplest blogging platforms around, is doing really well. Situated between WordPress , which requires a bit more effort to create and organize content, and Twitter , which requires almost no effort but also doesn’t offer many features, Tumblr is the perfect tool for users who want to have a blog with…