I've been holding out lately in using chrome since I pretty much rely on xmarks and lastpass.  I've recently found that some beta and dev builds of Chrome support extensions, however I was not able to get those to work.  Most of the information out there rely on people doing a registry hack and shortcut hack to get the beta and dev Chromes to use extensions, however none of that worked for me.  What did work was utilizing Chromium instead of Chrome, which is the open source version of Chrome.  For those interested, here is the simple steps...

1. Install Chromium from:
   http://build.chromium.org/buildbot/snapshots/
   (chromium-rel-xp, scroll down to latest snapshot, run mini_installer.exe)
2. xmarks bookmark synchronization:
   http://beta.xmarks.com/program/chrome
3. lastpass password synchronization at:
   https://lastpass.com/download.php

Hope this helps...  folks interested in learning how to write extensions can look here:

With this weeks news about the new URL Shortening service TR.IM closing down, many folks have started to wonder which URL shortening service they should be using to guarantee that they won't lose their old shortened URL's.  The quick answer is that their is no guarantee.  No URL shortening service has really come up with a good monetization technique, if one is really even possible.  The closest, of course, would be bit.ly, but even that is iffy at best.

So what are the options?  Depends, how important are your links?  If they're just for Twitter and it's time relevant, it might not be that important that your URL redirects to original link years later.  If it's for business purposes, perhaps you should either not use a URL redirect, or use your own.  It doesn't take much these days to buy a relatively short domain and install your own URL redirect script.  You'll most likely need a foreign domain of course, don't expect a .com - why not use that .net or .info of your domain everyone talked us into buying.  The advantage of this method is that your URL's always redirect as long as you're in business.  The disadvantage is that automated twitter clients will not automatically parse the url, so people might be less trusting to click on the link (except your regular customers, of course).  If you're  a big news site, this is definitely the way to go.  We've seen this approach done with the digg.com site recently.  If you're hosting a wordpress blog site, like I do here, the answer is really simple.  In your settings - permalinks section, change it to Custom and enter /%post_id% .  This creates a short url with your own domain.  The down side is that you no longer have the pretty SEO friendly links.  Since it hasn't been truly proven that these so called 'SEO friendly URLs' are truly applicable these days, that most likely is not an issue.  Other sites have implemented their own variations of short urls.  The site Populate.net creates a shorter (admittedly not short) URL of every article submitted to their directory and retweets them with the short url.  Here's a great blog post I found while researching scripts, if you're technically inclined.

So, apparently Google decided to expand into the OS market or at least show the intent to do so by posting about their upcoming Google Chrome OS.  I'm not entirely sure why this is new or exciting.  Cursory review of their plans show that they are creating a minimalistic version of another Linux Distro essentially with a Chrome Browser front end.  While I do think the concept is intriguing as far as size and speed goes, who prey-tell would actually want a 1+ ghz processor pc running this, I don't know.  The netbook internet cafe pc is a proof of concept idea without the back end infrastructure out there to support it.   We don't always have Wifi internet, sometimes I'm actually at places without internet, and I need to work.  Maybe in 10 years with technologies such as WiMax expanding over cities, this might change.  As of now, most people want a desktop based OS with Cloud Synchronization.

How this does effect us is how it expands Chrome to another platform.  With a Windows, Android and it's own OS version, developers should consider getting on the ball and making extensions that will work with it.  Password managers, Bookmarks Sync (real bookmark sync, not that lousy google bookmark label system) and other tools people use.

My first post on Arid.NET I figure should be about one of the best new sites I've come across as of late that will help reinvent your blog or website.  I came across Apture via a Robert Scoble @scobleizer interview and promptly decided to test it on one of my web properties.  Apture provides a few methods to add 'Apturized Links' to your site.  One of them is via a wordpress widget, but you can also add it via some simple javascript code.  The web property I added it to was far from a web 2.0 site but yet the javascript code was able to be installed into the footer template and worked immediately.  In a few seconds my site had a huge advantage over the competitors.

What does apture do?  We'll, if you hover over some of the links on this page, you'll notice it adds all sorts of rich media including reference guides, images, video, maps, music, documents, presentations and even twitter streams.   What was even more impressive was the links it created that I didn't even know about (and can be turned off from the admin if you like).  I had MP3 files linked that Apture turned into playable media on my site.  The visitors didn't even need to download the mp3 to listen to it.  If you haven't tried Apture yet, I suggest you visit them at Apture.com.  If you'd like to see some great uses for apture, try visiting FlightBlogger and Arts and Cultural Management People or just follow them on twitter at @apture.