I’m not sure what the whole point of this exercise was. My brain sometimes goes off on wild tangents and it must know the answer before I can move on to my next task.

I wondered tonight how many letter o’s I had to add to Google.com in order to register a domain name. Maybe there’s some trickle web traffic that can be gained by someone who fell asleep while at their keyboard, pressed the letter “o” for a while, wakes up, then presses “gle.com”.

Turns out the answer is a bit scary. In fact, I don’t know the answer because GoDaddy limits the # of domain name characters to 63, so the longest I could check is gooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooogle.com and guess what? All of the domain names from gooogle.com up to that one are taken. It’s a strange world out there… and now my mind can rest.

Now that Google has acquired Jaiku, what does that mean for the even more popular mini-blogging SMS service, Twitter? Well, first I’m surprised that Google acquired Jaiku and not Twitter. I don’t know anyone that uses Jaiku, even though I have mashed it into Runner+. Kind of an odd purchase, actually. So that leaves Twitter open to acquisition.

What about eBay? eBay bought Skype back in 2005 for 2.5 billion, so why not scoop up Twitter for a few poultry million and integrate Twitter in with Skype’s 8+ million users? Then take it another step further and mash Twitter into eBay itself?

Even though Twitter is the best mini-blogging SMS service out there, I’m still frequently annoyed with its downtime and unreliability. It is a service that I’ve always wanted to create on my own, as it’s a fairly simple web application, but I just haven’t had the time.

When it comes to the Apple iPhone and Windows iTunes, you can synchronize your bookmarks with Internet Explorer or Windows Safari, and contacts from Outlook or Yahoo! but when it comes to synchronizing your calendar you are severely limited, unless all you use is Outlook, because that’s all you can directly sync with at the moment.

I was an Outlook user for years until I gave Microsoft the (thunder) Bird. The biggest problem with making the change from Outlook to Thunderbird was the loss of my synchronization between my iPhone and my calendar, because I don’t use Outlook anymore. I do use Google Calendar (GCal) because it allows me to access my calendar from anywhere (like Gmail) and share calendars between my family.

So how do you sync the iPhone with Google Calendar?

Well, you can’t. But through some sneaky workarounds, it is possible. Since the iPhone only knows how to sync with Outlook, the trick is to get your GCal appointments synced with Outlook.

This is possible with some commercial (pay) services such as ScheduleWorld and SyncMyCal, however the route I went after trying his free trial was David Levinson’s gSyncit. It’s a whole 10 bucks and it works great. After throwin’ down $10 via PayPal and instantly getting the registration code by email, it got rid of the nags, enabled automatic synchronization, and allowed me to add the other 3 GCal calendars that I needed to sync with Outlook. Plus, you don’t need to touch GCal and copy ICAL URLs. Just supply gSyncit with your GCal username and password, then it gives you a list of Google Calendars to sync with.

You can sync both ways, too… from GCal to Outlook, and vice-versa. I am currently only syncing one-way (from GCal to Outlook) so I can’t comment on how well it works the other way.

After configuring gSyncit and clicking the Sync button on my Outlook toolbar, I was able to sync my iPhone through iTunes with ease. Now all my Google appointments are on my iPhone!

…now if I could just figure out a way to get the Chargers to beat the Patriots…

According to SMARTOFFICE, there are rumors not from Apple, but Apple partners, newly filed patents and industry professionals, that a new iPhone geared toward business users and a new iPhone based on the Apple Nano iPod will be available in 2008.

Through Apple’s partnership with Google, the more business-minded iPhone will sport better messaging applications and GPS, while the Nano-based iPhone will have very limited functionality, but will be sold at a fraction of the current iPhone’s cost.

Cool stuff… Apple is riding the wave of success and expanding quickly!