Both Microsoft and Mozilla have provided the ability to “block cookies” among the “Tools/Options” in the pull-down menus of their respective browsers. The instructions assocaited with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE8), illustrated here, allow for total blocking or selective blocking. The same approach will be baked into the forthcoming IE9.

Mozilla’s new approach has been criticized on two, closely related, fronts. First, because it adds more information to the header, it means that browsers are providing more information about themselves in the interest of promoting their privacy. As Fowler terms it, they “broadcast their desire to opt-out of third party, advertising-based tracking” through the HTTP header. This is not, inherently a bad thing, and it has the potential to do great good by getting us off of a dependence on either cookies or black lists. More to the point, as Fowler notes in his post the approach “requires both browsers and sites to implement it to be fully effective.” In this regard, we haven’t made much progress because the site operators have no financial incentive to take part in the transition.

Mozilla’s approach looks like a precursor to “Emancipay,” which is a relationship management (and payment) schema developed as part of ProjectVRM. With Emancipay, not only does a browser indicate whether to “block cookies,” he or she can also indicate preferred payment vehicles, as well as a a range preferences or policies that the site operator most conform to in order to carry out commerce with the browser/shopper. Stepping away from the cookie-based Web economy is an important step to promoting efficient Conversational Commerce.

The paradox of “cookie blocking” is one of the topics that is bound to come up repeatedly at C3-Conversational Commerce Conference next week. Blocking cookies in the bowels of the browser may give a site visitor some sense of accomplishment, but it removes one of the important mechanisms for revealing their true likes, preferences, practices and policies. Moving attention from the browser to the HTTP: header starts to provide more flexibility for engagement between a browser or shopper and a site operator. For that reason alone, it deserves attention, and is worthy of more discussion at venues like C3.

This announcement from Microsoft and Amazon.com certainly leaves a lot to the imagination, especially when thinking about Recombinant Communications (RC) tactics. In it, Microsoft reveals that Amazon.com is paying an undisclosed sum and entering an agreement by which each company provides “access to the other’s patent portfolio” which “covers a broad range of products and technology, including coverage for Amazon’s popular e-reading device, Kindle™”.

Even though Microsoft says that it has entered more than 600 deals since it started its licensing program in late 2003, this one is of great interest as both companies position themselves to offer new services in opposition to non-traditional competitors who are fellow software superpowers. Microsoft makes a point of mentioning that it has an interest in the publishing platform embedded in Amazon.com’s Kindle. That would signal a direct assault against Apple’s iTunes-based e-commerce platform, as well as some preemptive positioning versus Google’s ever-growing roster of cloud-based resources. Apropos of “the cloud”, Microsoft’s statement also makes mention of Amazon’s Linux-based technology. This really is losing one’s religion around Windows-based servers.

The fate of Windows Phone is another matter. With Microsoft showcasing a graphics-laden, Zune-like roster of applets running on a range of mobile devices, the idea of piecing together a back-end system that is “the best of…” cloud-based e-commerce resources from Amazon and Microsoft has tremendous merit. The fact that Amazon is paying Microsoft to cement the relationship without discussing which elements are of interest to the Web-based retailing giant is also ripe for speculation. At a minimum, it signals that the fast-growing (though comparatively diminutive) Amazon Web Services group will be able to make more serious inroads into enterprise IT infrastructure, especially where companies are committed to Windows-based servers.

At a minimum, Amazon.com’s EC2 (Electronic Commerce Cloud) and Microsoft’s Azure, will start looking a lot more like one another. This spells a stronger position for both in yet another large area of opportunity now dominated by Oracle and fast-growing Salesforce.com. An RC-based approach is key to understanding how these developments will play out. Open-ended, cross-licensing agreements makes it possible for either company to piece together solutions from both “open” and proprietary elements of their current technologies. RC makes it possible to re-assemble these pieces and move them forward into new products and services that directly address a customer’s (or end user’s) needs. It may be as mundane as providing a better way to re-schedule a sales call in Outlook or Microsoft CRM from a mobile phone, or it might be a full-blown effort to make Microsoft’s Azure a stronger competitor to Google Apps.

From our perspective, this is a watershed deal that reflects a major change in the competitive landscape.

[Update: Long-time Microsoft follower Mary-Jo Foley posted these comments earlier. At base, she says that Amazon is "using Linux" to pay Microsoft for unspecified patent infringements. She notes that, although this was not a joint press release, there was no corresponding notice from Amazon.

This hardly sounds like the basis of a joint development effort in cloud computing or e-publishing.]

The other development is the exit of the url-shortener tr.im from a crowded niche that already includes tinyurl, snurl and a few others. Tr.im’s owners made no secret about the reason for its precipitous departure, explaining that “there is no way for us to monetize URL shortening — users won’t pay for it — and we just can’t justify further development since Twitter has all but annointed bit.ly the market winner. There is simply no point for us to continue operating tr.im, and pay for its upkeep.”

URL shortening services have occupied an interesting, but not vital, backwater of the Web navigation world. They emerged when e-mail clients – the first and foremost means of engaging in social media – had a bad habit of inserting line breaks when lengthy, embedded Web addresses “wrapped” across lines of text. They became much more important as SMS and then microblogs, like Twitter, constrained posts to 140 characters (including embedded links). That transformed the millions of microbloggers into link-shortening addicts as they embedded pointers to longer posts or articles of interest.

The addition of this type of meta-directory “on top of” or “in front of” the Web’s DNS (Domain Name System) has long had the seeds of disaster. As Bob Frankston pointed out in a recent e-mail “tiny URLs just compound the failure of the DNS – they should be used as a last resort and not a normal way to make the Internet unravel even faster.” Well the flurry of microblogging has had just the opposite effect and there will be more serious repercussions down the road as IP v6 brings the promise of an address on the Internet for just about everything that moves.

The Amazon.com/Target rift was inevitable, as the two firms discovered that they compete on several levels of their core retailing business. It is within Target’s right to shop around for other providers of pieces in the recombinant telephony and e-commerce puzzle. The shrunken URL issue is just beginning to surface and we look forward to our readers helping to figure out how to solve both the technological and business challenges posed by the need to provide abbreviated ways to provide pointers from short posts (including instant messages, SMS-text and microblog posts) to Web resources who’s addresses are bound to get longer, not shorter.