Web Usability Video

Here is the video of the Web Usability Event on June 25 featuring Tom Chi, Senior Director - User Experience, Yahoo!, Jeremy Ashley, Vice President, Applications User Experience, Oracle, and David Nelson, Sr. Experience Designer, Adobe Systems.

Turning The Long Tail To The Big Tail

In a seminal article titled The Long Tail, published in October 2004 on Wired, Chris Anderson described a new niche strategy where it became possible to sell large numbers of unique items in relatively small quantities.

In fact, what would have been uneconomic in brick and mortar businesses was becoming possible AND profitable thanks to the Internet.

This concept of the “long tail” flourished and now applies to many other situations, such as domain names, for example, as well as (and especially) advertising. In particular since Google’s impressive conceptual – and commercial – innovation with the famous pair AdWords-AdSense.

In an interesting post on this matter, Scott Karp does an excellent job explaining wherein lies the innovation: factoring relevance into the auction model!

Let me explain: from 1999 to 2001, AdWords operated on a CPM basis, or cost per thousand impressions, the fee structure in fashion at the time, where advertisers were billed based on the number of impressions of their ads.

However, as Sergey Brin himself said, “It didn’t generate much money”.

In his book, The Search, John Battelle tells us that income from AdWords rose to about $85 million in 2001, while Overture earned $288 million the same year with its auction model operating on a CPC basis (cost per click, or the amount an advertiser pays for each click on its ad).

An auction system enables the advertiser to determine the cost per click incurred when users visit its site as a sponsored link. The starting bid is set at 0.15 $ per click. When the visitor enters keywords that were bid on, the search engine results page offers sponsored links, with the highest bidder’s site at the top of the list.

But Google couldn’t simply use Overture’s business model, unless they wanted a lawsuit. Even so, the lawsuit still happened and lasted more than two years, until the parties came to an agreement and dropped the suit.

However, it’s the essential difference between the two systems that enabled Google to defend itself and avoid a sentence: where Overture automatically linked the top ranking in the results to the highest bid value, Google introduced the idea of relevance, or rather popularity, with clickthrough rate (CTR), whose official definition is:

the number of clicks your ad receives divided by the number of times your ad is shown (impressions).

In other words, the bid value now became just a component, factored by the applicable clickthrough rate. John Battelle explains it the most clearly:

(A)ssume further that Accountant One is willing to pay $1.00 per click, Accountant Two $1.25, and Accountant Three $1.50. On Overture's service, Accountant Three would be listed first, followed by Accountant Two, and so on. The same would be true on Google's service, but only until the service has enough time to monitor clickthrough rates for all three ads. If Accountant One, who paid $1.00 per click, was drawing more clickthroughs than Accountant Three, then Accoun- tant One would graduate to the top spot, despite his lower bid.

A tiny innovation, but it took Google from $85 million in revenue in 2001 to billions just 7 years later!

And that’s not all: since apparently no one as improved upon it, most of the major Internet players are still looking for a decent business model.

In fact, this notion of relevance is also at the source of PageRank, at the heart of Google’s success. They go hand in hand. A search marketer cuts to the chase: If you don't provide the results, you don't get the money...

Now, the other reason for mass adoption of Google’s advertising services is... the long tail, as John Battelle rightly describes (emphasis mine):

You think Amazon's got scale? You think eBay is huge? Mere drops in the bucket. Amazon's 2000 revenues were around $2.76 billion. But the Neil Moncreifs of the world, taken together, drove more than $25 billion across the Net that same year, according to U.S. government figures. That's the power of the Internet: it's a beast with a very, very long tail. The head-eBay, Amazon, Yahoo-may get all the attention, but the real story is in the tail.

The power of the Internet is in the tail!

This is how Google achieved such amazing success. It was the only one to match advertisers’ needs with the fuel they required in abundance on the Internet: RELEVANT content. With an innovative ad server that enables millions of small sites and blogs to monetize their content, or at least to hope to...

But where Yahoo! had a presence since the beginning – since well before Google and before running astray – today Jerry Yang's abdication hands Google 90% of the advertising pie practically on a silver platter (if antitrust authorities accept it... even as advertisers already devote about 70% of their search budgets to Google!). All the other ad servers combined share the remaining 10%.

Even so, in 2008 no one has any illusions anymore (as Emmanuel Parody commented caustically: AdSense paying for content? That’s a joke...) and UGC, even if it continues to be created at full tilt, is no longer monetized like it should be (has it ever been?). Leaving millions of content creators fed up with their content be reused and monetized by the Web giants without any satisfactory form of payment or revenue sharing.

* * *

Turning the tail...

A disruption in this success story is possible, however: it would just require turning the tail, to move from the long tail of UGC to the big tail, represented by the yellow part in the graph:

To illustrate my idea, in a predictable imbalance predicted indeed by Clay Shirky in 2003, the analysis of 433 blogs ranked by number of incoming links illustrated the concept of the long tail nicely, with at the head:

1. top two sites accounted for fully 5% of the inbound links between them,
2. top dozen (less than 3% of the total) accounted for 20% of the inbound links, and
3. top 50 blogs (not quite 12%) accounted for 50% of such links.

Now imagine an analysis of not 433 blogs, but tens of millions of blogs, sites, social network pages, etc.

Then you will understand that the head (the green part), which we will arbitrarily say equals 30% of sites/blogs/pages that would form the network’s core in the good old bow-tie theory (i.e., the core of most interconnected sites where the most links and traffic converge and are shared), no longer cuts it when the UGC mainstream now forms not the long tail, but the big tail of the Web, rather predominant today.

There is the real issue for UGC and the creators behind it: they lack representation: Everyone is mooching off their content to monetize it better than everyone else, but nobody really monetizes it at its fair value.

In fact, currently only the head attracts advertisers, while the tail is left to Google, which takes full advantage of it without fearing the inconsistencies...

My prediction is that the first player who succeeds in doing what Google did five years ago with AdSense, this time adapting relevance and fair revenue sharing for UGC, will introduce an even more formidable break with the past, with the added blessing of content creators, who are obviously the most harmed in and by the current system.

Turning the tail, moving from the long tail to the big tail, is the Internet’s next big challenge. Steve Ballmer himself says nothing less :

At the end of the day, this is about the ad platform. This is not about just any one of the applications. The most important application for the foreseeable future is search.

So we have all the data for the problem, and the first ad server that creates the RELEVANT mix to match advertisers’ needs on one side with the legitimate monetization expectations of content creators on the other side (matching the inventory of the latter based on the message of the former), will win the jackpot. Even if there are still a few unknowns.

Building an All-Star Social Media / Web 2.0 Team

If you could only bring 6 Social Media Pros to an island to start a Web 2.0 Marketing Department, who would they be?

Making it on Jeremiah's list of 'Social Computing Stategists' got me thinking about my team, what we do, what we want to do and what's next. My team is fairly new and we've been at it for about 9-months now and the various disciplines and skill sets of our team was built trial and error over the past few months. As we plan for the next fiscal year I can't help but think big so I started creating a list of all of the things a 'Social Media and Web 2.0' team should focus on (leaving out the boundaries of resources). Here's what I've come up with:

Social Media Strategist - In 'Alice in Wonderland', Lewis Carroll wrote "if you don't know where you want to be, it hardly matters which direction you take". At the core of every good team there’s a good plan. This is the person who pulls everything together. They build the Social Media Marketing plan and determine what the objective of the campaign is and therefore what tools should be utilized and how.

Community Manager – There are currently two communities that we have an active presence on - Facebook and NetPro having someone actively facilitate conversations in these communities would really take things to the next level.

Social Site Management – The great thing about engaging your customers in social media is that you can tweak your message depending on the audience. The tough thing about engaging your customers in social media is that your message could end up looking different for every audience. At the core of any marketing strategy lies a common message. We now have a presence on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. Depending on the campaign we may leverage one or more of these channels and having someone to manage the communications and having it centrally executed is critical.

Blogging (including Micro-blogging) – Blogging is made up of two basic parts: content creation and content distribution. You could be channeling Shakespeare in your daily journal but if nobody knows about it, it won’t ever matter. Offering assistance to our bloggers to help optimize their posts for the search engines helping with suggestions on key or hot topics or sending out Twitters when new posts are live can make all the difference in the world.

Monitoring – If a tree falls in your community and you didn’t hear about it; WHAT ON EARTH WERE YOU DOING THAT WAS SO IMPORTANT?!? Whether it's with Google Alerts, Nielson BuzzMetrics or TruCast, it's important to have an ear on what conversations are happening about our solutions so that we can actively participate in those conversations. Web

Innovations – This involves looking at the technolgoy our web pages use and determining if there are new capabilities available to better communicate or present something on our website. For example behavioral targetting, implementing widgets, or something as simple as adding Lightbox treatments can give your entire website a 'web 2.0' feel.

What do you think? What additional superpowers should a Social Media / Web 2.0 all-star team stock up on?

Web Usability Event Wrap-Up

The Web Usability Event on June 25 was highly informative covering many issues of the day on building the usable web. Speakers Jeremy Ashley, Vice President, Applications User Experience, Oracle; Tom Chi, Senior Director of User Experience, Yahoo; and David Nelson, Sr. Experience Designer, Adobe Systems were all very knowledgeable, on the cutting-edge, and offered many unique perspectives. Thank you to everyone who attended and see you at the next event which is a great follow-on to this event on Web Analytics: Measuring The Attention Economy.
Photos of the event.

Adobe Acrobat 9 Now Available

Adobe announced today the launch of Acrobat 9 which includes native support for Flash and new collaboration capabilities. Users can now include Flash Player compatible video and application files into PDF documents.

Acrobat 9 also includes the ability to unify a wide range of content into a single document with the new concept of PDF Portfolios. PDF Portfolios enable users to assemble multiple media types into one, compressed PDF file that can be customized with several professional layouts and specific branding.

In addition, Acrobat 9 provides access to capabilities for collaborating live within a PDF document, enabled by working with Acrobat.com, a suite of hosted services available as public beta. This new capability can enable users to drive a group’s navigation through a PDF document in real-time, helping ensure everyone is literally, and figuratively, on the same page.

Acrobat 9 expected to launch up to twice as fast as earlier versions.

Yahoo's Luke Wroblewski On Web Form Design

Forms are a staple of the online experience. We use them daily for a host of activities from signing in/up, purchasing something, asking a question, to downloading a document. They come in all sizes, layouts, and configurations. Some are better executed than others and ultimately, impact our businesses adversely if their designs and usability are impaired. So, how do we ensure that in creating web forms, we get them right? I am speaking with Luke Wroblewski, Senior Principal at Yahoo! and author of a new book "Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks".

Q: First off, congratulations on the book. Help us understand, why does the design of web forms matter?
A: As you mentioned, forms are a core element of the online experience. Anywhere organizations are asking their customers to input information, Web forms are there: at the point of checkout in e-commerce; at the point of conversation in social applications; and at the point of data entry in productivity applications. Because actions like transactions in ecommerce, discussions in social sites, and data entry everywhere matter - forms matter. In these crucial flows, even small improvements in Web forms can make a big impact.

In my book, Jared Spool of User Interface Engineering shares a story where redesigning a two-field form resulted in an increase of $300 million in annual revenue for an online retailer. With returns like that possible, it’s no wonder form design matters.



Q: Users generally dislike completing forms. How can designers improve the user experience of the form completion process? What are some of the elements that should be taken into consideration in designing them?
A: The long answer is a lot of elements need to be considered: input field affordances, label layout, required indicators, inline validation, paths to completion, error and success messaging, start pages, content groupings, primary actions, additional inputs, smart defaults, personalized defaults, and the list goes on. So let me instead answer this by highlighting some of the broader areas to address in form design: form structure, form elements, and form interactions.

Form structure is the organization of the questions a form is going to ask people. Getting to the right set of questions requires designers to think of their forms as conversations instead of as interrogations. What is going to make people feel comfortable enough to respond to every question being asked? Are we asking questions in a logical order? Are there any questions we can remove or defer?

Too often, forms are simply laid out without a lot of thought given to the actual questions being asked. While form layout can aid comprehension and completion, the structure of a form can have a much bigger impact and is often not given enough consideration.

Form elements are the user interface components we use to ask and allow people to answer questions. This includes labels, inputs like radio buttons, text fields, checkboxes, and drop-down menus, actions, and messaging like help text and errors. Selecting the right combination of form elements requires an understanding of the advantages and disadvantages of each. Luckily, there’s a bevy of research that can help designers go from the quintessential answer of “it depends” to actionable solutions.

Form interactions are the behaviors that support and expedite form completion. Considerations like inline validation -that helps confirm correct answers, suggest options for correct answers, or help people stay within necessary limits for their answers- and additional inputs -that give people the opportunity to answer more detailed questions when they need to- are just a few examples of behaviors that can be taken into consideration.

Q: What is the biggest mistake you see designers making with the design of forms?
A: As I mentioned when discussing form organization earlier, one of the biggest mistakes Web designers and developers make is thinking about Web form design as a layout problem: "how will I arrange these labels & input fields on the screen?" You need to go deeper than that when designing forms and consider when, where, and how people encounter forms and design accordingly.

Another common problem I see a lot is designers forgetting that people want what is on the other side of a form. They want to buy something, they want to vote, or they want to make their voice heard. The form is just standing in their way. As a result, forms need to be designed in a way that makes it explicitly clear how to get through them quickly and easily. That means no distractions, concise questions, clear ways to respond, and a laser-like focus on completion. Let people get to the good stuff! They’ll love you for it.

Q: In your book, you mention the concept of 'gradual engagement'. Would you explain what this is?
A: Gradual engagement is an alternative to the all too common sign-up form. I’m sure you’ve encountered your fair share. You come across a new Web service and the first thing you need to do is fill out a registration form. As a new customer experience, that sucks.

Through gradual engagement, we can communicate what Web services do and why people should care by allowing them to actually interact with the application in gradual ways. Have a Web application? Let me start using it before I need to fill in a registration form. Allow me to learn why it’s great before I commit to being a customer.

As an example, we can look at Genia Web service that allows anyone to set up a family tree and share it with family and friends. What’s the first thing potential customers need to do when they arrive at Geni? Fill out a registration form? Nope, they make a family tree. After all, that’s what’s Geni is for. Their approach to gradual engagement has given the service five million profiles in five months!

Q: One of the outcomes of Web 2.0 technologies on the form creation process is the ability to create dynamic forms with fancy features and options. What has been the impact of Web 2.0 technology on form design?
A: Ajax development allows us to get information back from a Web server without executing a full Web page refresh. As a result, we can do things like validate an answer someone has entered in real time or make suggestions for valid answers directly on the form.

We can also surface information and inputs in a dynamic manner – revealing only what people need when they need it. In some of the eye-tracking and usability testing we did for the book, we saw that hiding irrelevant form controls from people until they need them results in forms that are easy on the eyes and completed quite quickly. Ajax can certainly help with that!

Q: There is no formal standardization for the design of web forms. Some argue that there should be to ensure consistency across the Web and improve the user experience. What are your thoughts on this? Should forms be standardized and should they even be made cookie cutter?
A: Well I guess it depends on whether or not you believe there is a perfect Web form layout that works in all contexts. Frankly, I’m not so sure. For starters this comes back to the point I made earlier that many people assume form design is just finding a good layout for a set of questions people have to answer. Hence the belief a cookie cutter solution could work. But let’s even take the simple question of how to align labels in a form.

Testing has shown top-aligned labels cut down completion times and can boost completion rates. But other options still have their place. For example, left-aligned labels - though they required more than twice the amount of time to complete in testing- allow people to easily scan a list of labels and find the one they need when only one or two fields have to be updated. In this use case, left-aligned works best. In many other cases, speed is of the essence and top-aligned hits the mark. So which alignment should be the standard?

In just about every aspect of form design the right answer depends on the problem you are trying to solve. This is why I gravitate toward best practices that give people a way to think through a situation and find an appropriate solution instead of enforcing standards.

Now could some user interface standards help by creating consistency? Sure, but we’d have to really think through what made sense across many different contexts.

Q: How do you see the future of web form creation evolving and manifesting itself?
A: Personally, I hope to see Web forms subsumed into the natural flow of goals people are trying to achieve online instead of being stand alone Web pages that act as roadblocks to these goals. In some cases, this will mean solutions that manage information sharing for people. In other cases, it will mean questions tightly integrated within natural ways of getting things done. So it doesn’t feel like there’s a form there at all! Gradual engagement, which we talked about before, is a great approach to moving in this direction.

Q: Are the practices in your book being implemented at Yahoo :)?
A: Of course! I'm advocating more every day as well. In all seriousness, we’ll be releasing a set of Web form solutions on our public design patterns site soon that incorporates a lot of what's in the book and what we have learned running hundreds of usability tests over the years.

Q: Any other books on the way?
A: Two is enough for now but you never know!

Thanks, Luke! The book also covers a host of great topics such as the path to completion, form labeling, input fields, actions, help text, errors and success, inline validation, and more. As a special offer for WebGuild readers, you can get a 10% discount off the purchase price of a digital (or print) copy of the book at http://rosenfeldmedia.com using promo code "WEBGUILD".

50 Best Websites 2008

Time.com has come out with their list of the 50 Best Websites for 2008. In what can be considered a reflection of our time, Gasbuddy appears to be high on the list. Also, making the cut of their picks are Penny Arcade, Gaia Online, Kongregate, Free Rice, Petfinder, Urban Dictionary, TinyURL.com, Geni, and ProFootballTalk. If you've never heard of some of these sites, you are not alone. A lot of these are likely the result of huge PR pushes. Not sure I would necessarily call some of the sites on the list the 'best'; maybe noteworthy or interesting. And it appears others are finding the same - sites such as Mobaganda, Net-a-porter, and iliketotallyloveit and are like totally bottoming out in the ratings.

Maryanne Buechner of Time once described their process to me as follows: "It really varies. We select sites that we find are interesting, entertaining, useful, informative, newsy, creative, well-designed, easy to navigate, well-written, innovative, broadly appealing or fun, or some combination of the above. Sometimes we include a website that is brand new because we think it's worth checking out and that perhaps many people don't yet know about it. Sometimes we include a site that has been around for a while, but that keeps getting better and better, or has been underappreciated. It just varies. It's an entirely subjective process, and we welcome suggestions from readers."

Previous year's list.

New Bookmark Recommendations Service Launched

Bookmarks inSuggest is now launched. It is a service that gives recommendations to users of bookmark services, based on personal taste. This improves the user experience on the Internet by giving suggestions that the users did not know they were looking for.

If a user of the bookmark service del.icio.us enters his/her username on inSuggest.com, the user will immediately get personal recommendations of web sites that the user might like. A special feature is the tag filter functionality.

"Personal recommendations will be a more important way of consuming content on the web, when the amount of online content is growing", says Dennis Gustafsson, founder of inSuggest.

Web 2.0 Organization Adoption Survey

Here are the results of a survey of the adoption of Web 2.0 by organizations, with a focus on marketing practices/vehicles, conducted by DeCarolis Design and Marketing.

May Survey Results

1. My company’s marketing initiatives include the active implementation and use of these online collaborative media (by percentage):



2. How do you measure customer feedback on marketing campaigns?



3. Which of the following online marketing and advertising vehicles does your company use?

1. Email – 80%
2. Display ads – 50%
3. Video ads – 0%
4. Webcasts/Podcasts – 20%
5. Other emerging vehicles – 30%

4. The main roadblock to my company becoming more engaged in Web 2.0 marketing practices such as blogs and other forms of social media is:

1. Budgetary concerns – 20%
2. Management/ownership buy-in – 40%
3. Applicability to our industry or business – 30%
4. It’s overrated – 0%
5. No roadblocks, we’re all in – 40%

As DDM notes, "it's interesting to note that most respondents currently employ a mix of traditional media along with gradually escalating ventures into Web 2.0". I'd love to see a similar survey on W2.0 adoption for internal and external (customer/partner) uses also...how ready are we for putting bi-lateral communications goals into practice? Do we really embrace customer-generated content (beyond testimonials and SCM issues)?! What happens when we "go bi-lateral" internally with employees, as opposed to the predominant use of blogs, etc., as executive platforms? It's not surprising these issues aren't addressed here, but it sure would be interesting to know the extent to which this background dynamic affects/doesn't the foreground conversation and how to move forward effectively as a result..No answers yet here; just posing the question....

Submitted by: Lucie Newcomb

Buzzwords 2.0: What is Web 2.0? What is RIA? What is Ajax?

I am doing a lot of customer presentations these days, so am getting much "constructive criticism" about the number of confusing buzzwords on the WaveMaker web site. Buzzwords represent job security for entrepreneurs like me who would be practically unemployable were it not for our secret knowledge of the true meaning of words like Web 2.0.

However, even I must admit that these Buzzwords 2.0 get in the way clear communication. In addition, while there are many standalone definitions of these terms, it is much easier to understand what they mean by considering them together.

With that in mind, here are my definitions of Web 2.0, Rich Internet Application and Ajax, complete with helpful graphics:

• Web 2.0 represents a market shift in consumer attention from expert-generated content (Yahoo) to user-generated content (Google)
• Rich Internet Applications represents a requirements shift for more interactive, PC-like web sites to simplify consumer creation of content (Blogger, MySpace)
• Ajax is an architectural shift to support RIA requirements

Definition of Web 2.0 - Shift In Consumer Attention

Consumer eyeballs still rule the web. The huge power shift over the last 5 years has been from expert-driven content (which could be created using expert tools like Adobe Dreamweaver) to user-driven content (which requires web based tools that are easy to use). The shift in consumer attention is also driving a shift in business focus as corporations look at ways to engage more effectively with their customers and employees.

Definition of Rich Internet Application - Shift in Web Requirements

In order for more people to participate in creating content for the Internet, the content creation tools have to be both simpler and more interactive. Rich Internet Applications seek to erase the difference in user experience between browser-based applications (Gmail) and traditional client/server applications (Outlook). A quick comparison of Gmail versus Outlook shows that RIAs have a big usability gap, but the Internet brings the offsetting benefit of dramatically simpler application distribution.

Definition of Ajax - Shift in Web Architecture

Ajax is an architecture which makes the browser smarter and more interactive by running Javascript programs on the client. Don't tell anyone, but the old name for putting logic on the client was fat client programming. Everything old is new again and it turns out the only way to make an interactive client is to do more processing in the browser.

The following diagram shows the fundamental changes between the Web 1.0 architecture (circa 2000) and the Ajax architecture.

Where is all of this leading?

Web 2.0 is driving new application requirements and in turn creating a demand for new development tools that can meet those application requirements. Building increasingly visual and interactive web applications requires a WYSIWYG Ajax tool - something like a Microsoft Access for the Web. Adobe Flex and Micosoft Silverlight are providing proprietary tools for building Ajax applications. WaveMaker is providing open source tools for building Ajax applications based on Spring, Hibernate and Dojo. Download Wavemaker to see what a visual Ajax tool looks like!

References
A number of others have gone before me in defining these terms individually. Jonathan Schwartz recently pointed out that Java has always had RIA capabilities (but he also admits they didn't work very well until recently. Here are my personal favorites definitions:

• Web 2.0. Tim O'Reilly at O'Reilly Media has a good definition of what is web 2.0
• Rich Internet Application. Adobe initially defined the term rich internet application
• Ajax. Jesse James Garrett of Adaptive Path originally defined Ajax.

Another Social Network Bites The Dust

Yet another social networking site you've probably never heard of is - alas - shutting down. Following in the footsteps of Conde Nast and Verizon's social networking communities, Monster.com's personal networking community site, Tickle, is closing it's doors. The company provides interpersonal content and services (self-discovery, matchmaking, career and social networking).

Silicon Alley Insider is reporting the story. Tickle apparently sent this email out to its 17 million members:

We will be shutting down Tickle as of June 30th 2008. You will no longer be able to access your saved test results after that date. If you would like to keep your test results, please print them out before that date. Many thanks for your understanding! ... There is no action required from your side, you don't have to delete your user account or cancel your subscription; Tickle will do this for you.

It appears that everyone is tickled out. Take a final gander:

Online Shoppers To eTailers: I Want My Web 2.0

In a survey conducted by Guidance and Synovate, in which they asked respondents: “When thinking about shopping online, what is most likely to make you return to a given shopping website?”, they found that 60% of people are drawn to online retailers with Web 2.0 tools and technologies. And of the respondents, they found that:

- 34% will return to sites that offer product and service recommendations. The majority, 41%, of the social web gen in the 18-24 age group were more prone to this than the boomer 55-64 age group.
- 26% will return to sites that provide an unique shopping experience. Those with post-grad education and non-whites seemed to prefer this.
- 18% will return to sites that value and allow for feedback submission. The older age groups were found to be more likely to provide feedback. Non-whites as well seemed to value this option.
- 16% will return to sites that welcome them. More women than men were statistically inclined to this and more people in the lowest income range.
- 6% will return to sites that make them feel part of a community. So, the social networking component of online shopping is a valuable component that can serve to drive sales.

“The economy is fragile and the competition for the consumer dollar is fierce, but as these findings make abundantly clear, online commerce is now a two-way street - and retailers need to embrace that reality. Online consumers and merchants are in dialogue as never before, and consumers are counting on each other for insights in making purchase decisions. Recommendations have become the new currency of online commerce, along with their corollary, the opportunity to give feedback to the e-Commerce site.” - Jason Meugniot, Guidance President and CEO.

Travel Website UpTake Launches

UpTake.com, formerly Kango.com, launched today with features on thousands of destinations and over two million reviews aggregated from other travel websites such as Orbitz, Travelocity, Virtual Tourist, and Yahoo Travel.

Working to bring semantic search to travel, Uptake:

.... tries to understand travelers' intentions - if a traveler is looking for a hotel that is "good for kids", UpTake interprets it to have the same intent as phrases such as "child friendly" or "family vacation."

The online travel space is one of the most competive in the online world but the semantic approach to search and aggregation of reviews may give UpTake a strategic advantage over other Travel sites.

Your Name Should Be Right Here!

WebGuild covers technology topics from startups to news to enterprise applications, and we'd love to hear more from you. If you are a tech blogger WebGuild would like to feature some of your technology opinions. If you are in management we'd be interested in hearing more about what you and your company do with online technology.

To submit material or ideas for articles contact WebGuild Blogger Joe Hunkins jhunkins@gmail.com or click here>>.

We also love comments on the posts. A lot of people read WebGuild but only a tiny number leave comments. If you like - or hate - the post feel free to let us know, or add anything you think is relevant to the conversation.

Tinkering Your Way To Success

If statistician and author Nassim Nicholas Taleb is right in this Forbes article, we tend to underrate the power of random tinkering and events that are outside of our control with respect to business failure and success:

Random tinkering is the path to success. And fortunately, we are increasingly learning to practice it without knowing it--thanks to overconfident entrepreneurs, naive investors, greedy investment bankers, confused scientists and aggressive venture capitalists brought together by the free-market system.

[thanks to WebGuild commenter Atolley for the heads up on this author]

Randomness is a major component of biological evolution and I would suggest that business and evolution have a lot in common, most importantly the notion that both biological and business entities work *away from failure* rather than *towards success*. Events both random and controlled continue to change the playing field, making it difficult to find consistent formulas for success, let alone even predict which among a dozen companies will survive into profitability and business success.

Web Pages : Size Matters!

A recent analysis indicates that the size of the average web page has tripled since 2003, up from 94k to 312k (!). Also, the number of objects on the page has doubled to a whopping 50 objects per page.

Details of this excellent analyis that combined website data from two studies are at WebsiteOptimization.com, where they conclude with some advice for designers:

Within the last five years, the size of the average web page has more than tripled, and the number of external objects has nearly doubled. While broadband users have experienced faster load times, dial-up users have been left behind. With the average web page sporting more than 50 external objects, object overhead now dominates most web page delays. Minimizing HTTP requests by using CSS sprites, combining JavaScript or CSS files, reducing the number of EOs, and converting graphic effects to CSS while still retaining attractiveness, has become the most important skill set for web performance optimizers.

It's easy to see how wider use of broadband and high speed internal networks have combined with a lot of misunderstanding to create corporate and small business websites that are often bloated with questionable graphics, pictures, and design elements. Although a shift is underway, search optimizers are generally much lower on the corporate food chain than, say, a brand manager who will be reluctant to sacrifice powerful design components for a faster page loading time.

Complicating these matters is the fact that many consultants and even internet IT departments generally create web redesign presentations for high speed or internal networked environments that are many times faster than normal user interaction. Dial up is still a common method of connection in the USA yet few websites are well optimized for low bandwidth - arguably losing thousands of potential sales as customers leave in frustration with slow page loads.

Recommendation? Take some lessons from Craigslist and start with the most spartan, efficient, optimized environment you can imagine and then add design elements only if they are essential to your online functionality. Are customers basing decisions based on the *look* of your website? In some cases yes, but in general I'd suggest customers will prefer a fast and functional site to a pretty one, and sites that err on the side of function rather than form will see higher conversion and interaction levels.

Just the Facts Please - Online Seminar Limitations

Online Seminars, webcasts, and podcasts have really exploded on the tech scene over the last year or so, but I remain skeptical about the potential of these to change things very much. An "old style" online information gathering approach still works very well. Generally it takes only a few online minutes to search, find, and quickly scan a topic you need to understand better or learn about for the first time. If you need to become an expert in a topic I'd suggest it is better to surf a lot of sites and participate in blogs and forums rather than spend the same amount of time watching a webcast, though of course there are exceptions to this. Unfortunately it is hard to know which of the millions of videos on millions of topics are great vs. a waste of your time. Sorting the wheat from the chaff - at least for me - is much easier if I'm scanning search engine listings, text snippets, and websites rather than listening to podcasts or video clips.

Webcasting and Podcasts in some way bridge the human gap we have with simple surfing where you have a very limited connection to the purveyor of the information you need. Yet thanks to blogging and forums you are able to to get direct feedback from experts by simply commenting or participating in those formats, which to my way of thinking have the huge advantage of allowing you to jump in and out and quickly scan for the good stuff without enduring a lot of information that is not relevant to you.

Certainly a podcast would be a better choice for some specific types of learning - languages for example - where audio and repetition are key parts of the learning experience. Also obviously there are times when the online picture can "paint a thousand words" and thus may trump any amount of text reading. Real time breaking news could benefit from webcasting, especially if pictures are a key part of the story. However I think these exceptions are relatively few. In most cases your best information bet, in terms of return on your valuable time, is the same as it has been for some time - good old Web 1.0 search, surf, and find.

Web 2.5?

Today CNET has a fun piece on the evolution of the internet where - partly I think just for effect - they use the increasingly incomprehensible numbering system for "Web 1.0, 2.0, etc" that is now thrown around without much regard to consistency or even comprehensibity.

I agree with the author that we should probably abandon the Webish numbering system in favor of some online characteristics and definitions that everybody can agree about and then use terms that actually have some real - and more importantly consistent - meaning behind them.
































(Source: CNET News.com)

Yahoo's Open OS: Really, Really Open

Larry Dignan and Dan Farber at CNET have the early scoop on Yahoo's freshly unveiled Yahoo! Open Strategy somewhat cryptically labelled .... "Y!OS"

Ari Balogh, Yahoo CTO said at the San Francisco Web 2.0 Conference today:

“We are taking open to a whole other place,"... “We are rewiring
Yahoo from the inside out with a developer platform that will open up the assets
of Yahoo in a way never done before, making the consumer experience social
throughout and provide hooks to developers.”

It is too early to know if this type of openness will be embraced by developers to the degree needed to make a significant impact in the way people use Yahoo services, but it is very encouraging to see how the key players are racing to claim the title of the "most open" online environments. Facebook's API's were followed by Google Open Social and now Yahoo which appears to offer more programmatic freedom than ever across Yahoo's massive number of network assets and 500,000,000 person user base.

Shame On You Tim O'Reilly

On January 18, 2008, Google informed me that they will no longer be hosting the WebGuild events. A Google representative said the decision was based on the fact that the name of our January 2008 event called "The Future of Web Applications" and the name of our web 2.0 conference called "Web 2.0 Conference & Expo" were not changed as requested by O'Reilly.

O'Reilly associates contacted Google and asked them to demand that WebGuild change the name of our events and conferences and to cease supporting the WebGuild. See the email below.

from A**** I*** ******@google.com
to Daya Baran
date Fri, Jan 18, 2008 at 8:03 AM
subject Webguild and Google
signed-by google.com

Google will no longer be able to host the Webguild meetings. We need you to take our logo off your website as a sponsor since we will not be sponsoring your meetings moving forward. We also need you to take off our logo on your upcoming conference site as Google is not sponsoring that conference http://www.webguild.org/meetings/web20/2008/. You can keep our logo as a PAST sponsor but the language needs to say past as that is indeed what we are, a past sponsor. I tried to warn you that this was a delicate issue but you did not listen. I asked you three times to change the name of this weeks event in order to maintain the relationship and since you did not budge we will no longer support Webguild. I wish your organization the best of luck!

Thanks,

*********

The WebGuild Conferences and Events provide the web community with the opportunity to learn about new developments in web technology. We believe that knowledge is not the domain of the privileged. Our events have been extremely successful in creating an open platform to share knowledge with the masses. This is contrary to O'Reilly's model which is based on withholding knowledge and gouging attendees, companies, and sponsors where the highest bidder wins shelf space.

Do No Evil
The old boy's network has benefited from the O'Reilly platform by publishing books through his company and by speaking at his conferences and hence, positioning themselves as experts in their respective fields. Many such experts have landed at Google. O'Reilly contacted these old-timers and asked them to demand that WebGuild change the name of our event and conference and to cease supporting WebGuild. Once such individual is Dewitt Clinton, who joined Google in 2006. This arrogant individual threatened to cancel the January event on 200 people if I did not change the name immediately. I did not budge. The harassment continued. I was flooded with emails and phone calls demanding I change the name. Finally, they became condescending, arrogant, unprofessional, and appalling. I emailed Larry Page, Serge Brin, and Eric Schmidt about this issue. I also told them that the WebGuild has been a big supporter of Google and its products since 2001 and we represent the community that are early adopters of Google products and contributes to Google's revenue engine. I never received a response. Google has also hired several hundred employees from the WebGuild events they hosted saving the company hundreds of thousands of dollars if not millions.

O'Reilly felt it was necessary to cut-off Google's support for WebGuild because he felt that without Google's support we would not have a venue to keep putting on high quality events at low costs. Thus, he would be able to continue gouging the industry. Furthermore, O'Reilly contacted speakers, sponsors, and bloggers and asked them to withdraw support for WebGuild Conferences and Events. O'Reilly was desperate to avert a repeat of the backlash when he sued an Irish non-profit for putting on a Web 2.0 conference.

O'Reilly Sues Non-Profit
Web 2.0 is about community, openness, and the free flow of information. O'Reilly's model is centered on limiting access to knowledge and creating dependencies for profit. It is a Web 2.0 Conference, however, not everyone can attend. You have to be exclusive enough to be invited to the conference which is about common technologies and for that privilege, you have to pay a king's ransom to get information that is freely available. O'Reilly sued ITCork, an Irish organization for holding a Web 2.0 event (see here and here). His attempt to extract his pound of flesh backfired so badly that he is resorting to questionable tactics to avoid a similar backlash.

Claims To Coining Web 2.0
O'Reilly even claims that he coined the term "Web 2.0". The term was coined two years earlier by Joe Firmage, CEO, ManyOne Networks. Web 2.0 is a term used to refer to the web as a platform to develop applications. The term "web 2.0" is in the public domain, however, O'Reilly has attempted to trademark it to retain exclusive use of it and prevent others from using it. Paul Graham has a great post about the term Web 2.0 and his run-in with O'Reilly.

Shame on You O'Reilly
Presently, O'Reilly is promoting keynote speaker Saul Griffith calling him a "genius" and "a scientist and engineering polymath" without disclosing the fact that he is his son-in-law. When I met him, I cordially introduced myself, however, O'Reilly was a despicable individual. He is a dinosaur whose time has past.

As a result of this, we have not had a venue for events for the past few months. Many of you have been asking when the next event will be. I am happy to announce that the events are back on track and we will be holding the next event on May 7, 2008.

The Twitter Scaling Storm

Twitter quickly moved from internet obscurity to one of a handful of key online social media players. Past concerns over Twitter's infrastructure and reliability came to a head this week as key Twitter IT architect Blain Cook has left the company amid a swirl of blog commentary and criticism over his performance at the company.

As Matt Ingram notes in his reasonable take on things, it is ironic that Cook will be speaking soon at a Web 2.0 conference in Silicon Valley about how to scale up large online applications.

I'm a big fan of Twitter but unlike many of my tech friends I am not obsessed with it. I think many Twitter critics have really overreacted to the downtime and slowness because ... overreacting to modest tech defects is what tech people love to do.

My take is that people are not reasonably factoring profitability issues into the Twitter equation. Cook is getting more blame than he deserves because he probably was tasked with keeping things going less than the budget you'd have with a more profitable enterprise.

Twitter has been wildly successful in terms of traffic and adoption, but it has not been monetizing that success. Scaling up to an extremely robust infrastructure could be throwing good money after ... no money. Many bubble companies developed huge and robust architectures to handle trivial traffic and thus I am not at all convinced Twitter is wrong to set their priorities as they appear to have done - a great service with a second class infrastructure until they figure out how to turn a buck from all the Twitterers.

Really Simple Web 2.0

Web 2.0 apps look all shiny and bright, but we all know what horrors lurk within the typical enterprise IT shop. Web 2.0 will not be able to transform the enterprise until it can deal with real world integration nightmares like CICS systems, flat files accessed through obscure SNA protocols and AS/400s programmed in RPG.

Who is going to tame all this real world IT stuff and bring it into the bright shiny Web 2.0 world? SnapLogic and WaveMaker, that's who!

WaveMaker and SnapLogic announced today a partnership to use SnapLogic's Really Simple Integration platform to wrap any legacy data source as a web service. Once SnapLogic has "tamed the beast", WaveMaker provides a point and click, WYSIWYG development platform to expose legacy systems via rich internet applications.

Although we are performing very different tasks, both SnapLogic and WaveMaker are getting incredible value from creating web service-based products. SnapLogic wraps any data source as a web service, while WaveMaker assembles applications from any collection of web services. Chris Marino of SnapLogic also blogged about our partnership.

The following marketecture diagram shows the power of this approach. Rather than a rat's nest of one-off adapters, replicated data and custom data conversions, there is one clean API to the data - web services - and one simple tool for exposing the web services - WaveMaker!
To demonstrate the power of the rich and thin approach to web 2.0, WaveMaker and SnapLogic will be demonstrating an application at Web 2.0 Expo this week that integrates mainframe, minicomputer and relational data into a simple inventory tracking and re-ordering sytem. Stop by our booths and check it out!

Social Media Top Priority For Enterprise

Enterprise 2.0 will become a $4.6 billion industry by 2013, according to a report by Forrester Research. The top priority for enterprises will be social media applications and tools and most of the money is expected to flow to social networking tools and mashups.

Forrester defines Enterprise 2.0 as the corporate version of Web 2.0. Here’s the research firm’s definition:

In Forrester’s view, the key hallmark of Web 2.0 is efficiency for end users, and the ultimate goal is to use technology like Ajax, rich Internet applications, blogs, wikis, and social networks to foster productive, advantageous behavior among employees, customers, partners, and other networks such as Social Computing, the Information Workplace, and collective intelligence.

Across the board, Web 2.0 tools enter a crowded space full of legacy software and processes that are difficult to displace and with which Web 2.0 software must integrate to be fully effective. Integration with lightweight applications like email and Excel, as well as heavier applications like Web content management suites, campaign management software, portal software, and customer relationship management (CRM) systems, must all be addressed over time.

AOL Spheres It With Acquistion

AOL announced today that it purchased Sphere for an undisclosed amount. The company responsible for the "Sphere It" link which appears on a growing number of sites, describes itself as connecting your current articles to contextually relevant content from your archives as well as from blogs, media stories, video, photos, and ads across the web.

According to Ron Grant, AOL President, the acquisition will help AOL enhance content on its own sites and distribute its content across Sphere's third-party publisher network. Additionally, the acquisition provides AOL with access to advertising inventory across Sphere's network, while growing its reach to content publishers via the widget. Sphere was founded in 2005 and is based in San Francisco.

Stanford Website Redesign Coming June'08

Stanford University is working on the redesign of their website. The project which started last Nov 15 will take 7 months with an expected launch date of June 15 '08. Codenamed "Project 8180" which refers to the total acreage of the Stanford campus, the redesign will be the third of the site since its inception. The site has not undergone a redesign in about 5 years.

The goals of the redesign are to create a more consistent and updated look and feel across Stanford sites, focus the global navigation by decreasing the number of menu items from 8 to 5, to surface and provide a more holistic view of what the university has to offer, and to better market it. What is interesting to note are the following:
-the page has a lot more content
-it is now more of a portal or gateway page
-front and foremost use of rich media i.e. videos (very web 2.0-esque)
-use of lots of imagery
-timely and current news section
-multiple rss feed subscriptions (very web 2.0-esque)
-jump links to the most popular content areas
-what looks like in-page quick links versus a link to another page (very web 2.0-esque)
-events calendars
-scrollable in-page view of other stanford sites (very web 2.0-esque)
-international program section surfaced

MOCKUP OF REDESIGN:

Web 2.0 Bubble Bursting - Crash 2.0 Coming

Dow Jones VentureSource released a report on venture capital investment in Web 2.0 companies Tuesday saying that "investment boom may be peaking."

A total of 178 deals received $1.34 billion in 2007, an 88% increase over 2006. Of that Facebook received $300 and Ning.com received $44 million. The rest of the distribution does not look too good from there. Venture capital investment has been sustaining many Web 2.0 startups, which are often chasing the same users. When the money dries up so will most Web 2.0 companies unless they find a new source of revenue.

U.S. Web 2.0 Investment by Region, 2006-2007

                         2006                           2007
              Deals     Investment (MM)      Deals     Investment (MM)
                     
Bay Area              74         $431               72*         $721*
New England           15         $79                20          $158
Southern California   10         $41                14          $115
New York Metro         9         $18                25           $58
Pacific Northwest      6         $35                13          $140
Southeast              6         $24                 7           $47
Mountain (CO, AZ, UT)  4          $7                 7           $31
Texas                  3         $10                 2            $4
North Carolina         2          $3                 2           $10

*Includes Facebook

"The beauty of Web 2.0 companies is that they can do so much with so little. A few million dollars and they're not only up and running but attracting eyeballs and advertisers. 2008 may be a make-or-break year for many Internet companies with business models relying on advertising. The slumping economy, coupled with a slowdown in click-through rates for online advertising, is going to pose a real challenge to their ability to generate revenues and position themselves for an exit," said Jessica Canning, director of global research at Dow Jones VentureSource.

Web 2.0 Bubble Bursting - Part 1

Blue Links In A Web 2.0 World

Should all things blue on the web be links and all links on the web be blue? While in the offline world green means go, in the online world it is a well recognized convention that blue is our cue to click. But with the ever-evolving web, how is this standard faring?

• Corporate Sites. The vast majority of enterprise sites I looked at adhered to the law of blue links - Microsoft, HP, Cisco, IBM, and Intel. The anomaly was Oracle.
  

• News Sites. CNN.com, CNET, NYTimes.com, and WSJ.com all sported blue links.
  

• Consumer Sites. Amazon, Apple, eBay, MSN.com, Yahoo, Google, Walmart, and Petsmart are all bullish on blue. An exception I found was Target.com.

• Social Media Sites. YouTube, Flickr, My Space, Facebook all maintain blue links. But popular blogs HuffingtonPost, TMZ.com, and tech rag ValleyWag.com don't have blue links.

• Politicking Sites. HillaryClinton.com, BarackObama.com, and even JohnMcCain.com have blue links. So, clearly this rule transcends political persuasions too.

Of course, it also depends on the type of links, positioning, context, etc.. I am, of course, referring to the standard body copy links. Some sites even omit the border="0" on images thereby rendering the blue border on images to illustrate their clickability. Many sites use multi-formatting on their links to visually communicate their click states. And these links can come in all shades of blue. There is the Intel blue, big blue IBM's blue, and the Microsoft blue. Blue links are in fact the defacto fail-safe color of choice for links. Even usability guru, Jakob Nielsen, follows this model.

Does this mean that sites with non-blue links are doomed? Not at all. While it is the color of choice for links, links are popularly manifested in a myriad of colors. Many well-known sites have successfully accomplished this. It is the implementation of those links to appear as links - either by way of underlining or some other visual cue such as a symbol - that become important but such links can and do work. A lot may depend on the target audience and genre of site. There are many examples of Web 2.0 sites and teen sites that do different things that work as well. But tread carefully with this before deviating from the norm.

Video - Social Bookmarking 101

Here is a video explaining Social Bookmarking and how it works. See also post on Social Bookmarking Going Enterprise.

Social Bookmarking Going Enterprise

Social bookmarks are joining the ranks of utility navigational elements like print and email as a standard feature. For companies integrating Social Marketing into their Web Strategies and adopting Social Bookmarking, this can be a competitive advantage.

Bookmarking 2.0 or Social Bookmarking has been popular for about five years now. The old-school way of bookmarking web pages using your browser toolbar to "Add to Favorites" in IE or "Bookmark this Page" in Firefox is now considered archaic, basic, and standard. Newer and more advanced bookmarking tools have spawned which allow users to save links to pages using varying bookmarking services such as Del.icio.us, Stumbleupon, Google, and Yahoo.

The basic premise behind this kind of bookmarking is:

• Portability - to allow users to save their bookmarks online and take them with them so they have access to them anywhere they go as opposed to saving their bookmarks to their browser favorites locally on their computer - where they would be inaccessible from any other computer.
  
• Social Bookmarking also allows users to not only save for quick, ubiquitous access but with the capability to share and proliferate content virally if they so choose. In some cases, users can subscribe to web feeds for their list of tagged bookmarks allowing them to be notified when a new bookmark is added.
  
• Users can also tag the content in meaningful ways to them and others making them easier to find and be found.

Having been tried and tested for some time and popularized, the concept made its way to the blogs and news sites such as CNN and NYTimes, and is now making its way more and more to enterprise websites. The business case is similar to that of the standard "Email this page" functionality - referrals! If a visitor on your site reads a great white paper that they find is worth sharing, they can do so easily with potentially many people using a social bookmarking utility. Many users are leary of the "Email this page" option as they fear their email address will being captured for lead generation or other purposes. So, social bookmarks are a safe alternative. For corporate sites using social bookmarking, the relevance seems to be more so for news, press releases, blogs, webcasts/podcasts/videos, and case studies/white papers. But there are many instances where for such bookmarks are made available persistently across sites.

Yahoo Launches Mobile Content Tool

Yahoo announced today the impending launch in Q2'08 of onePlace, a mobile content management tool to enable consumers to better manage the wide selection of content available across the Internet. Yahoo! onePlace is expected to become available across hundreds of devices and mobile browsers globally.

"Yahoo! onePlace(TM) will bring together a consumer's interests, passions and important information into a single location - creating a rich and highly personalized experience. Everything is instantly organized, dynamically kept current, and served to them the way they want. So now, the content they consume and the way they consume it will be hyper-customized to their specific preferences and tastes."

onePlace will provide personalized views, dynamic content updates, and a mobile RSS reader. Users will be able to bookmark content online, keep it automatically updated with the latest updates, and assign categories and tags - or placed into customized "collections" that consumers create.

SaaS To Account For 18% of Software Sales In 2013

The Software as a Service or SaaS market is reportedly growing but is still relatively small. 6% of the software sales in '07 was SaaS and this is expected to grow to 15-18% in 5 years - which is still small. This, according to the OpSource Summit. Gartner expects SaaS to grow at 22.1 percent until 2011 for the aggregate enterprise application software markets and predicts that 63 percent of products in the software infrastructure market and 56 percent in the software application market will support Web services.

A panelist at the summit described SaaS as the thin edge of the web for utility computing. They went on to say that objections to SaaS in the enterprise are still quite high despite it being an important way to deliver critical functionality without having to maintain the apps internally, being able to push out upgrades on a continuous way, and having a low TCO.

Some of the top SaaS providers include:

• Salesforce.com - CRM solutions provider
• Adobe - looking at bringing Photoshop online
• Netsuite - another CRM solutions provider
• SuccessFactors - talent management solution
  
• Axentis - governance, risk and compliance solutions provider

Somewhat surprisingly, Microsoft is also in the Saas space. Other companies in this space are Oracle, IBM, and SAP. There are also others that provide web-based content management systems and analytics solutions. Clearly, this area has a lot of teeth. There is nothing worse than teams using different versions of the same software giving rise to file incompatibility issues.

Hidden Power of Online Forums As A Marketing Tool

I was at the Opsource SaaS Summit today and sat in on a preso from the Lithium SVP, Amy Lewis, who talked about the value of online forums to companies. Some of the key points were as follows.

Why have an online forum:

• Forum-ize your product line as part of your Web 2.0 marketing
  
• Forums can be used for customer support as well as for marketing
• Building a forum allows you to identify who your super users and because they are passionate, they represent a critical user group, a tribal base that are influencers.
• Consumer groundswell can be positive or negative which a forum can help manage. As a vendor, a forum allows you to be involved and make it a two-way dialogue and manage conversations happening on the blogosphere otherwise outside of your control.
• Communities can provide a powerful real-time vehicle:
• enhancing customer care
• enhancing brand loyalty
• providing support provided by users to users
• content is raw and unfiltered
• immediacy of great info
• value of having users talk to each other eg. customers share workarounds
• foster demand generation
• can serve as an online focus group eg. an setup private communities to help with product design
• value of happy comments being viewed by many users has a nice halo effect for branding
• professionalism and tone of forums have improved. Forum moderator should respond where appropriate and establish rules of conduct.
  
• ROI on support forums is a great place to start eg. call deflection
• suppport forum helps to build up critical mass
• lot to learn from customers

Rolling With Online Video

The majority of online video content viewed in the US is news/current events followed by jokes/bloopers/funny clips and movie trailers (previews, clips). Such videos are generally up to five minutes in length. But as David Hallerman, eMarketer Senior Analyst states, "as technology problems are solved, however, making the computer-television connection more viable and pleasurable for the average consumer, online video content will expand in both length and breadth, and professionally-produced material will account for a large part of the menu.” But until then, don't extend the length of your online videos because as a lean-forward technology, the web is second to TV for now "when it comes to elements such as convenience, control and the ability to easily find enjoyable content, TV video content wins out for relaxation, sharing the experience with friends and family and less annoying advertising than online."

When A Website Redesign Takes Flight

In the market for a helicopter?! Sikorsky Aircraft, a subsidiary of United Technologies Corp., announced the redesign of their website yesterday. When I came across this, what stood out for me is that the company seems to get what sometimes gets forgotten - that a company's website is a business tool and increasingly its "front door" to a global audience and the first experience many visitors have with your brand. As a result, they wanted to make the site a positive and memorable experience for visitors.

Given the product, it is kind of cool that they tried to mirror the offline experience online which can sometimes be tricky to do and given the medium, not always recommended. The company used a combination of video and Flash animation to bring the aircrafts to life by creating an interactive aircraft tour complete with a hangar and airfield, helicopters landing and taking off with all the sound effects, and a pilot describing them. You can get different views of the aircrafts and click on specific parts to get more info...simplified like buying a pair of jeans. They messaged their progress bars creatively; the labels were things like countdown, requesting landing clearance, and cleared for landing/takeoff. It's overall a very creative and unique way to sell such a complex product online effectively using rich media to create an interactive tv-like experience and taking design to greater heights.

Martha Stewart Expands Online Empire

Today's good thing (actually Thursday's) at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia was the acquisition of a 40% stake in online wedding planning company, Wedding Wire. The union provides MSLO the opportunity to increase their digital footprint in the lucrative wedding business both on- and offline. Wedding Wire boasts a localized online wedding marketplace, planning tools, and a social community. "By investing in WeddingWire, we are assembling a robust online offering with a proven toolset to enhance our digital Weddings content and complement what is already the category's premier print magazine," said Wenda Harris Millard, President, Media, MSLO. "We are impressed by WeddingWire's superior online platform and see great opportunities to leverage its expertise across our Internet sites and bring similar tools and features to our other lifestyle content verticals. This is also a tremendous opportunity for our advertisers to reach couples engaged in the process of planning their wedding."

The media mogul's growing online empire is quite impressive. Her own site, MarthaStewart.com, is of course elegantly designed but also has a lot of Web 2.0 and new media features and capabilities that a lot of traditional tech companies lack. It is clearly designed for users and usage and around community building. It's a good thing!

Adobe Launches Platform For RIAs

Adobe announced today the launch of AIR and Flex 3 software for creating rich internet applications (RIAs) that can run on the desktop and on most browsers and across operating systems. "The ROI of RIAs is real. A more engaging product visualization experience in eCommerce applications for example, helps customers understand what they are buying, which leads to less online abandonment and increased average order size through cross-sell and up-sell visualization" according to Al Hilwa, Program Director at IDC.

Windows and Mac OS versions of AIR and Flex 3 and their SDKs can be downloaded for free at www.adobe.com/go/air and www.adobe.com/go/flex. The standalone version of the Flex Builder 3 is US$249 for the Standard edition and US$699 for the Professional edition.

Web 2.0 Sites - Who Is Really Commenting

I recently did an interview at our Web 2.0 Conference & Expo of members of the Web 2.0 user generation and uncovered an interesting finding. I asked five twenty-somethings if they commented on articles, blogs, and videos. Surprisingly, contrary to the belief that these young Web 2.0'ers are actively posting comments to blog posts they read and videos they watch, is apparently NOT the case. These young people apparently prefer to take a more passive approach as voyeurs rather than active participants. They might read blog posts and watch web videos and even read the comments but not necessarily add to them. One person said he might comment if there were a lot of comments and he really liked the story or video. Another said she would read her friend's blog to keep in touch and might post comments there. But they were not commenting on mainstream blogs or Youtube videos. As it turns out, they weren't commenting because they didn't like what they read or saw just that they didn't feel inclined to engage beyond that. They were happy to consume the content but nothing more.

This begs the question - who is really commenting on these sites?! If the so-called Web 2.0 user generation is not commenting, then who is? Commenting on most sites can be anonymous so if users wish to remain unknown they can. Other sites like Youtube, for instance, requires users to login before posting a comment but the commenters can use screen name aliases. What's also interesting is that most of the comments on these fun consumer sites are generally meaningless one worders or one-liners but the members of the user generation interviewed still did not comment.

These interviewees were not shy; they were outgoing and adventurous, some were Stanford students, and they all worked - most in high tech and a couple in the service industry. Their behavior seems to suggest that unless there is an element of familiarity/community or they felt engaged enough or felt strongly enough about something, these Web 2.0-ites simply do not comment.

Web 2.0 Bubble (Bomb 2.0) Is Bursting

ZDNet has a great article comparing the events that lead to the bursting of of the first internet bubble (Dot Com Bomb) to the bursting of the Web 2.0 bubble called Bomb 2.0. The article suggests that Bomb 2.0 is underway. Google is down 27% since the start of the year. Just as Time-Warner set off Dot Bomb 1.0 by acquiring AOL, Microsoft may have set off the second through its bid for Yahoo. More>>

Life in Real Time

Ryan Kuder twittered his last day at Yahoo! as they gave him the boot. You get a play-by-play update of this day from getting the news to backing up his files to getting his phone confiscated.

What's interesting about this is how real-time every aspect of our lives can be. Every meeting, every event, every conversation could be documented in seconds with the quick movement of one's thumbs across the keyboard on their phones. A private conversation with a customer or a meeting with an analyst can be 'Twittered' at anytime and posted for the world to see. This illustrates yet another way Web 2.0 is changing the way we communicate.

For marketing professionals the only thing scarier than someone twittering something negative about one of our campaigns is no one twittering anything at all.

93% of Websites To Add Web 2.0 Functionality In 2008

More than half of online businesses plan to add Web 2.0 capabilities to their sites in the next six months to enhance their sites' user experiences. And, over 93% plan to do the same within the next 12 months. This, according to a survey conducted by Scene 7 of 335 retailers, manufacturers, agencies, and high-tech companies that sell products or services online.



The most popular Web 2.0 features sites plan to deploy this year include:
-Alternate views
-User ratings, rankings, and comments
-Videos - merchandising, advertising, and demonstration
-Blogs
-360-degree spin
-Interactive catalogs & circulars
-Product tours & integrated views
-Personalized messaging throughout the site
-Quick looks & rollover views
-Personalized stores (with My Account, profile, favorites)
-Zoom
-user-generated visual content
-RSS

And of these Web 2.0 features, the ones deemed most effective are:
-Alternate Views
-Zoom
-Personalized Stores (My Account, Profile, Favorites)
-Microsites
-360 spin

Impact of the W3C's HTML 5 On The Future of Web Content

The W3C has announced the publishing of an early draft of HTML 5. As stated, this revision of the web markup language is intended to be the open, royalty-free specification for rich web content and web apps.

"HTML is of course a very important standard," said Tim Berners-Lee, author of the first version of HTML and W3C Director. "I am glad to see that the community of developers, including browser vendors, is working together to create the best possible path for the Web."

The previous version, HTML 4, was first published some time back in Dec. 1997. The new iteration of HTML is in response to the evolution of the web from static pages to rich media communities with user participation and dynamic improvements to meet users' needs. Technologies such as Ajax have created the need to create interoperable web apps across desktop and mobile platforms.

Some of the new features in HTML 5 are:

• Backwards compatible. HTML 5 is defined in a way that it is backwards compatible with the way user agents handle deployed content.


• Syntax. HTML 5 language has a 'custom' HTML syntax that is compatible with HTML 4 and XHTML1 docs. XML syntax can also be used for HTML 5.


• Character encoding. <meta charset="UTF-8"> could be used to specify the UTF-8 encoding in place of <meta equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">


• Doctype declaration. HTML 5 requires a doctype declaration of <!DOCTYPE html> to ensure that the browser renders the page in standards mode.


• New elements. There are new elements such as 'article' which represents an independent piece of content of a document, such as a blog entry or newspaper article; and 'audio' and 'video' for multimedia content.


• APIs. HTML 5 has a number of APIs that help in creating web apps such as one that enables offline web apps and another for 2D drawing.

While there are some new elements and attributes, there are also some that have been changed like the a element without an href attribute now represents a 'placeholder link'. And there are some elements like center and font that are now absent in HTML 5 because their effect is purely presentational and better handled by CSS. Frame elements are not in HTML 5 because they negatively affect usability and accessibility.

Web 2.0 Conference Photos

Here are the photos for the Web 2.0 Conference & Expo on Jan. 29, 2008.


View all photos >>

Web 2.0 Website Award Winners

Congratulations to the winners of the Web 2.0 Website Awards. The awards were presented at the Web 2.0 Conference & Expo on Tuesday, Jan. 29.


Best Online Community Website - Craigslist
Accepted by: Craig Newmark, Founder


Best Web 2.0 Apps - Zoho
Accepted by: Raju Vegesna, Founder


Best Emerging Social Networking Site - Socializr
Accepted by: Jonathan Abrams, Founder


Best Politicking Website - BarackObama.com
Accepted by: Sam Perry, Campaign Representative

Web 2.0 Conference Raffle Prize Winners

Many thanks to Expo companies Mzinga and BayArea Internet for providing raffle prizes at the Web 2.0 Conference & Expo last Tuesday. The winners of the prizes were as follows:


Kindle Winner, Dan Olsen, with Mzinga Team; iPhone Winner with BayArea Internet Rep

Web 2.0 Conference Wrap-Up

The WebGuild Web 2.0 Conference & Expo was a great success! The Conference was on Wednesday and had about 1,000 registered attendees. Thank you very much to everyone who contributed to making it a success - thank you to the Keynotes Craig Newmark, Founder of Craigslist and Gil Penchina, CEO of Wikia, all the very knowledgeable and insightful speakers, sponsors, exhibitors, and attendees. The feedback we've received has been fantastic. Photos and videos will be posted shortly.

The day started off with introductory remarks from Daya Baran, President of WebGuild, who noted that Web 2.0 is representative of many things including free or almost free, open, accessible, community, social, collaboration, sharing, and innovation and that these are the elements we've strived to stay true to in bringing you this Conference and that the Conference is about knowledge sharing and community.

Opening Keynote, Gil Penchina, CEO of Wikia was fantastic. He talked about Wikia's wiki communities including the most famous of them all, Wikipedia, and about the newly launched Wikia Search, a community-driven search engine. Craig Newmark, Founder of Craigslist was a knockout and his session was very informative and entertaining. He was very candid about Craigslist's rise, the site's very un-Web 2.0 design, his view on advertising, eBay's stake, and his role as Customer Service Rep.

Many of the breakout sessions such as Designing For Users, Usability 2.0, Designing the Mobile Web, Web Marketing, Web Dev, and others were standing room only. The User Revolution session where we turned the tables and interviewed actual users and members of the Web 2.0 generation in person was very insightful and interesting.

Winners of the Web 2.0 Website Awards were as follows: Craigslist for Best Online Community Website, Best Web 2.0 Apps went to Zoho, Best Emerging Social Networking Site went to Socializr, and BarackObama.com for Best Politicking Website (Barack was not available to accept in person but a rep from his campaign did).

Win an iPhone!

There are only 4 days remaining until the WebGuild Web 2.0 Conference & Expo on Tuesday, January 29, 2008.

Visit the Bay Area Internet Solutions (BAIS, Inc.) booth, proud sponsor of the Web 2.0 Conference & Expo, to check out their Web 2.0 specific promotions and to enter for a chance to win an iPhone! The winner will be announced at the event.

Digg Makes Well Intentioned Changes But More Needs To Be Done

Today came a post in Kevin Rose's blog notifying users of Digg's change in its algorithm. The main change is that it will now take into account voting patterns and will promote stories to the main page (a really valuable web real estate) depending on "diversity of voters who have voted for the story". What this essentially means is that, firstly, stories will take longer time or more Diggs to make it to the front page. For instance, a few days ago stories with a Digg count of 60-70 often made it to the front page while there were instances of stories with 145 Diggs still present in the upcoming section. Secondly, and more importantly, it is an effort on the part of Digg to lessen the influence of top diggers in its community who presently contribute at least 10% of articles that make it to main page of Digg. Each of the top users have a fan following on Digg and their stories automatically get 70-80 diggs and they receive a boost over new joinees in terms of stories they want to submit. This change aims to make Digg a level playing field for old powerful users and new users.

This step of course hasn't gone well with top users with many crying foul over how this algorithm change suggests that top digg users are gaming digg. In the words of Derek, a power user on digg:

"I was quite surprised by Kevin's announcement. Personally I thought all the controversy was a bunch of hot air. It all started because a user by the name of digitalgopher stayed home sick from work a couple days ago and spent the day submitting even more awesome content to Digg then usual. Naturally, this resulted in a lot more of his stories being promoted to the front page than usual that day. This caused a couple of users to panic and before you know it we have people calling for the heads of the top 100 users."

And obviously top users are upset, since this algorithm directly hits on their well earned reputation and fan following. Also, it is taking longer for stories to make it to main page which make them cry about good missed content. Visit this site and you will notice concerns that many people have with digg and which has been inflated with algorithm changes. The situation went so bad that Kevin and Jay, its founders had to talk to top digg users in an attempt to quell their fears. Note that its users have already been upset with digg about issues like banning of accounts without any reason and digg not replying to mails that are sent to them.

However, I think that in one respect that what Digg really needs to change is in terms of transparency. Users want to know if there is a feature called "Auto-Bury List" in digg which automatically buries stories that belong to particular URLs. Kevin and Jay have mainly avoided this question till now. Also in question are digg editors who scan stories and bury which seems inappropriate to them. These features are not necesserily negative, but the problem is the lack of transparency and digg users being kept out of loop. Digg should remember that many users submit stories to digg because they feel themselves to be part of the digg community as contributors. If they are kept out of the loop and their account banned due to TOS violation without giving any reason/warning to them, these users will tend to go look for other options. I had noted in an article about top social media sites that many digg users have left to join mixx, another social voting site with richer facilities than digg. What digg must remember that its value lies only in its community of contributors and thus be nicer and open with them. Many of the users there contribute because they love digg and digg should also love them back so that good stories keep coming in.

Netvibes Ginger Beta Announced

I recently met Tariq Krim, Netvibes Founder and CEO. The company has just come out with the next gen of their personalized homepage Netvibes Ginger. This is a private beta release of the service; general availability for all users is expected in mid-Feb.

As described on the site, with the beta, users can "create and personalize a netvibes Universe page just for yourself or publish one for your friends, family, everyone! A Universe is your very own personal dashboard that's updated live directly from all your favorite Web services (email, Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, widgets) and media content (blogs, podcasts, video). Everything you enjoy on the Web, available at a glance, all in one place — spend less time surfing and logging in from site to site and more time enjoying your web, your way."

Top 5 Social Media Sites

Here are a list of the top 5 social media sites as I see it and why.



Digg: We all know Digg, one of the most popular social news sites. It is also the first of its kind and has many loyal users who are working on the backend of Digg to bring in news to the homepage of Digg, where most people arrive. One can expect to find funny and interesting videos and images with stories from popular blogs on Digg. Kevin Rose, Founder of Digg, was looking for $300 million buyout of Digg, but as I had noted, it seems to be pretty difficult.

Reddit: While Digg started by centering on tech news and then expanding its domain, on Reddit it's mainly the political news that rule the roost. With a much simpler interface - in fact, too simple, I think it survives because it serves a niche.

Newsvine: This site has a bit more of a traditional look with its content being not wholly user contributed but also automatically picked from sources like Associated Press, ESPN, New Scientist, etc. Of course, users can submit their stories too, but self promotion there is heavily frowned upon!!! Its interface and look and feel though is much admired.

Mixx: Now, this site is said to have a future. Though presently, a small but active community, it has mainly received good reviews. Recently, it introduced features for private or public groups inside its community which basically did away with the need for Digg clones. Another reason behind the rise of Mixx was that it got be an alternate site for Digg refugees, people who were banned from Digg or frustrated because of the untransparent way in which Digg functions. What I am referring to, is buries of certain stories and account bans that happen on Digg without giving a clear reason and being unresponsive to their claims. Many of these users have moved over to Mixx as can be seen by Digg related stories which often make it to their homepage :).

Propeller: This site was touted to be the one among many Digg clones that were present but has not really lived up to its initial publicity. Even though it has grown slowly, I am waiting to see what is unique thing they will try to do or to find a niche that would bolster their growth.

The Problem of Monetizing Twitter

Ok, we know that Twitter has been revolutionary and its growth has been exponential like a dream Web 2.0 app with its unique idea of restricting message length and centering them around the question "What are you doing?". Also, now that they have a nicely working (though sometimes a bit shaky) platform with useful third party apps, I am sure they are looking at some way to monetize it. But how do you monetize it? For instance, putting up advertisments in their empty space on the right is an option. However, to this straightforward approach therein lies a problem, as I noted before too. People on a Twitter page would be looking for info on what their friends are doing and not interested in related content that is ads. So, even though simple ads would work, they won't be too profitable. To think about this problem, we need to consider that what are the assets of Twitter. The assets, of value, presently is the technology or their platform and users who are using it. So, monetizing that has to be done using these assets.

Users send and receive twits via mobile phones or the Twitter interface. So, it would be a good idea to send like every 10th-20th, some nth twit a targeted advertisment. Users can receive them as SMS on their mobiles. These advertisments would be contextual or targeted i.e. based on twits that are generated by that particular user. In essence, it is similar to how Facebook has placed advertisments in feeds of friends that each user receives. These ads are where twitter sends ads to users. There can, however, be a similar model where advertisers are treated as users. Then, behind the screen, users interested in a particular area will be made follower of these advertisers thus receiving twits from them. Another similar model is where advertisers are charged in the order of, for instance $5, for sending a message to some thousand users. Note that here all that is proposed is sending advertising twits to users.

Another way is that they offer their technology to businesses which have a need for sending messages. For instance, providing the infrastructure when businesses and companies need to send updates like appointments over a secure channel. Or pages like Companies'/Bands' blogs where updates about their products/services are put up and people can follow them. That is, charging for micro-blogs. Now, as posted here, Evan Williams, Twitter founder says:

"Two more-straightforward ideas:1) Ads on the site. We have a little AdSense on there now, but we haven't really tried. As the traffic grows, some tasteful sponsorships might be sellable. 2) Charging companies who are using it for marketing or other commercial purposes. If an organization finds Twitter to be a valuable communication tool with their customers/constituents/etc -- especially if we're sending lots of SMS's for them, which cost us money -- it seems viable to make an offering around that."

People are thinking about viable and effective advertising models for Web 2.0 websites/social services. The same problem is faced by Facebook and it would be interesting to see which generic approach succeeds.

Image Source: Ambermac

Google - Always The Scraper, Never The Scrapee

The recent Robert Scoble/Facebook Kerfuffle was widely reported by Kara Swisher of the WSJ and by Nick Carr of RoughType. The flap had to do with the ability of a Facebook user to synchronize his contact data with the Plaxo contact manager.

For this "crime," Scoble was banned from Facebook (and then reinstated later after much wailing and gnashing of teeth). This is all the more interesting because Facebook welcomes with open arms a one-way import of contact data from gmail and Outlook. As I wrote on my Keeneview Blog, the result is that Facebook is becoming the roach motel of social networks.

Facebook is simply following the gameplan laid out by Google - always be the scraper, never be the scraper. Google - which owes its $200B+ market cap to its ability to scrape information from other web sites - goes to great lengths to avoid being scraped.

There are numerous reports of Google's equivalent to the Microsoft blue screen of death for example, for example here and here. More importantly, Google has permanently banned IP addresses from Web 2.0 sites like dapper and openkapow (full disclosure, I am on the board of Kapow).

Thus Google, the poster child of all things Web 2.0, makes it impossible for third parties to build mashups that take advantage of Google functionality. Doesn't that seem awfully Web 1.0 of them?

The Machiavellian lesson of Web 2.0 is clear - always be the scraper, never be the scraper.

SOLD OUT!

Premier Expo Passes for the upcoming Web 2.0 Conference & Expo are SOLD OUT! Early bird registration ends today, December 31 ($199 for Members and $299 for Non-Members). Starting Jan. 1, regular registration pricing will be in effect ($299 for Members and $399 for Non-Members). FREE Expo Only passes are still available but we will need to cut those off at some point. Hope to see you there. Don't miss it. Register here.

Top 10 Videos Of The Year

Here are the top ten WebGuild videos of 2007.


1. Usability 2.0 - Google, Yahoo, and Netflix


2. Web 2.0 2006 - AJAX: Creating a Rich User Experiences


3. Web 2.0 2006 - Keynote: Marissa Mayer, VP, User Experience & Search Products, Google


4. Web 2.0 2006 - Keynote: Ram Shriram, Founding Member, Google & Safa Rashtchy, Managing Director, Piper Jaffray


5. Web 2.0 2006 - Ad Trends


6. Searchnomics 2007 - Keynote: Marissa Mayer, VP, User Experience & Search Products, Google


7. Future of Online Advertising


8. Next Generation of Social Networking


9. Searchnomics 2007 - Keynote: Bill Tancer, General Manager, Global Research, Hitwise


10. OpenSocial

View more videos.

Top Blog Posts of 2007

Here are some of the most popular posts on the blog based on readership in 2007.

Facebook Is Trapped

10 Reasons Microsoft Fired CIO

Steve Ballmer On Google's Rising Power

Building brick buildings with steel and other misuses of Ajax

Sex Sells – In Enterprise Software Too!

A Comparison of Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft's Indexes

Google's Constitutional Amendment: The Right to Rank as they see fit

Google Adsense God Says Goodbye

Cisco Out To Lunch on Social Networking

Five Usability Challenges of Web-Based Applications

Another Ignoramus For Ajax

The World Obsessed With Google

30 Usability Issues To Be Aware Of

Portability of Applications and Widgets

13 Ways To Power Search Using Google

Out Googled Microsoft & Facebook Team Up To Pull Stunt

Demystifying The Social Graph

Web Strategy: How to Evolve Your Irrelevant Corporate Website

Facebook Ads May Be Illegal & Cost Billions

Google To Bid On Wireless Spectrum

What CIOs Think About Web 2.0

Google Announces Fastest Growing Search Terms

Interview with Marissa Mayer, VP, at Google

Internet TV Site Shuts Down Aftering Blowing US$80M

Bad Search Ideas And People Backing Them

Redefining ROI

Facebook: Stop Invading My Privacy

Virtual Marketing is a Reality!

The GPhone Is Here Already

Facebook Ruins Christmas

Blogging for Favorability

Google Gadgetizing the Web

Top Trends in Corporate 2.0 Sites

Another Googler Gone - Google Luck!

Vote for Cool Software

Promote Your Website For $1 A Month

Marketing with Facebook

Optimizing Keywords For Content

Facebook Beacon Woes Mounting

Google Enabling Twice the Links Into Sites

Local Search, Review & Listing Vertical Challenging

Designing for Speed

Yahoo's Casualties in Search War

In-Flight Email Now Available

Social Networks Going Corporate

Come Celebrate The End of Web 2.0

Web Offers Exclusive Smoking Zone

There is virtually nothing you can't do online and now that even includes taking a cyber puff. While patrons of French bars, restaurants, and nightclubs may no longer be able to smoke in these establishments come Jan. 1, smokers can now get their smoke-on online. Complete with entertaining videos, support group, and information, European tobacconeer, Altadis, has created a social networking site called Le Lab. But don't get your smoking jacket on just yet, Le Lab is an internal only website to rally the company's brand managers in the face of France's increased smoking ban.

Web 2.0 Versus Desktop Office Suites

In a survey of U.S. PC users who were asked if they had heard about online, browser-based office productivity applications, it turns out that 73% had never heard of them. The remainder had heard of online office tools such as Google Docs & Spreadsheets, gOffice which allows you to create Word docs on your iPhone, Zoho, etc. and tried them.

Five Days Remaining for Early Bird Registration

Early bird registration for the upcoming Web 2.0 Conference & Expo ends in 5 days on December 31st, 2007. The cost is $199 for members, $299 for non-members, and Expo Only passes are FREE. On Jan 1, ticket prices will go up. Don't miss your chance to take advantage of this offer and to attend this cutting-edge Conference. Register here.

Simple Web 2.0 Guideline: Be Like Flickr

Flickr has been my favorite Web 2.0 application for some time, and I think it's for a very good reason: Flickr is a fundamentally enabling application. Initially, I just used the (superb) photo uploader to send all my vacation and family pix online for easy storage. That soon evolved into better labelling, categorizing, and searching for photos, as well as the ability to share them with friends and family, even restricting access as needed. Flickr makes all this fairly easy, and as such sets what I'd say is *the* critical Web 2.0 guideline - make it simple!

My favorite feature of Flickr has come about fairly recently. It is the ability to connect your blog to Flickr and then quickly post Flickr photos to your blog along with a blog post for the photo that you can write from within Flickr - i.e. you don't have to do a separate blog logon and blogging session to get the job done. This really rocks because, again, it is *simple*. Sure, it's not a big deal to copy images and upload them separately to blogs, but I think with each step comes a cost in terms of your time and more importantly your motivation to get the job done.

Flickr makes it almost seamless to upload, categorize, and blog an image in the matter of a few minutes. That's beautiful, and that is a Web 2.0 standard I'd love to see everywhere.

Limited Spots Remaining for Web 2.0 Conference Expo & Showcase

The WebGuild's Web 2.0 Conference & Expo is coming up on January 29. The conference focuses on how to apply Web 2.0 technologies to business with reps from more than 50 leading companies in attendance.

If your company would like to participate in the Conference, here are three ways to do that:
1) Panels - speaking (limited spots). Selected companies will be paired with an industry giant in their respective space. No cost to participate.
2) Showcase companies (limited spots) - each company gets 10 mins - 5 to present & 5 for Q&A. No cost to participate.
3) Expo - $2500, includes table, electricity, internet access, free to distribute material.

Why would you want to showcase your company?
-Expected audience size: 1000
-20 big time VCs already signed up (VCs focused on web companies) and more coming
-Opportunity to get in front of a highly targeted group of web professionals

Nokia Attempts To Define Web 2.0

Here is yet another company's attempt at defining Web 2.0 for us. This one comes complements of Nokia.

Why Apple Is An "A" Player

I was at an Apple store yesterday - this one was newly refurbished - and was struck by how kool and high tech it is. The store is kinda easy on the eye, open, and new-age design much like Apple products (iPhone, Mac, iPod, etc.). Hit the closest available Mac to surf online - the graphical picture quality is next to none. And, if you have some, get your kids started early by dropping them off at the kiddie Mac play area complete with miniature sized everything. There are built-in plasmas on the wall telling you who is the next customer being served and offering up tips on how to use your Apple products along with definitions of terms like Wi-Fi and bandwidth, etc. There are store clerks everywhere. I made the mistake of pausing a few times and was instantly approached each time by a clerk offering their assistance. No need to checkout your purchases at the cashier, clerks on the floor come out-fitted with electronic POS devices. Got a Mac because it looks cool but have no idea how to use it, a friend of mine mentioned he was getting his friend a one- to two-hour lesson for Christmas with an in-store Apple "genius". Ok, I wouldn't consider myself a die-hard Apple fan - I have a Mac collecting dust - but I do like Apple products and their product and UI designs and experience (on- and offline) are good. Not perfect but good. Where else can you get this?!

The Apple Online Store is equally cutting-edge. The UI is clean, clear, streamlined, and seemingly simple. It is Web 2.0-esque with the use of gradients and radial-edged corners. It is wide-screen, utilizes a lot of white, displays a lot of content which is well organized and clearly labeled. The scale of images is not overly large or small. The online store site is clearly identified at the top left with a store-specific search (separate from the general site search), contact tel, and online chat.

The company has had a stellar year and with their recent release of Mac OS X Leopard, they sold 2 million copies in the first weekend. Fresh on the rumor circuit is that Apple has sold nearly 5 million iPhones since its debut in June, half of their '07 and '08 goal. Apple is also currently embroiled in a controversial case against Harvard student, Nicholas M. Ciarelli's web site, Think Secret, which reports on leaked insider info about Apple's product plans. They have reportedly come to an undisclosed settlement which, in essence, means the site will be shut down. Nonetheless, they keep pushing the edge on product and UI designs and I look forward to what's to come from them in the new year.

Marketing with Widgets

It’s raining widgets! But we knew that already. They have taken over Facebook, are being adopted by Facebook’s competitors, and now media companies are catching on and starting to use them as ads known as Google Gadgets. A few months ago I posted some ideas and examples and even in just a few months the widgets have advanced and are being used in even more creative ways so I'd like to add to that original list with by expanding on the idea of a microsite widget.

Like the Google Gadget examples this type of implementation can go a long way beyond just advertising. I see this particularly useful for large websites where you can cross promote sections of your website. For example you can create a microsite of your products area and place it on the solutions area of your site. A product widget may include product shots, product datasheets, customer testimonial videos and news or reviews about the product. Mash it! You can also mashup the idea of a widget with an online game and include a game in the widget. This enhances the experience of your user who will not have to toggle back and forth between different sections of your site while at the same time making your site more interactive. Partner or office locators are other examples where this would be valuable.

Assuming you include an embed code in your creation, you can then leverage this same widget in your Social Media Release. Publishers and bloggers are then equipped with an easy way to enhance their story with an interactive widget. Partners and resellers who also promote your products can easily use the embed code to include the widget on your site.

Frequently Asked Questions

• Can you track it? Yes, it is hosted on your site so you can track impressions, interactions and embeds.
• Can you update it? Again since it's hosted on your site when you update the content it is broadcasted to all of the sites that have picked up the widget.
• Is it proven? No, it's new - there is little data to say the people prefer widget over traditional approaches but there's certainly a lot of buzz around widgets and there are always bigger returns for first movers. Go out on a limb in 2008 and see what happens!

Have You Googled Yourself...Lately?

We are all guilty of it. Many of us have Googled ourselves at some point or the other. Employers are Googling candidates as part of their standard background check on potential hires. And, according to a research study (PDF) by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, 47 percent of Internet users have searched for themselves through Google, up from 22 percent in 2002. Younger users tend to self-search more and men and women search equally for info on themselves. Three percent search regularly, 22% once in awhile, and 74% once or twice.

It is not surprising that there would be a ton of information on people considering the onslaught of Web 2.0 tools that enable and facilitate user generated content and overall information sharing such as blogs, vblogs, photo blogs, photo sharing sites, videos, social networks, lifecasting sites like Twitter, etc. Eighty-two percent of adult online users maintain a public profile compared to 77% of teens. Sixty percent of internet users are not worried about how much information is available about them online but most people are aware of their digital footprint especially those with the highest educational levels. Most people search for the contact information of others online and 7% of those who have searched for information on key people in their lives do so regularly.

Cisco Out To Lunch on Social Networking

Cisco’s social networking strategy is to help media companies connect with their customers. Cisco’s offerings will deliver multimedia content to online communities, help visitors find content through a recommendation and relevance engine that looks at a user's activity patterns and makes personalized suggestions, said Dan Scheinman, SVP Media Solutions. The strategy is predicated on the notion that due to information explosion:

1) Users’ often don't even know what they're looking for;

2) Finding anything in this world of infinite information is really going to be tricky; and

3) Cisco's network expertise and recent social-networking acquisitions uniquely equip it to solve this set of problems.

"We've become the only company that can do all of these three things together," Scheinman said.

Users’ often don't even know what they're looking for. Oh really! Do the millions of users on social networking sites not EVEN know what they want? Is that why they are spending so much time on social networks - because they don’t know what they want?

Users are finding it tricky to find content. Has Dan Scheinman not heard of Google? If not, let me quickly explain. Google is a web site where you can go and enter your search query, click the video link, and find exactly the video you are looking for. It will find the content you are looking for regardless of where it resides. The content does not have to be on your web site.

Cisco is the only company that can do all of these three things together. Wow! Have you NOT heard of YouTube? They do that and more, and they do it for free. Cisco recently acquired Five Across and Tribe.net, both dogs in the social media space. Five Across, was a blogging site founded by folks that did not blog but were looking to make a quick buck. Tribe.net was a site for burning man fans with good intentions but backed by evil doers (Mayfield) looking to make a quick buck. The evil doers finally gave up on the site after talks with NBC failed and an acquisition bid by burning man fans fell through. Finally, Cisco revealed that it had acquired the site for its cutting edge technology such as photo uploading and inviting friends.

If you are responsible for social media strategy for a major corporate web site or a small internet community you can save yourself a lot of money, time, and frustration by simply using YouTube. It is free and easy to use. You can easily upload your videos, integrate them into your web site, track subscriptions, get viewer analytics, and more. If you want to customize it, you can use their API and if you want to customize further, you can use their YouTube Director which has many more options for professional users such as logo customization and scheduling show times etc. In fact, UC Berkeley uses this service.

This is in no way an endorsement of YouTube's offering but information so that you don't end up blowing $250,000 when you can get the same thing for free.

Ruby On Rails 2.0 Launched

Ruby On Rails Version 2.0 was released on Friday. Rails or RoR is a free, open source application framework using Ruby programming language. It is aimed at increasing the speed and ease with which database-driven web sites can be created. Ok, I am not a hard-core programmer so I won't even begin to try to interpret the changes in v2 but here is a listing for those of you who can decode this:

• Multiple Controller View Paths - Rails now supports multiple view paths for each controller


• SOAP has been replaced with REST - SOAP is considered too complex and RoR is more focused on building REST-ful applications


• Improved Security features - to protect against phishing with provisions to guard against cross-site request forgery (CRSF) intrusions and cross-site forgery (XSF) attacks. Improved testing support and backing for Atom feeds critical to application updates


• ActiveResource feature added - which encapsulates web services and makes them as easy to use as databases. This is similar to the ActiveRecord feature for encapsulating database calls in Rails

Download here.

Startups - Revolution Or Evolution?

Rumors of "Bubble 2.0" are running rampant. Many relatively new startups bite the dust. Other new startups hit the jackpot. What determines the success or failure of a technology company?

Today at TechCrunch there is a very thoughtful post by Mike Arrington about pulling the plug on one of his own startups - Edgeio. Here is somebody who has seen more Silicon Valley startup successes and failures than anybody, who has the best connections you can hope for in the valley, and had a brilliant technical team and great company advisors. Yet the company still failed.

My working hypothesis is that startups follow more along the path of biological evolution than along some easily predictable business paradigm. Evolution works *away from failure* rather than working *towards success*. Most biological species - historically over 99% - fail and become extinct. In the same way we should expect most startups to fail. Not so much because they did anything wrong, but because they simply could not work away from failure fast enough to keep afloat.

Seven New Web Startups From Amazon's Contest

The Amazon startup contest has video profiles of the seven finalists in their web company contest that helped showcase users of Amazon Web Services (AWS), a very robust technology platform using Amazon's substantial infrastructure.

Jeff Barr, Amazon's great tech evangelist, noted the finalists on Amazon’s blog as well.

These look like some really interesting companies. One is measuring brain networking, another is providing 19 usability testing (this is brilliant for the small website market!) One is optimizing PPC campaigns (hmmm - but won’t Google analytics do that extremely well?)

Come Celebrate The End of Web 2.0

Come celebrate the end of Web 2.0 at the Web 2.0 Conference & Expo on January 29, 2008. Meet and mingle with the who's who of the web and usher in The New Web.

Live Journal Sold

LiveJournal, the online blogging platform owned by Six Apart which also owns Typepad, Moveable Type and Vox, has sold LiveJournal to Russian online media company, SUP, founded in 2006. The financial terms of the sale have not been made public.

LiveJournal, which has been in existence since 1999, was started by Brad Fitzpatrick who went on to join Google as its social networking guru. It claims to have 14 million users and 18 million unique visitors a month, the majority of users are 15 to 22 years old and mostly female, and it is open source. The WebGuild featured Ben and Mena Trott, co-founders of SixApart, which acquired LiveJournal in January 2005, as speakers back in April 2004 to talk about blogging and their experiences in starting SixApart.

I know that some Harvard classes use LiveJournal mostly because its free (but there is a paid component to it as well) and I wouldn't be surprised if other academia do as well. LiveJournal.com also "supports the OpenID distributed identity system, letting you bring your LiveJournal.com identity to other sites, and letting non-LiveJournal.com users bring their identity here". This is something another free blogging software, Blogger, is also moving towards this with its latest announcement that it is adding OpenID commenting where users can sign in using their LiveJournal identity.

Portability of Applications and Widgets

Talk about portable widgets is not new. After all, 2007 has been proclaimed "Year of the Widget" by Newsweek. Though what I intend to discuss here is more about portability aspects and efforts in this direction rather than about widgets themselves. One of the early entrants in the market was Knofabulator (remember anyone?) which was bought by Yahoo. Then it seemed that they didn't know what to do with it and rebranded it but added no extra functionalities. A few days back it was in the news that Yahoo was releasing version 4.5 of its Konfabulator widget. The new version includes things like HTML and Flash support as well as a better user interface. However, Yahoo widgets are still only for desktops like Vista or XP. However, with Google releasing widgets for Mac a few days back, as well as Mac having widget support and Microsoft supporting widgets in Vista, Yahoo may find itself facing tough competition in a comparatively small market. Such widgets are important if we see them in the light of what is expected of applications in future. Application virtualization is gaining ground and also to be noted is the following vision of Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt.

Netvibes is a company which had initially announced a widget platform to make widgets that can work on Vista, Google, Mac, and even Yahoo widgets. It is called Universal Widget API and has the aim of "build your module once, deploy everywhere". Other companies in this space are Musestorm and Clearspring. Musestorm enables non-programmers to develop rich media widgets and Clearspring specializes in distributing widgets as well as analytics and API. The next step, of course, would be for these applications or widgets to run on mobile as well. For instance, I am sure Google's Android which is to be released next year with Open Handset Alliance will soon be integrated with their Web ToolKit so that applications can run over mobile, computer, and web. And won't that be cool?

Virtual Marketing is a Reality!

First it was virtual worlds, then virtual shopping now it's virtual workspaces! Qwaq, a company that creates 3D collaborative environments for meetings just grew their piggy bank by $7M to grow the company. Similar to Second Life it uses avatars so that each person has a virtual self - but with the focus on an actual 'workspace' there is a focus on sharing and collaborating office apps including Word, PowerPoint, Excel and others. Their initial customer list which includes BP, Intel and HP, is impressive and it validates the growing interest in virtual 3D worlds.

Virtual Worlds and 3D animations is also a growing trend in marketing. Here are a few things that I'm aware of:

3D Product Demos
Already companies like Cisco, Intel and even smaller companies like Mirapoint offer 3D product views. The virtual products are also starting to replace those that get shipped out for roadshows and tradeshows with the help of companies like Kaon Interactive which bring the interaction on a large touch screen so your products can be there without really being there.

3D Holographic Presentations
Musion Systems takes that a step further with true Star Trek 'Beam me up, Scotty' type of functionality where you can have a 3D holographic image of a person appear next to you on a live stage - even if that person is thousands of miles away!



Virtual World Events
A number of companies are hosting events on Second Life - here's a machinima video of a Second Life event I was involved with when we announced Cisco's Connected Life Contest winners.



Virtual Websites
Brookstone's 3D store is a good example of this for B2C situations. The Second Life sites like the one Microsoft has can also be considered a virtual website (or "island").

Berners-Lee calls for more WWW research

Tim Berners-Lee, the closest thing we have to an “inventor” of the web as we know it today, is calling for more integrated, broad studies of the internet rather than the mostly piecemeal academic work being done now.

He’s absolutely right of course. The internet is arguably the most profound change in human communication in history, and it’s just getting started. As social networking explodes into the dominant socializing mechanism for humans we are experiencing many new opportunities and many challenges, especially as the online environments create new relationships between people, generations, and cultures.

Universities would be well advised to heed this call from Berners-Lee and offer more “web centric” courses and degrees. More importantly academics should be spending a lot more time studying the complex, changing structure of the web. The technical aspects of the internet are fairly well studied in commercial circles. The sociological side is poorly and rarely studied in academia while the commercial sector is still struggling to understand the implications of the massive shift of human activity online.

Social Networks Hit Mainstream

Pepperidge Farm is moving the old-fashioned tea party for soccer moms to the online realm. The company has launched a social networking community artofthecookie to help women improve their social lives.

Other companies getting in on the action with their own social networking community sites are Jockey (jockeyunderwars.com), Dove (campaignforrealbeauty.com), Proctor & Gamble (beautifullengths.com), and Goldfish (fishfulthinking.com) aimed at building community and their respective brands amongst their target audiences.

First Impressions of Flock – The Social Web Browser

After reading about the Flock release in this blog post which nicely outlines the features, I downloaded the new ‘Social Web Browser’ to give it a test drive. Here are my first impressions:

The good: For a social media nut like myself this is pretty cool. Similar to Plaxo Pulse it aggregates all of my social networking profiles but they’ve done it in the browser – a tool that I use everyday. So I can stay connected to my social graph while doing my daily activities.

The bad: It feels busy. There’s a lot going and it’s a little distracting with all the buttons, options and links. I think it would appear less busy if they would have chosen muted colors for some of the buttons and links. Also they didn’t think about integrating other RSS readers, they only gave the option to use the browser as an aggregator. I’m pretty happy with Google Reader and would have liked to simply login and access all of my feeds through a widget or something.

Favorite Feature: The drag and drop web clipboard – this is a place to temporarily save images, links, and even text. Today I often use an email window to save things I want to go back to that day and this may serve as an interesting alternative.

The bottom line: I like it enough to keep using it –for now. I’m going to give it a week and see if I can make this an everyday browser or as Scott Gilbertson says, a ‘weekend browser’. It will all depend on if I actually use the ‘social’ features and if all of the options don’t distract me from doing my job.

If you find that you have a little extra time between holiday shopping this weekend I say give Flock a try and see what you think. If you’re already a user of Flock I’d love to hear about your experience with it.

Is Web 2.0 Killing the Killer App?

Web 2.0 definitely has buzz, but has it become so prolific that it’s now becoming the preferred way to communicate electronically? Blasphemy you say? Not according to this article from this dude at Slate, who says the younger generation (under 25) already thinks of email as too slow and detached to be used for most communication. Facebook, text messages, and instant messaging seem faster, more efficient, and let’s face it, more interactive than traditional email.

When telephones achieved critical mass, letter writing quickly lost the mantle of most efficient means of communication. It was still better for delivering messages, but that’s a subset of communication. When trying to get in touch with someone quickly and efficiently, the phone was faster, cheaper, and more convenient. Letter writing didn’t die, but the US Postal Service definitely took Alexander Graham Bell off their Christmas card list.

It’s possible we could be seeing a similar, albeit less dramatic, transition today from email to a more efficient means of communicating. It would be impossible to list all the benefits email has had on the way we work and socialize so I won’t even try. I will say though that due to our fondness for it, we probably overlook a few of the more obvious drawbacks:

• only about 10% of my email is relevant
• asynchronous communication by definition is clunky and unsatisfying for most uses
• I have multiple email accounts, and so does everybody else I know so getting someone a message is a bit of a guessing game

IMs and text messages can work for a lot of my basic daily communication without the drawbacks listed above. Is email still useful? Of course, but we’re coming to a point where it may be used more for message delivery versus actual communication, which in this case should be viewed as two different things.

What does that mean to marketers? It really depends on your audience and the nature of your campaign. Does your campaign rely on communicating with customers or delivering messages? Is your audience still relying on email for most of their communication or are they having conversations in social networks?

Web 2.0 to Boost Online Advertising

The Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) is reporting today that internet ad revenues has hit an all time high of $5.2 billion for Q307 and has been consistently setting new records each quarter of 2007. Revenues for Q1 was at $4.9 billion, and $5.1 billion in Q2. The IAB claims that this is attributed to both larger as well as smaller companies recognizing the role of digital marketing as pivotal to their overall marketing strategy.

The more interesting part of this report is their assertion that Web 2.0 promises to provide even more opportunities for marketers to leverage. New platforms emerging out of Web 2.0 are providing new and lucrative platforms for online marketers to tap into and monetize.

"The emergence of new platforms, including broadband video, rich Internet applications, mobile, and social media promise to deliver new benefits for consumers, and create exciting new venues for marketers to realize value in digital media."

Top Trends in Corporate 2.0 Sites

I've been scouring around quite a bit online to identify some of the top trends in corporate websites. These sites have traditionally been nothing more than brochure-ware displaying static content like mission statements, and product and contact info. In reality, not a whole lot has changed. While the Web has evolved at internet speed from the early days of Web 1.0 to 2.0, corporate sites have remained relatively the same and many are in danger of becoming relics of the past. We were going to have an event on "The New Corporate Website" which we decided to slate for another time in light of the OpenSocial phenom that came about.

So, what's the deal. Today's corporate website is still a sales and communication channel but not of the same manifestation as yesteryear's; the DNA of these sites have changed. There are a lot of Social Media and Web 2.0 components making their way to the corporate arena. Today's new corporate website is less static, stagnant, and one-dimensional.

Here are some of the trends I found:

• Widgetization of the web
  No suprise here. The corporate marketing-ites have jumped on this bandwagon and proven the Newsweek declaration that this is the "Year of the Widget" to be true. Although, I think this year was more about the hype and next year we will see more commercialization of widgets as more and more companies get caught up and the others push the marketing efforts on their initial adoption.


• Social networking cum customer networking
  It is built for customers, with customers. Live chatting has been around for a while for customer support but full-blown social networking sites have been created to serve customers better and to build and grow the network and community and utlimately, customer loyalty and goodwill. A good example is eBay's Neighborhoods.


• Blogs
  Blogs are being harnessed carefully and selectively. Not a lot of corporate blogs except for notable ones like Sun's CEO Jonathan Schwartz's Weblog which provides insight into the company and its products. The rarity of these blogs is mostly for fear of legal and market backlash, but a lot of companies have externally facing blogs by employees. The problem is that unless its the CEO or some high-profile employee or a sexy company, or if the blogs are not fully endorsed by the company and marketed and supported, they will flail.


• Rich Media Content
  Live or on-demand rich streaming media content with a real person demo'ing or talking about a new product or service offering. This is much preferred and more effective than just straight textual content. But keep it real. Too many companies still can't let go of the canned, highly produced videos. Customers don't want to see that either but the context is important. Use by product managers and for customer testimonials are great but how-to's are more valuable to customers. Some companies even have video on their homepage. Audio-only podcasts are also common but offer a different dimension to video.


• RSS
  RSS feeds that people can subscribe to to get the latest information delivered to them as it is available versus going to a site to find it. This is very uselful for alerts, breaking news, etc. for customers, partners, and financial community.

I didn't see the use of a lot of other Web 2.0-esque elements like wikis (probably better suited for extranets and intranets) and mashups on corporate sites. The web is a powerful tool and many companies are realizing that if they don't utilize their websites effectively, they won't be able to effectively go the distance. Clearly, there is still a ways to go.

What CIOs Think About Web 2.0

We put on a seminar yesterday at the Ritz Carlton in San Francisco entitled, The CIO Survival Guide for Web 2.0. The CIO panel included Jim Sutter, former CIO of Xerox, Lila Tretikov, CIO of SugarCRM, Max Rayner, CIO of TravelZoo, Steve Douty, President of BSG Applications and former CIO of Hotmail, Larry Singer, former CIO of the state of Georgia and Andrew Aitken, CEO of the Olliance Group.

The big take-away from the event was that Web 2.0 tools will help companies innovate more at the edge of their business while managing their IT infrastructure from the core.
I summarized the following points from the public comments and followup discussions with the CIOs:

• Need more rowers: when you're CIO, sometimes you feel like you have 49 guys bailing, 49 guys patching the boat and only 2 people rowing. What we hope for from Web 2.0 is tools that enable us to get more IT folks rowing. - Steve Douty


• I like to watch: Web 1.0 gave us better tools to observe our business, Web 2.0 will give us better tools to interact with and manage our business. - Jim Sutter


• Balance edge/core priorities: Web 2.0 will enable innovation at the edge of the corporation. The CIO's job is to provide core infrastructure that enables innovation at the edge and prevents unintended damage. - Larry Singer


• Web 2.0 is Consumer-driven: Web 2.0 in the enterprise is being driven by end-users who do things at home on consumer web sites and then come to work and expect their business applications to give them the same kinds of capabilities. - Lila Tretikov


• Revenge of the non-nerds: Web 2.0 will allow non-IT experts to contribute their creativity to the process of building business applications - Max Raynor


• Lower the cost of failure: The web is a massive Petri dish. Web 2.0 makes it possible to have lots of small application experiments running in the enterprise. - Steve Douty


• Encourage accidental collaboration: The internet is a platform that enables accidental collaboration. - Larry Singer

We also used this event to launch our new company name, WaveMaker Software. I wrote about our rationale for the name change and perspective on the enterprise Web 2.0 market under Ready to Make Waves.

CIOs see the value of new web technologies for driving positive change in their business. As Web 2.0 toolkits improve (I wrote about our role in helping commercialize Ajax and Dojo here), we will start to see these forward-looking CIO's predictions come true.

Update: Matt Asay had a great post on this same seminar on his CNet Open Road blog under the title, Any CIO Not Using Open Source Should Be Fired.

The Web Is Better When It's Social

Maka maka. It's official! Google's platform agnostic API OpenSocial is live. Per its Product Managers:

"OpenSocial is a set of common APIs that will work on many different social websites, including MySpace, Hi5, Ning, orkut, and LinkedIn, among others. In addition, this allows developers to learn one API, then write a social application for any of those sites. Learn once, write anywhere, if you will. And because it's built on web standards like HTML and JavaScript, developers don't have to learn a custom programming language." (like Facebook's proprietary ftml maybe?!)

"Perhaps most interestingly, we will see social capabilities move into new contexts. OpenSocial will also work in non-traditional social contexts, such as on Salesforce.com and Oracle. With a common set of APIs, it will be even easier to extend social functionality. Beyond the many fun and entertaining social applications we already have seen, we think we'll see a number of social applications emerge in business contexts."

The business applications and adaptations of this should very interesting.

Next Gen Social Networks

The video of the October event on the Next Generation of Social Networking featuring Socialzr, RockYou, and Appfuels is now available. If you missed the event or simply want a re-cap, check it out to hear what the panelists had to say on this hot topic.

Web Strategy: How to Evolve Your Irrelevant Corporate Website

Traditional Web Marketing needs to evolve, and this post intends to kick start the next generation.

What’s a corporate web site?
It’s the domain they use after every advertisement where you can learn more about a company, ya know it, anycompany.com.

But we’re tired of the corporate website and all it’s happy marketing speak, stock photos of smart looking dudes or minority women crowded around the computer raving about your product, the positive press release, the happy customer testimonials, the row of executive portraits, the donations your corporate made to disaster relief, the one-sided view never ends.

While some of your traffic may be going up on your website, it’s not indicative of how corporate websites are being used. Analytics don’t tell us why people go to your site, and it may not be for the reason you want them to.

[The corporate website is an unbelievable collection of hyperbole, artificial branding, and pro-corporate content. As a result, trusted decisions are being made on other locations on the internet]
Why is your corporate website irrelevant?

Marketing has shifted, it’s no longer on two domains
Many web marketers are under the impression that the battles are only fought within Google search results and on the corporate domain. In reality, marketing has spread to many other areas where conversations occur: social networks, rating sites, chat rooms, and even blogs. I dedicated a whole post to why marketing is not on two domains only.

Decisions are made before they go to the corporate website
Yesterday, at lunch with a college student, she told me that her peers get ideas about product decisions on consumer rating sites, and from their peers. They use instant messaging, facebook, (and other social networks) and rarely directly type in a domain name to corporate website. If this holds true, then it’s assumed that prospects make decisions on other websites BEFORE they come to the corporate website to get factual information.

Factual information
Legally, corporations need to disclose product details, this is a strong case for the use of the corporate websites. However in my continued conversation with the Generation Y, she continued to tell me that she used corporate websites to get core feature stats and pricing, but that’s after she made a decision based upon her peer feedback to visit the corporate site.

The future, and how to stay relevant:

Websites are created with customers
This is disruptive, but I predict that the most relevant future websites will have customers building websites alongside employees. The most effective websites will contain a balanced point of view of both the product team and customers –even if they have qualms with the product.

Unfiltered customer testimonials will appear
You’ll no longer only be the only one publishing to your website, customers, prospects, and other members of the community will have direct access to publish on your website. Sure, there will be controls to make sure the content is somewhat factual or reviewed, but it will be obvious to many that the only voice won’t be the marketing one.

Content will have both negative and positive views about your products
This one is hard to swallow, but how do you build the most trust? By being open, authentic, and transparent to the marketplace. We know from research that the highest degree of trust comes from those ‘like me’, a savvy marketer will allow content to appear from peers, customers, and the market. These will not always be a product rave, in fact it may be downright criticism, the goal? To take that feedback, and demonstrate in public how you will improve your offerings in plain view. Case study: Dell has done this with IdeaStorm.

Your website will be a Community Resource
This means that you’ll put your customers first, No Really, I mean it. This means providing analysis of not just yourself but to competitors as well, this means that you’ll link to competitors. Crazy? I did this myself at my previous role as a community manager, I created a wiki for customers that linked to competitors, and it made me more relevant.

[The corporate website of the future will be a credible source of opinion and fact, authored by both the corporation and community. The result? A true first-stop community resource where information flows for better products and services]

Outcomes
Customers will make your site the first place to go for information, trust will increase, you may be able to build better products and services with real-time customer feedback, and most importantly, you’ll be a community resource that will help you meet your customer needs faster.

Visualize
We’ll start to see customers help write the corporate newsletter, feeds pulling in industry blogs, media (audio and video) customers rating and ranking and voting for what features they want improved, product teams working directly with customers in real-time, and customers self-supporting each other.

Written by and reprinted with the permission of Jeremiah Owyang, Senior Analyst, Forrester Research

Next Generation Social Networking

Last Wednesday, the WebGuild held its monthly event on the "Next Generation of Social Networking" featuring Jonathan Abrams, Founder & CEO of Socializr & Freindster fame, Jia Shen, CTO of Rock You, and Sundeep Ahuja, Founder of Appfuels. It was a highly social event - well attended and high energy.

If you missed it, the video of this event will be available in about a week. View photos.

Google Gadgetizing the Web

Google Gadgets was the topic of discussion for Jeff Huber, VP of Engineering, at Google in a presentation at the Web 2.0 Summit. Jeff explained that gadgets are representative of the programmable web. Gadgets are being created using rss, html, flash, and css and that gadgets are open, easy, mashable, packable, portable, and embeddable. He went on to say that gadgets serve to disaggregate the web and are socially distributed.

There are 20,000 gadgets on over 100,000 sites and a billion are served each week via syndication. There are also gadgets being embedded in gadgets eg. Google Maps. According to Huber, "what rss did for content, gadgets are doing for apps. It is the power of the open platform and open distribution system that is responsible for growing gadgets versus as a company trying to do this. It is an open ecosystem that is democratic and self-sustaining. The platform is fast, open, and easy. The web is the platform."

Social Media is killing quality content. Do the info slaves need more food?

The news last month that Microsoft may wind up offering Facebook $500,000,000 for a 5% stake is great news … for the tiny number of Facebook insiders who stand to gain from this move which would effectively value the social media giant at about $10,000,000,000. However for the millions of Facebook folks who provide the content and faces that drive Facebook it means … um … more advertising.

Gee, thanks Facebook.

When the legions of "Information Serfs" wake up they may start to realize that we have got a potential crisis as small numbers of “info intermediators” like Google and Facebook scoop up the lion’s share of the online ocean of cash while the “info creators” are distinctly second class citizens in the big show. Small time web publishers and mom and pops are in this group. But so are all the major newspapers like the New York Times, Washington Post, and WSJ. Also most other print outlets who tend to make relatively little online despite offering much of the web’s best content to date, especially now that the foolish paywalls of some newspaper outlets like NYT are coming down. Having no paywall will allow them to make more, but it’s clear they are unlikely to make enough to keep all that high quality content coming.

Print and newspapers are hurting and that is going to continue. That’s OK as long as websites and blogs continue to provide great insight and breaking news, but it’s about time the big players in the online world start working *a lot harder* to feed the hands that are feeding them. It’s about time they realize that the best web ecosystem must encourage the production of high quality content as well as the valuable but mind-numbing data detritus left over from social networking gone wild.

Yes, it is true that revenue sharing programs like Google adsense give publishers a fair share of the revenues that come directly from activity at their websites. However most of Google’s money (and virtually all of Myspace and Facebook revenues), comes from advertising they run off their own sites - sites that benefit indirectly but dramatically from the oceans of content they feature, index, or otherwise mashup, clip, and snip. Sure the information intermediators should make *a lot* from categorizing *our content* so effectively, but should they make 100%? No, they should not.

One can make a good case that this feudal funding arrangement was fine when the big players turned around and did things with the big money that make the internet ecosystem thrive and grow in ways it could not without their involvement. But I think that argument was far more valid a few years ago than now.

What ideas are left in the dust as the Youtubes and Facebooks - built squarely on the shoulders of other people’s content - scoop up the super gigantic big money? It is not a problem that startups die - in fact it’s a good part of the ruthless evolution of technological things - but it’s problematic when the lion’s share of online resources from the work of so many are redistributed to so few. Not because this is “unfair”, but because this type of inequity does not lead to optimal system efficiency and growth.

Social media in all its various and sundry forms is a wonderful development. Finally we see clearly that people, not computers, will be at the heart of future online developments - probably for some time into the future. Facebook and it's users are now leading with big innovations in this area, though Alice at NYT thinks this could lead to unintended consequences.

To protect this new socially charged online environment from the ravages of our silly, stupid and prurient human interests we’ll need better incentives than the big players currently offer to quality content producers. Those incentives will ultimately shape the quality of online content for years to come.

Social Networks Going Corporate

For companies with the foresight, Web 2.0 is enabling the transformation of corporate web sites from stodgy old static brochure-ware sites to more dynamic and multi-dimensional sites. Corporate 2.0 sites are integrating social networks, social networking components, or creating separate social networking companion sites.

Old world companies like Cisco are trying to make a foray into this brave new world of social networking via their purchases of Tribe and Five Across. eBay has created its own social networking site called "Neighborhoods" to build a sense of community with users. Even Bank Of America jumped into the game with a social network for small business owners.

This can be a scary new world for old world companies relinquishing control of their carefully crafted images and opening themselves up to criticism from customers actually providing live feedback for the world to see. However, leveraging the social networking platform is a huge opportunity and if done well can yield trememdous benefits such as:
-realtime feedback from your customers. You definitely know what people think and feel, what works and what doesn't and can use it as an opportunity to improve your products and/or services and to correct any public relations issues.
-opportunity to build brand loyalty as customers will see that you value them, and to respond to their issues or concerns.
-opportunity to enable commerce. If customers are recommending your products/services then that can only serve to drive up sales.
-more content and more fluid, timely, user-generated content. Less expensive content for you to create.

HP Unlocks the Printable Web for Millions of Internet Users

HP has just announced that it will be making it easy for you to print your customized content from the web. This is part of HP's Print 2.0 Strategy to offer internet users new and enhanced printing options to control what they print and how they print it. HP has partnered with high traffic sites like Facebook, Flickr, Windows Live Spaces, and Disney.com to offer this improved print capability. HP plans to deliver this via Web 2.0 technologies such as those developed through an acquisition of web-based app, Tabblo, and others.

"People are frustrated with printing from the web – it’s often wasteful and rarely do the pages print with the information laid out on the page the way you want," said Vyomesh Joshi, executive vice president, Imaging and Printing Group, HP.

On Facebook, users can use a Graffiti widget to draw on or decorate their own and friend's profiles and print their real-world artwork. With Flickr, it's a similar feature. The HP technology will power a blog printing feature on Microsoft Live Spaces.

Redefining ROI

According Paul Dunay, "I" no longer stands for investment. He coined a new term, "Return on Influence". When it comes to Marketing 2.0 this exactly the kind of ROI that should be measured. Influence refers to the ability to indirectly control or affect the actions of other people or things.

The time we dedicate to blogs, forums and social networks allow companies to build a more personal relationship with the the customer. These interactions have a direct impact in the tonality and overall feeling of a brand.

However the question still lingers - how do you measure it? For this I turn to Jeremiah Owyang, the web strategist guru. Jeremiah talks about 'measuring engagement' which can be defined by "the level of authentic involvement, intensity, contribution and ownership."

Now consider a mashup of these concepts. The time we invest in conversation needs to result in "authentic involvement" from our customers - they have to spend time interacting with the brand. This involvement we get the more likely we are influencing the customer and therefore improving our ROI.

ABC Reshapes News for the Web

Interesting story out by the NY Times about how ABC is now tapping into a new frontier/platform of news syndication...the Web! They are now producing, an albeit short, 15-minute news webcast dubbed "World News" with a different style and approach suitable for the younger online audience they are hoping to capture. It is apparently decidedly less stuffy and scripted and more Web 2.0-esque including video blogs, personal essays, and interviews not dictated by TV time constraints. Based on the story, this foto does not appear to be representative of the style of the webcast and hopefully the tone is not like typical newscasts out there where they feign concern and do cheesy stories and bad reporting.

Webcast often features Mr. Gibson in the anchor chair, but the similarities end there: the segments can run long, and they purposely look raw and personal, as if they were made for MTV rather than ABC.

It is intended in part for people who view Web pages on iPods and cellphones, and ABC executives say they are deliberately aiming to please the 25- to 54-year-olds whom every news organization covets. "World News" reaches a tiny fraction of the broadcast audience — 4.5 million views and downloads a month, most of which come in the form of podcasts downloaded automatically by iTunes users.

It is currently not ad-supported so there are no noisy commercial interruptions, however, the podcast version is preempted with advertising. But it is also "competing with newspapers, radio and Web-based organizations" for ad dollars.

They are apparently the only ones doing this and have been for 1.5 years about. CBS and NBC offer only a re-packaged version of their regular news programs.
Read article.

Vote for Cool Software

That's what Intel wants you to do with the launch of their new website called CoolSW. They are using collective intelligence to help sift through the millions of software companies to find the best one. They've created a social ranking system that allows them to find what's "Cool." I have to admit the software that currently has the most votes in the 'digital home' category is pretty cool. It's a web service that allows people to draw floor plans online, or upload images of floor plans which are converted automatically into 3D Google Earth. Would they have found this company and the many others listed with the 90K+ employees they have? Maybe eventually but they've decided to take the shorter route and rely on anyone who wants to participate in helping them identify and rate cool technology.

This isn't a new concept, people have always gathered together to share information but the internet and the advancements of Web 2.0 allow us to share this information more freely. And those who have taken advantage of this have illustrated the powerful result:

• Google became the number one search engine by using 'PageRank' which uses the search behavior of millions of people to improve relevancy.
• Wikipedia has become the world's largest and arguably the most accurate encyclopedia.
• Innocentive opens up tough R&D problems for anyone to solve - since 2005, 58 of these tough problems have been solved by over 120,000 solvers.
• Cisco's Connected Life Contest resulted in over 600 technology ideas in 3-months that will be used to drive product strategy.

It has been proven that collective intelligence works and those who have jumped on the bandwagon have the competitive advantage. How have you seen 'the power of many' used successfully?

Designing for Speed

Speed is everything. Especially in the ultra competitive, information rich web environment where users are overloaded and are willing to allocate only so much time to your site. So, design for speedy websites. Speed of download of pages, speed of access to information, speed of execution of commerce, etc.. Speed speed speed! If you've got a high traffic or an e-commerce site, speed is especially important. So, notwithstanding Marion Jones' steroids, here are 10 tips to help your sites load like they're on steroids.

1. Keep it simple
In many ways, Google has mastered this...speed of execution in their business as well as sites. Lets face it, the Classic Google homepage in all its bareness is the Mario Andretti of the web. Fast and furious. Its easy to over-complicate things and get carried away with too many bells and whistles. An analogy I like to use with my designers, male and female alike, is the 'less is more' fashion analogy where you remove one accessory item before you leave the house. This can be applied to sites as well.

2. Optimize your code
Aim for a page size of 50-70KB including a full load of all code, images, and apps. There are several tools online that can help you calculate the size of your pages. High speed internet connections are commonplace today but depending on your target audience and their access point, be it dial-up hotel room access, T1-3 office connection, or mobile access, you will know their likely connection speed and can determine how long it takes to load a page.

3. Optimize your rich media files
Rich media files like Flash, video, images, etc., although key, can be death to page load if used incorrectly. Over-accessorizing a page with gratuitous images, for example, can be noisy as well as add unnecessary bytes to a page. Try preloading files so they are cached and load faster. It always kills me when I see these so-called design agencies with their all flash sites. Not only does that date them, it is clunky.

4. Minimize use of tables
Table based designs and too many nested tables add code to a page. Try using more CSS to layout your pages instead and use divs instead of tables where possible.

5. Use server side includes
Once SSI files like .asp and .php includes are called from the server, they are cached and, therefore, load faster on subsequent requests. SSIs also have the added benefit of facilitating easier and faster site updates.

6. Do use Ajax
Loading new pages slows you down especially if your page sizes are not up to snuff. Decrease calls to the server for page requests by using nifty web 2.0 technologies such as Ajax. Ajax uses javscripting which is client side scripting. Gmail and Google Maps are popular examples of Ajax implementations. Be sure to keep your js files external as they are cached by the browser. Too many scripts, however, and positioning in the context of the code (top or bottom) impact page loading performance.

7. Use Web 2.0 widgets/badges/gadgets wisely
Certain widgets have been known to slow down page loads. Flash widgets are expecially prone to this as are image serving widgets. Test them out before loading up.

8. Test test test
Do the old heuristic evaluation. Get out your stop watch, clear your cache, and type your website address into the address field of your browser and see how long it takes. Try it a few times and at different times of the day. For peak times when there are more people trying to access your site, load time is especially important. Depending on the purpose of your site, target audience, and who you ask, aim for a 3-5 second load time. Again, there are online tools for timing your site load.

9. Get fast servers
Make sure you have fast, dedicated servers. No need to expound on this hopefully.

10. Other
Here are some other guidelines from Yahoo as well: http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html.

Adobe's All A Buzz About Buzzword

The lines between web and desktop are being blurred even more in what can be dubbed WebTop. Adobe today announced, as part of its bid for all things Web 2.0, its planned acquisition of Virtual Ubiquity, the maker of the online word processor, Buzzword. In an official statement, the company said that the "acquisition furthers Adobe's commitment to foster a vibrant ecosystem for rich Internet application (RIA) development that delivers breakthrough experiences built on Adobe AIR."

Running on Adobe® AIR™, Buzzword offers users a hybrid online/offline experience and the ability to work with both hosted and local documents. The collaboration capabilities in Buzzword enable multiple authors to edit and comment on documents from anywhere, at anytime, while document creators can set permissions that virtually eliminate version control chaos. There are reported drawbacks such as speed and lack of link support (a big oops for anything claiming online capabilities).

Adobe also added a new free file sharing service to its online doc services codenamed "Share" intended to allows people to share, publish, and organize documents online. Developers can create mash-ups with their applications, including storing and accessing files, as well as creating thumbnails and Flash-based previews of documents. For more things Adobe, visit the Adobe Labs site.

How To Speed Up Your Web Site

In a recent book published by O'Reilly called High Performance Web Sites, author Steve Sounders, Chief Performance Yahoo!, outlines tips, tricks and best practices to increase the speed of your web site. He outlines 14 specific rules that will cut 20% to 25% off response time when users request a page. According to the author even highly optimized pages, such as Yahoo! Search and the Yahoo! Front Page, were able to benefit from these surprisingly simple performance guidelines.

The book explains how you can optimize the performance of the Ajax, CSS, JavaScript, Flash, and images that you've already built into your site -- adjustments that are critical for any rich web application. The book focuses heavily on the display time taken up on the browser side and by the communication between server and browser as opposed to focusing on tuning web servers, databases, and hardware.

Here are some of the tips and tricks;

* Make Fewer HTTP Requests

* Use a Content Delivery Network

* Add an Expires Header

* Gzip Components

* Put Stylesheets at the Top

* Put Scripts at the Bottom

* Avoid CSS Expressions

* Make JavaScript and CSS External

* Reduce DNS Lookups

* Minify JavaScript

* Avoid Redirects

* Remove Duplicates Scripts

* Configure ETags

* Make Ajax Cacheable

Another Ignoramus For Ajax

I recently posted an article entitled, Really Idiotic Approaches to RIA to point out how 1980s the proprietary Rich Internet Application solutions from Microsoft (Silverlight) and Adobe (Flex) are.

Not surprisingly, this elicited predictably troll-ish "contributions" in my comment section, including one which opened with "you are an ignoramus." After I had looked up ignoramus in the dictionary (no, it is not an absent-minded dinosaur), I thought a bit about how Ajax looks from troll-land.

The argument for Silverlight and Flex is that Ajax is bad because it is not cross browser. Let’s examine that for a second. Cross browser at this point is really shorthand for “runs the same on Firefox and Explorer.”

When we parse that a bit more, we find that many of the cross-browser problems come from Microsoft’s poor implementation of the standards. And hey, whadda you know, Microsoft benefits from its poor implementation by getting witless developers to adopt their proprietary, Microsoft-only solution as a reward for Microsoft’s poor implementation.

And if you feel that Microsoft should not be rewarded for this kind of behavior, but do not have the weight of the EU behind you to slap a $600M fine on them, you can always choose a different proprietary solution and get locked into Adobe forever.

So the argument against Ajax, if I understand it, is that this open-source thing is just a crock, that nobody will ever get the cross-platform right, and the sooner we all just capitulate and fold up our tents, the sooner the caps-lock trolls will leave us alone? I think I'd rather stay an ignoramus.

Social Network for Web Industry Launched

We are very excited at WebGuild to announce the launch of our Social Networking Community exclusively for Web Professionals.

It's free and allows you to connect with over 30,000 other web professionals.

Get Started! Complete profile Sign up for an account and add as much or as little information about your self. Join groups and submit and answer questions. Join groups in your subject area(s) of interest and get and share knowledge with peers via our online discussion board. Share and promote sites working on. Discover, submit, and rate sites you're working on or just love that you would like to share with the community. Invite and keep in touch with your network. Invite new and existing contacts into your network and communicate with them via our messaging tool. Post and find jobs. Post jobs and find your next gig!

As always, let us know how we can continue to better serve you and improve the services and features. Look forward to your comments, feedback, and suggestions.

Enjoy!

Who's afraid of Google?

The latest issue of The Economist has an article on the rising power of Google (NASQ: GOOG). The article makes the case that the internet giant is more like JP Morgan than Microsoft. The article is harsh at times as when quoting Eric Schmidt "Our goal is “not to make money”, as its boss, Eric Schmidt, puts it, but “to change the world”.

Google is the white knight that rescued silicon valley after the dot com bomb and prevented it from becoming death valley. Google ignited the next evolution of the web, made silicon valley the online advertising capital of the world, overnight, and has empowered millions by making information universally accessible and not the domain of a priviledged few. Yes, Google has changed the world. Click here for the article>>.

Google's Eric Schmidt Defines Web 3.0

Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt, was recently asked how he would define Web 3.0 and what Web 3.0 means to Google.

I am paraphrasing below so watch the video as well.

Web 2.0 is a different way of building applications using Ajax as the underlying technology.

Web 3.0 are applications that are pieced together which are relatively small, the data is in the cloud, apps can run on any device (PC or mobile), apps are very fast, very customizable, apps distributed virally by social networks and email, not store bought.

It's a very different application model from the mainframe era and PC industry, likely to be very very large, low barrier to entry, new generation of tools being introduced by Google and others make it relatively easy to do, solves a lot of problems, and works everywhere.

Interview with Chuck Villard, Developer, VeriSign

I recently interviewed Chuck Villard II, über Web Developer, at VeriSign whom I worked with on the re-design of the VeriSign.com homepage. Chuck and I have a healthy mutual respect and admiration for each other's expertise and crafts which makes for a highly synergistic relationship, crucial in any project, but especially so for a high-visibility project such as this. I thought it would be beneficial to share some of what went into this re-design from a development perspective, which some of you may find useful in your own re-designs. So here goes.

Q: What were some of your goals in the development of the page?

A: I would say my goals fit into two groups - team and personal. As a development team, we wanted to have a home page that grabbed the user's attention and presented them with content in a more attractive and interactive manner. We also wanted to be able to continue to present one unified home page globally, across all our sites.

Personally, I wanted to challenge myself to create a homepage that was cross-browser compatible and standards compliant, all while taking advantage of some of today’s hot topics like DHTML and CSS.

Q: What, if any, were some of the challenges you encountered with the development and why?

A: I think the biggest challenge was trying to create an interactive homepage in a content driven business. I think this actually tends to be the most challenging aspect of development on a regular basis. Our development team wants to be challenged and push our own limits, however, when content is king it can be quite difficult. I feel Web 2.0 practices are about finding a sweet spot. That spot where you can make an eye catching web page but still be able to speak to the customer and not distract them.

Q: The new home page is a deviation from the previous iteration of the page from both a Web 2.0 design as well as functionality perspective. Can you describe the Web 2.0 technologies you used and how?

A: As we were preparing for the home page project we talked about how to present the content and how we could come up with a sexier look. The page was created using XHTML for content and CSS for the presentation.

To keep the news headlines concise and clean we used a DHTML news ticker. Following along that line we used DHTML for a hover system that allows the user to view all of the products and services without taking up too much real estate. This also worked out excellently for SEO purposes.

We have a flash piece that tells our story, but our biggest change is the top level navigation. We are now using a DHTML hover menu system that gives users quicker access to the sub-level pages of content that they may be looking for.

Q: Standards based development practices has gotten a lot of web airtime recently. How did you incorporate coding best practices into your programming of this page?

A: It’s tough at times trying to keep in mind that every browser displays differently, and there isn’t just one major internet browser anymore. Attempting to comply with W3C standards is often more of a challenge when it may not benefit an organization financially. The first few times trying to use this process can be, developmentally, time consuming. The time spent on it may cut into other projects or budgets but the benefits are worthwhile when perfected, especially when considering scalability.

Standards have been a passion of mine as of late, and despite technological issues we may have internally, I wanted to implement a 100% compliant home page. When I started development, I laid out the content in XHTML before thinking about what a border might look like or what size the text might be. After this process I started to create the CSS, laying out the content and checking and making adjustments for major browsers issues. After the major page is laid out, we add all the fancy stuff.

Q: What steps were taken programmatically to improve the web accessibility of the page for users utilizing assistive technologies to view it?

A: Along with the separation of content and presentation, making sure that the page degrades well without CSS and Javascript was a focus. Part of my development process is to also use a text based browser to try and make sure all users are considered when putting the page together.

Q: AJAX has gotten somewhat of a bad rap for encumbering accessibility. What has been your experience with this and what would you advise on this issue?

A: I think some people see flashy, slick interfaces or applications and automatically think "Ajax". However, this can just be the presentation which is mostly DHTML. Ajax refers mainly to the data requests behind the scenes without those pesky page reloads. My thought process is; use DHTML and Ajax where it’s not going to greatly affect content and where it just makes life easier. There is a great article over at StandardsSchmandards.com that talks about some of these issues.

Q: Newsweek has declared 2007 the "Year of the Widget". What are your thoughts on this as it relates to the widgetization of the web and/or future revs of the homepage?

A: With the addition of services to the web, and user generated content, widgets and mash-ups are the next big thing in the future of the internet. You can view the stock market, the weather, the news and have them available to your PC, phone, and now on your TV. At this point I am not sure how VeriSign’s home page will fit into the mix, but we are constantly trying new things to enhance the usability of our site.

Q: What are some of your favorite developer resource sites?

A: With the introduction of sites like iGoogle, I use RSS feeds to read all the great articles in one place. I regularly read Ajaxian and A List Apart (great CSS resources), as well as, the truly Geek site - Slashdot.

Q: If you had to do it all over again, what, if anything, would you do differently?

A: I don’t feel I would do anything differently; however, I would love to have other resources like PHP available to make a more dynamic home page. We are working on a more dynamic environment while keeping security in mind, which is time consuming. At this point, I just look forward to the next redesign.

SideStep Gets Social

Travel search engine SideStep announced the acquisition of social networking site TripUp.com.

User's visit TripUp.com to gather current information from locals and fellow travelers who act as destination gurus with reviews about restaurants, attractions and places to party. Users also can find trip buddies to plan their travels and members share travel video, journals and photos.

“As travelers look for more information, the best way to get at it is through social communities and social networking,” Rob Solomon, president and CEO, told Brandweek. “The editorial content that is out there in guidebooks is great, but the information is finite.”

SideStep also purchased travel review aggregation site TravelPost. All three sites will continue to operate independently for the time being until their functions are absorbed into SideStep.

Google Real Estate?

I see Google entering the space that Zillow, Trulia and a few others own right now. I am basing this on an article in the San Jose Mercury. Google already has most of the piece in place. It is a matter of packaging and branding at this point. You can read more here>>.

Interview with Jon Wiley, User Experience Designer, Google Apps

I am an avid user and fan of Google Apps and judging by its growing popularity, I am certainly not alone on this. I recently had an opportunity to interview Jon Wiley, User Experience Designer, for Google Apps to gain some insight into this suite of apps. Jon was also recently a panelist at the Usability 2.0 Event at the WebGuild on April 11, 2007.

Q: You work on Google Apps. Can you tell the readers a little about it and what you do on Google Apps?

A: Google Apps is a collection of Google services such as Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Spreadsheets, and Talk, all bundled up as a white label product for businesses, schools, small groups, and ISPs. The Premier Edition is $50/user/year and the Standard and Education editions are free. I work on the sign up and payment interfaces, and parts of the administrator control panel interface. I also work with other designers and researchers to represent the needs of enterprise, SMB, ISP, and educational organizations when thinking about the experience of Google's diverse products and services.

Q: I think most people would point to Google Apps as an example of web, usability, and design 2.0 epitomized. Do you agree with this characterization and why or why not?

A: All of the services bundled with Google Apps certainly typify Web 2.0 applications. Google has long been an innovator in delivering powerful web applications via the browser. But we have only begun to scratch the surface of what is possible. Everyone who works on these applications has a hundred ideas to make them better. Our work is never done.

Q: One of the things I've noticed with Google Apps is that there is a little more attention placed on form in the design, notwithstanding function, compared to the uber simplicity of the google.com homepage. It still has the Google moniker but there is color, icons, and visual interest. Why this divergence, if you will? And what, if any, has been the impact on usability?

A: While the classic Google home page maintains a very simple appearance, we've recently given users more choices and the ability to customize their experience with iGoogle. It's true that our search interface is highly functional and that we've explored visual design more in our applications.

This divergence can be traced to where users spend time. Search connects users to the best results for their query as quickly as possible, and users do not spend a lot of time in search. Much more time is spent in applications like Gmail, Calendar, Docs, and Talk. The usability of these applications is enhanced through visual design. We want users to feel comfortable in our applications and it is there that investing in the visuals really pays off.

Q: Components of Google Apps such as Gmail, Talk, and Calendar are available for mobile access. Do you foresee Docs and Spreadsheets migrating to WAP as well? And if so, what would have to be different from the desktop version to ensure the usability of these apps on a WAP platform?

A: We want to make information universally accessible and useful. Providing access via mobile platforms goes towards fulfilling that first goal. Fulfilling the second, making it useful, is more complicated. Do people want to edit spreadsheets on their mobile phone or collaborate on documents? Perhaps they would rather just manage their documents, sharing them for instance. Or maybe the mobile context creates new possibilities for collaboration.

Q: Google Apps is localized for a number of countries and languages. How do you design for and test the usability for the various geographies and what are some of the differences encountered?

At a very tactical level, we strive to design interfaces which can work well in a variety of languages. Interfaces that scale and that make extensive use of CSS are easier to translate without breaking. If, from our research, we think a particular interface or workflow may be impacted by language or locale, we will organize user testing to help us understand and address those variances. At a more strategic level, Google has offices throughout the world. It is a lot easier to listen to your users if you are close to them.

Q: Tell us a little about your usability testing process.

For usability testing, which is a small part of our overall research program, we typically utilize labs on site to host users and present them with high fidelity prototypes of applications. We'll walk our users through a number of scenarios in order to gauge the usability of the interface. Occasionally, if the prototype is sufficiently deep, we will allow users to explore without any particular scenario in mind. Our process is an iterative one and we'll perform testing several times to improve the usability of the application.

Q: The target audiences for Google Apps are Small Business, Enterprise, Academia, and Families or Group. That's a pretty broad spectrum of users with varying needs and skill/experience levels. How do you create a suite of apps for multiple demographics and experience levels and still make it usable and stimulating for the everyone?

A: In terms of administrating these services for the organization, we work to identify the information and actions common to all of our customers and make those items readily visible and easily accessible. While the types of organizations served by Google Apps are quite diverse, their needs are often quite similar. Often, it is simply a matter of scale.

For the applications themselves, the spectrum of needs and diversity of users is greater. Nearly all Google applications begin their lives aimed squarely at the consumer market. Google excels at supporting large scale initiatives and we want to solve problems for the largest possible audience. This focus on solving problems for lots of people translates into highly useful applications. The world is full of software and devices with a wealth of solutions, maybe a tenth of which people actually use. We aim to include the features that most people will use a lot.

The rapid innovation of web applications in the consumer space has opened up a gap between the usability and usefulness of products in people's personal lives vs. the products and services offered by their employers and schools. Rather than look for feature-heavy products at home, they are seeking products that are easier to use and more useful in the workplace and the classroom. We're bridging that gap with Google Apps.

We also just launched a Partner Edition of Google Apps for ISPs.

Q: How are Web 2.0 technoligies such as AJAX being used in Google Apps?

A: I've been building web pages since 1995, and I find it hard to see the Web in such quantized units as 1.0 or 2.0. To me, there are a number of technologies and best practices that have been developed over the years, the adoption of which has come in stops, starts, stutters, gradual transitions, and everything in between. Google tends to take a very utilitarian view of technologies: we want the best tool for the job. Whatever enables us to offer fast, efficient, usable, accessible, and powerful services to our users.

JavaScript is used extensively in Gmail and Calendar. Our new Talk gadget for iGoogle uses Flash. The control panel for Google Apps uses CSS throughout. I'm continually amazed by the innovation Google engineers manage to achieve with technologies like JavaScript, HTML, and CSS, which are many years old and were never really designed to handle the powerful applications we've created.

Q: Is Google Apps built with web accessibility in mind with respect to disabled users? And if so, how?

A: Accessibility of web applications for people with disabilities is a very challenging problem, one that we are working to solve. I am a member of a team of people at Google working to develop better processes and educate Googlers about the challenges we face in this area, as well as best practices for creating accessible products.

Q: Google Apps was created last year. How has this suite of online software applications and web publishing tools changed from then to now from a user experience perspective?

A: Initially the product was called Gmail for Your Domain and the scope was very limited. We have continued to add services to the product, enabling a number of communication and collaboration activities to be hosted in the Google computing cloud. This is in line with our mission to make information, in this case the information created and shared by our users, universally accessible and useful. I think Google Apps has also resulted in a greater need to integrate across our services and this work has direct benefits for individual consumers as well.

Q: Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt, was recently quoted as saying that Apps and online software applications is a new focus for Google, in addition to search and ads, in what he calls a "shift to an online lifestyle" and Google is creating web-based applications that support that lifestyle with Google Apps. What are some of the user experience advantages and challenges that are unique to online apps versus the traditional desktop software like Microsoft Office?

A: Our customers can access their data from any device with a web connection. Gmail leverages Google's massive supercomputer to store vast amounts of information and our customers derive piece of mind from the knowledge that they won't lose their data, even if their computer breaks or is stolen. Hosting data in Google's cloud makes sharing and collaborating super easy, since information isn't chained to a single device. And users only have to worry about one program to run - the browser - no need to install and maintain a bunch of applications.

Designing web applications is a difficult problem for a number of reasons. As I mentioned before, the foundation technologies were never really designed for the complex tasks we're asking them to do. Also, the Web as a medium is highly variable and customizable. Web applications must function on a variety of browsers running on a variety of operating systems and displayed within a variety of browser window sizes. There is also the matter of bandwidth and connectivity.

Q: What can you share with us on the future enhancements planned for Google Apps? What's next on the roadmap?

A: We'll soon be adding presentation software to our suite of services and email migration for our Premier and Education Edition customers will be available soon. As always, we are continually innovating and improving our applications.

Thanks, Jon! This has been great. We look forward to more cool stuff from Google Apps.