Facebook Demos New Design

Here's another interesting video. If you are in any way involved with website design, development, or management, you spend a lot of time looking at other successful websites in an attempt to discover what works well. During this process you'll often contemplate what drove certain decisions. Therefore it's very intriguing when you get a chance to hear an actual Q&A about such topics. So, check out this press demo from Facebook:



Found via: Mashable

Browser-based Web Browser Testing: Litmus vs. Adobe BrowserLab

Below is a quick comparison of two browser testing tools. There are others out there, feel free to add in comments. However, since Adobe just made another press push for BrowserLab I thought it would be a good time to compare these two tools that I've been trying out.

Litmus

Litmus is out of the UK, and has been around in some capacity since 2005. They currently offer both an HTML-based web application, as well as a nascent desktop application counterpart.

Browsers supported at this time:

• Short answer - Litmus wins here big time with a very broad list of browsers on both Windows and Mac. Full list here.

Stand out features:

• Not just web browser testing, but also Email Testing - a feature Adobe doesn't have at all
• Browser tests can show both: Cropped, in-browser window; and Full page no browser window bordering image
• Save multiple tests
• Retesting / test history, iterative workflow
• Validation warnings and direct links to validation results
• Ability to download test results
• Ability to mark a test as complied and share the results (ie Social features)
• bookmarkelt lets you test any page you are visiting in your normal browser
• Rich Help and other resources

Adobe® BrowserLab

Adobe BrowserLab is in a limited time preview stage, this Flash-in-browser-based tool covers the website basics that Litmus does and has a few slick features. One immediate 'weakness' in comparison is that at the moment you can only run one test at a time and there is no apparent way to access test history.

Browsers supported at this time:

• Firefox 2.0 & 3.0 for both Win XP and Mac OSX
• IE 6.0 & 7.0 for XP
• Safari 3.0 for Mac

Stand out features:

• Views: single browser, 2-up for comparison, and a very cool "Onion Skin View" that overlays two different captures to show where layout diverges.
• Browser sets, with controls
• Zooming on captures
• BrowserLab Extension for Dreamweaver CS4

Verdict

IMO, Litmus offers a broader more user-friendly set of features for testing multiple sites in an iterative fashion. It's huge browser library and additional support for testing HTML Email give it a clear edge. Adobe may be able to catch up of course, but I also feel that it will ultimately come down to pricing. Both offer free options, but at the moment Adobe allows you to test IE 6 for free, whereas Litmus requires a paid plan to gain access to anything but IE 7 and Firefox 2.0. Adobe has not set pricing, but has stated that it will become a paid service after it moves out of preview release. We'll have to see how the pricing packages compare. For the time being, you could benefit by using both in tandem, which I'll likely do for a while until I feel there's reason not to. No matter what, the advent of powerful browser-based browser testing tools is a huge time, money, and headache saver for website builders concerned with providing the best user experience possible across a large spectrum of web clients.

Twittermaven Survey Results:Users’ perception of brands on Twitter

Twittermaven recently surveyed 240 people with 6 questions regarding interacting with brands. Here are some key findings, as well as a sample chart.

• Most users (89%) agree that brands should engage their customers on Twitter.
  
• almost 90% of users would frown upon poor or inappropriate brand use of Twitter.
• 60% of respondents would recommend a company based on their presence on Twitter and 80% of Twitter users will reward those brands
• More than 60% of respondents have 100+ followers and almost 50% of respondents have posted more than 1000 Tweets

For the full results, including a number of other interesting charts, read the article.

Video: Jason Fried at "Business of Software"

Business of Software conference September 2008: Jason Fried is founder of 37signals (developers of Basecamp and Ruby on Rails) and Signal vs Noise blogger

10 Tools for Analyzing Twitter Activity

Feel the need to track some tweets? Get your twitter analytics fix, by using these handy web-based tools...

1. Twitter Grader gives you a grade based on the power of your Twitter profile.
2. Twinfulence: a simple tool using the Twitter API to to measure the combined influence of twitterers and their followers, with a few social network statistics thrown in as bonus.
   
3. TweetStats helps you graph your Twitter Stats including: Tweets per hour; Tweets per month; Tweet timeline; Reply statistics
   
4. TwitGraph analyzes your tweets and presents the data in pie-chart form
   
5. Twitstat - Real time Twitter Analytics
   
6. Twitter Quotient will get your Twitter stats (# friends, #updates) and calculate your Twitter profile standing
7. Twist - see trends in twitter in comparison line chart format
   
8. Tweetrush is a service that aims to provide estimated stats on Twitter usage over a period of time via many attractive bar charts
   
9. Twitter meter let's you query an index of all the words that have been sent to twitter's public timeline (since late 2007) and plot the number of times that word was used over time.
   
10. TweetVolume is a useful tool for tracking the usage volume, of specific keywords or phrases, in the twit-osphere
    

Does open source need consolidation?

The Open Road - The Business and Politics of Open Source by Matt Asay - CNET News: Matt puts the question out there. See the comments in the article to hear what others have to say:

"Yes, I'm the one who argues against consolidation in enterprise software, but another part of me wonders why we spend time reinventing wheels....

I guess my underlying question is, "Do we need a myriad of open-source alternatives to the proprietary software stacks, or would we be better served with one or two rock-solid open-source alternatives?" I'm inclined toward the latter, as I think Linux, for example, is much better off for having three robust competitors (Red Hat, SUSE, and Ubuntu), rather than dozens of also rans with no strong options."

Read on...
Image credit: jagelado

ShrinkTheWeb - FREE website thumbnails

"ShrinkTheWeb (STW) will allow any webmaster who wants to show a website preview to do so using our free, powerful, and reliable service. Thumbnails increase click-through and conversions..."

Some people have attempted to link to Snap.com previews, only to find that doing so violates the Snap TOS. I'm glad to see that ShrinkTheWeb noticed the demand, and jumped in with a simple service. An example of one of their previews (of their own site nonetheless) is shown at right. Go shrink.

Cooper Journal: Bringing sanity to swat-team design projects

cooper.com: "In a perfect world, interaction design would begin when a product was still just a twinkle in a venture capitalist’s eye. In reality, many software products make it all the way through the development cycle with little thought to the users’ experience, and when executives, sales people, or QA testers finally get their hands on the functioning product and start sounding the alarm bells, interaction designers are brought in to clean up the mess. With increasing demand for design “swat teams” to rescue fully developed but flawed software that is scheduled to ship within months or even weeks, the critical question becomes: how can you avoid getting caught up in the chaos that frequently permeates “crisis-mode” engagements?..."

This is an excellent article from an authoritative source. Read the full article...

EFF Releases 'Best Practices for Online Service Providers' Whitepaper

eff.org: "Online service providers (OSPs) are vital links between their users and the Internet, offering bandwidth, email, web and other Internet services. Because of their centrality, however, OSPs face legal pressures from all sides: from users, industry, and government. As an intermediary, the OSP finds itself in a position to collect and store detailed information about its users and their online activities that may be of great interest to third parties. The USA PATRIOT Act and other recent legislation have also provided the government with expanded powers to request this information. As a result, OSP owners must deal with requests from law enforcement and lawyers to hand over private user information and logs. Yet, compliance with these demands takes away from an OSP’s goal of providing users with reliable, secure network services. In this paper, EFF offers some suggestions, both legal and technical, for best practices that balance the needs of OSPs and their users’ privacy and civil liberties..."

EFF has drafted a thoughtful resource intended to help both OSPs and consumers. Read the full whitepaper online or download the PDF at www.eff.org

Internet Explorer: A Browser Breaks

"Enterprises aren't loving Internet Explorer 7, so how can its successor do any better?...

For businesses looking for a standards-compliant Web browser, Internet Explorer won't be the choice in 2008, with IE 6 entrenched and IE 8's release as much as a year away—or more, if closely aligned with Windows 7. For Web developers, the standards headaches will continue as long as IE 6 enterprise adoption remains high...

There is huge competitive opportunity for Mozilla, and even Apple, to exploit Microsoft's browser problems. Both organizations have highly standards-compliant browsers that can be deployed at lower risk."

Finally! - Email Standards Project

Email Standards Project: "The Email Standards Project works with email client developers and the design community to improve web standards support and accessibility in email."

I'm very happy to see an organized attempt to address the issue of poor and inconsistent industry-wide support for rich email (html email). The Email Standards Project looks like the bandwagon to jump on. The site has a great chart right on the homepage showing popular email clients (desktop and web-based) and their rating in terms of standards support. The project has come up with an "acid test", much like the Web Standards Project, that is used to fairly and consistently test the ability of a given email client.

Check out the site, join the email list or spread the word.

Adobe Delivers Flash Player 9 with H.264 Video Support

"HD Quality Web Video and Audio Now Available With Adobe Flash Player Update... Adobe Flash Player 9 now includes H.264 standard video support, the same standard deployed in Blu-Ray® and HD-DVD® high definition video players, and High Efficiency AAC (HE-AAC) audio capabilities. The latest update also features hardware accelerated, multi-core enhanced, full-screen video playback for high-resolution viewing across major operating systems and browsers. The combination of Adobe Flash Player 9 and Adobe Flash Media Server 3 (also announced today) enables the delivery of HD quality video to the broadest online audience. Adobe Flash Player 9 Update 3 is available immediately at http://www.adobe.com/go/getflashplayer"

read more | digg story

Box.net Launches OpenBox Services

Box.net: "With the new OpenBox Services, you can bring the power of web applications directly into your existing Box account. Edit photos and images online with Picnik, work on your Word and Excel files using Zoho, publish documents for the whole world to see through Scribd, send your documents signed with EchoSign, and much more...

Already have an account? Log in and add services to your Box Upload files to one place for use anywhere Box users can now utilize third-party applications with their files stored online, which means you will only need to upload files to the web once. Upload an image to your Box account and be able to edit it online with Picnik, send it to a friend on Facebook, add a link to it on Twitter, and turn it into a custom t-shirt on Zazzle — all from a single file upload."

I'm a fan of box for online storage because of it's widgets, and overall UX. Their ongoing efforts to further tie-in box storage to other popular web services is a good thing.

Thumbalizr Takes Screen Shots from a URL

via mashable.com: "Thumbalizr is an image tool that lets you take screen shots of web pages and offers up several dimension options for you to download your image. Just enter in the URL of the web page you'd like a screen shot for, and hit "go"..."

Here's a handy service for quick web captures. The site appears to be slow right at the moment due to heavy interest. I wonder if it will allow for specifying a particular browser type for rendering, like browsershots.org does?

Google announces a simple new way to embed Google Maps

Now those seeking a simple way to include a Google map on a page no longer need to deal with the more complex API method. However it's worth noting that the technique Google has employed is the use of an iframe, which may or may not work in all circumstances for web publishers.

Google Press Center: News Announcement: "Starting today, Google Maps users can add a map to their website or blog just by copying & pasting a snippet of HTML. This new functionality enables Google Maps users to share and disseminate geographic information in the same way that YouTube users share videos. Bloggers and webmasters no longer need an API key or knowledge of Java Script to put a Google Map on their website or blog.

To embed a Google Map, users simply pull up the map they want to embed - it can be a location, a business, driving directions, or a My Map they have created - and then click 'Link to this page' and copy & paste the HTML into their website or blog. The embedded map is fully interactive, like the Google Maps API, but creating one does not require any programming skills. Users can drag and click or zoom in on a location, and view it in map, satellite, and hybrid modes..."

The Impact of Social Media on Search Rankings

SiteProNews:: "Over the past few years, the Internet has increasingly become a participatory social network where user-generated content is just as important as traditional advertising messages. This means your articles, blog posts, videos, podcasts, and other comments on the Web are now critical sources of information about your company, your products and services... Social media, therefore, becomes increasingly important to a Web site's success and its visibility in search engines...

With the advent of universal search by Google and others, search marketers and site owners will soon find it necessary to optimize their Web sites for a broad range of content types. This means creating content in every media and vertical niche applicable to your brand..."

This article summarizes the importance of a broad-media approach very well, highlighting the categories of: Search Personalization; Universal Search; Optimizing Podcasts; and Optimizing Google Base Data Feeds.

You don't want to necessarily implement content types or social media frameworks that aren't appropriate to your business, but be sure you are not overlooking a variety of options. And another trend is to NOT lock-up assets like PDF downloads and demos behind registration walls. Give a prospect all you have, if they are interested, they'll eventually wind up in your CRM database.

The Virtues of Print in a Web 2.0 World

oreilly.com: "Dale Dougherty, the publisher of Make: Magazine did a brief interview with Publishing Executive Magazine, which included some great thoughts on how print publishers can harness the power of Web 2.0 while also playing to their own strengths...

There's a lot that publishers can and should do with technology, because Web 2.0 is providing many new ways of finding new talent, bringing great material to the top of what used to be called 'the slush pile', and then bringing it to market. But so much does begin just as Dale says, in deep engagement with your audience, which in almost every case is also the source of the content that you will feature."

Interesting article, also includes a video about how O'reilly leverages the web to augment the total customer experience for their publication "MAKE".

Coworkers.com Launches New Profile Badge Feature

"By simply inserting a couple lines into your HTML source, you can quickly display one our "badges" wherever your like... you can even show your Coworkers rating inside any web page! Each badge links directly to your public Coworkers.com profile page. Just go to our "Tools" page, login, and get your code."

This is a nice new way to share your profile information. Some of the badges even show live rating statistics, both overall and detailed.

Coworkers.com Summer 2007 iPod Giveaway

J.Y. Design client Coworkers.com is giving away an iPod Nano (8 GB). The promotion ends on September 30th, so go check it out now. The promotion requires that you register on the site for FREE. It's a startup site, with a growing community so odds are pretty high in your favor: Enter at Coworkers.com now

Cover Flow and the scrolling horizontal subnav at the new Apple.com

37signals has a thoughtful post on the proliferation of the Coverflow UI metaphor: "As the world gets iPhonified and Leopardized, get ready for more Cover Flow (video), the scrolling interface with forward/backward arrows that mimics a CD collection or jukebox selection..." As they point out how aspects of the horizontal scrolling UI have been incorporated into the new Apple.com, they summarize it all well: "At least there’s more conventional text links in the footer."



I think that is an important takeaway. Coverflow is one of many 'views' that you can choose to enable within iTunes. As variations on these newer navigation models start to hit the web, it will continue be important to offer multiple ways to get to the same content. And IMHO, the Coverflow interface as demonstrated in the iPhone port is the most usable version I've seen. It skips the file list below the images, and allows you to interact directly with the thumbnails, flipping albums over to see their contents. Until iTunes can do this too, I will fully understand why Coverflow gets slammed so much.

read more | digg story

Competitious: New product in the works

Competitious.com: "Competitious is an early beta release of a much more robust service we’ve been planning here at RivalSoft... The service will be a comprehensive web-based platform that helps companies manage and analyze all information about their competitors, and will incorporate almost all of the suggestions and feedback we've received on Competitious. The new service will also have a new name (which we are keeping under wraps for now). All of your data from Competitious will be migrated when our new service launches. We are aiming to launch the new service in 2-3 months..."

Competitious is a great service even in its current form. It's a handy way to organize a group of related Companies / URLs and attach articles to them, create a comparison matrix for them, and also monitor Alexa traffic. You can create multiple "projects" which makes it handy for doing different competitive scenarios. I've even used it as a quick research tool when looking into topics or new market trends.

Google Analytics launches new reporting interface design

The new UI looks nice. Here are some highlights: It takes advantage of full browser width; it has a customizable dashboard; larger cleaner graphs; and the ability to email and export reports. I'm looking forward to digging deeper into this upgrade.

UPDATE: mashable.com has just posted a very in-depth look at the new UI complete with many screen shots.

Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos kicks off Web 2.0 Expo

ZDNet Video: "Company's S3 surpasses 5 billion objects stored... At the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos talks to conference attendees about the company's on-demand storage service. Bezos announced that today the S3 service stores more than 5 billion objects, compared with 800,000 objects stored in July 2006."

Create an irresistible free trial for your app

thinkvitamin.com: "Free trials are a super effective way of increasing sign-ups to your service, but to reap the rewards later it’s worth following these four tips for your campaign... So what is this success formula I’m talking about? We’ve narrowed it down to four simple rules for how a free trial of an online service should work. Let’s go through them one by one."

1. Signing up for a trial account should be easy and painless
2. Do not require trial users to enter their credit card information
3. Do not cripple the trial
4. Include a "highlight bonus"

read more | digg story

Adobe CS3 Official Launch

Here's a round-up of some other interesting coverage and details:

• AppleBlog coverage
• digg.com coverage
• Apple.com special feature
• creativepro.com: What's New in Adobe Creative Suite 3
• CNET coverage

Web Apps 101: Your Three Point Success Plan

TechCrunch - Building a web app is easy. Building a successful and profitable web app is where most people fail. If you want your app to stay out of the Dead Pool, you need to know the answer the following questions:

1. Who is it aimed at?
2. Why will they use it?
3. Will they pay for it?

Also, you can download the MP3 audio and PDF presentation that appear to be the foundation for this article at: http://www.futureofwebapps.com/

read more | digg story

MySpace News: The Digg Killer?

"MySpace is launching a news aggregator called MySpace News in the second quarter of 2007. It’ll rely on both algorithms and user rating - basically a combination of Google News and Digg..."

Yeah maybe it will be like the parallel-universe kind of digg with a really ugly design, giant ads with scantily clad women, and constant intermittent outages! I know, I know, it will probably succeed due to the sheer volume of existing users... Add to the '_-killer?' watchlist :-P

read more | digg story

Future of Web Apps: FREE MP3s, Podcast and Slides

The "Future of Web Apps" happened in London from 2/20-21. Well, it's a wrap and now you can find Speaker Presentations & MP3s (includuing a Podcast RSS Feed) on the program website. I just finished pulling down the last of the presentations in iTunes. There are some great speakers in the lineup.

The Mobile Web Offers a Rich Platform for Content and Advertising

Online Publishers Association: "With strong usage growth and consumers watching and acting upon advertisements, the mobile Web is a compelling platform for content and marketing, according to the latest research from the Online Publishers Association (OPA). Going Mobile: An International Study of Content Use and Advertising on the Mobile Web is the first OPA study to go beyond the U.S., involving over 6,000 interviews in the U.S., the U.K., France, Italy, Spain and Germany. The study was conducted in partnership with TNS Media and Entertainment."

Key findings: "Heavy Access and Growing Usage, Advertising is Driving Action, PC Web Brands Driving Mobile Web Activity, Mobile Web is Vital for Consumers of Sports, Weather and News"

They've also got the Presentation of Findings in PDF.

Firefox 3 To Support Offline Apps

"Firefox 3 will deliver support for offline applications. This is significant because you'll be able to use your web apps - like Gmail, Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Google Calendar, etc - in the browser even when offline... Although Mozilla is an open source organization, some of its top workers are employed by Google."

This is very interesting. There are a number of companies out there building add-on utilities and system extensions for synchronizing traditional desktop apps with online counterparts. For example, Spanning Sync for Google Calendar. If the browser can do this for you, and support a wide variety of online apps, then one of the largest barriers for web app adoption will be knocked down.

So You Wanna Be a Web Tycoon? Amazon Can Help

Web Worker Daily: "While Amazon Web Services (AWS) offerings are currently limited in capability and oriented to only the most technical of developers, what they're doing changes all the economic rules about creating a web startup. You thought that cheap web hosting and free email services disrupted the startup business space and kept venture capitalists up at night? Take a look at the next generation of web apps infrastructure, as imagined by Amazon..."

This is a good article discussing the potential benefits for companies using 'The Utility Computing Model'.

The Best (FireFox) Browser Extensions for Web Development

This article summarizes things well IMHO. Glad, and not surprised, to see the Web Developer extension as number one on the list. Thanks to mondaybynoon.com for compiling this list! (via Vitamin)

Why Browser War 2.0 Will Heat Up in 2007

readwriteweb.com: "Our theory is that in 2006 a lot of the ground work for a major battle was laid out. Microsoft launched a significant upgrade to Internet Explorer for the first time in about 5 years (IE7), while the Firefox team spent time polishing up their open source browser. But it is the latest developments which make it clear that Firefox thinks it's showtime."

This is an interesting article, and I really got a kick out of the illustration. Between the business interests and the (still) inconsistent support for web standards in IE7, it should be another interesting year in the browser-sphere.

Running Heads

"How to deal with those little scraps of text on a page that tell us what document we're reading, and where we are in it.



Sometimes the humblest and most inconspicuous elements of design turn out to be essential. A case in point in printed publications is the running head and its frequent sidekick, the page number. They may be humble, almost unnoticed, but if they're done right they serve as signposts, telling you, the reader, where you are. The running head is part of the roadmap to any publication."

A lot of visual trends in "Web 2.0" seem to come from a print-educated aesthetic, without the baggage of precision that once kept designers from being able to let go of the concern about exactly how someting will look on any given browser. Blog entries share have a lot in common with their print publication grandfathers, and this article covers the ever-important "running head".

Interview With Jeff Bezos On Amazon Web Services

TalkCrunch: "Moments after Jeff Bezos left the stage at the Web 2.0 Summit last week I was able to talk to him for a few minutes about Amazon’s web services ambitions. Jeff is emphasizing that new services like Mechanical Turk, Simple Storage Service (S3) and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) are going to be a key business line for them in the future, and they are planting the seeds now."

I'm really into the possibilities for S3. It's interesting to hear some info straight from Bezos.

Squidoo or Squidon't...

So it's been around for a while, and it has been pretty much bodyslammed. But I wanted to expeirence the UI, it's OK but clumbsy overall. Here's a resulting page: http://www.squidoo.com/jydesign/. In the end, it's too proprietary to replace one's blog. However, I intend to use it as another page out there that promotes what I'm up to. It's pretty easy to load it up with RSS feeds and other content so that you don't have to manually 'touch' the page that often - kind of like a 'start page'.

Blogger Beta: Feature Complete!

Blogger Buzz: "This morning's push marks a huge milestone for the version of Blogger in Beta - it's finally feature complete! ...you can now publish blogs via S/FTP, a feature formerly available on the older version of Blogger. Beta's FTP functionality is significantly enhanced however - it includes Label support!

Most importantly, the addition of FTP to the beta means that account migration will soon (like Really Really Soon) be available to all Blogger users -- it's currently just enabled for blogspot users. Thank you all for your patience with the recent outages and networking problems - they'll soon be a thing of the past!"

This could not come soon enough.

Google buys JotSpot Wiki Service

CNET News.com: "Google has bought JotSpot, a 3-year-old company with a system for building collaborative Web pages called wikis... JotSpot's product is a platform for building wiki-based applications. For example, the company has an online spreadsheet and calendar that multiple people can edit."

Interesting news, also Google has fully absorbed recently acquired Writely by combining it with spreadsheets and giving it a "Google Docs & Spreadsheets" brand at http://docs.google.com/.