360angles

Internally at my agency we now have a running joke – the two-year web site. This is mostly based on our experiences of the past six months.

Since mid-2011 I’d estimate we acquired ~six new clients who were escaping bad situations with other agencies taking excessive amounts of time to complete website development projects. And in the cases we experienced, the timeline always seemed to be around two years.

The conversation kind of went like this:

Client: “I’d like to see if you could help us out.”

Voltage: “Sure, tell me what’s going on and I’ll see what we can do.”

Client: “Well, we hired this agency to build our website and it’s been in development for about two years now, is XX months past due, and $XXk over budget.”

Voltage: “I’ve heard this story before.”

On the upside for my agency, a pretty low bar has been set. On the downside for my agency, we are now starting in a position of distrust and we’re immediately on the defensive.

My point is this … I understand. I understand where the client is coming from: why they’re distrustful, why they’re hesitant to start over, and why they’re considering just giving up on the project altogether. And while I thank the other agency for practically handing me business, I’d like to give them the “what-for” for making my job harder.

So why does this happen? In our experience, it seems to follow a standard formula. Here are the things to keep an eye on when starting any website project:

1. RFP:
   Many companies initiate a web development project by issuing an RFP to agencies. They collect estimates form those agencies and then select an agency for the project. Make sure your RFP is written in a manner that will garner apples-to-apples pricing and deliverables from your potential vendors. Too many open ended requests (etcetera and miscellaneous items) and little specifics leave room for speculation and great variation in deliverables and pricing. In the case of some larger projects it’s well worth the time and money to hire a technology consultant to help with this process.
2. Requirements:
   Whomever your vendor may be, make sure they plan to detail the requirements of your website project in a written format. If they don’t plan to do this, run. These requirements are essential and should be based on your goals for the site. By their very nature website requirements will be highly technical, so if you’re not technically savvy then make sure to ask lots of questions. If your vendor can’t explain the document, then run. If they can and you still don’t understand, then seek the assistance of a third-party IT professional who can check the validity of the document.
3. Revisions and Approvals:
   Make sure you understand how revisions and approvals will be managed. Most agencies allow for two rounds of reviews and revisions on project deliverables – it’s an industry standard. And if you go beyond two rounds, you’re looking at change orders. This responsibility falls on both parties: a) the agency is responsible for communicating to the client the phase of revision being reviewed, and b) the client is responsible for making sure all decision makers provide input before submitting revisions to the agency. Change orders are not unheard of, and certainly not the death of a project, but run-away change orders can sour a relationship.
4. Realism:
   You’ve probably heard the term “You can have it cheap, fast, or good. Pick two.” This truism never fails in the website development business. For example, good and fast work will be expensive, and fast and cheap work will be bad. Unfortunately, some agencies will tell you what you want to hear to get your project (it’s hard not to). If your website project is large and complex, then be prepared for more money, a longer timeline, and more in-depth discussions with your agency – it will pay off in the long run. And if that’s not possible and you need something cheaper and in short order, then consider a phased approach where you launch a minimum viable product and phase-out the less essential items for post-launch.
5. Vendor Lock-In:
   Beware of systems that you don’t own, must license, can’t access or that beholden you to the agency that developed them. This is not always a bad situation, especially if you have an a-typical need that requires the application of specialized technology like vast e-commerce installations or CRMs (and even then, many open sourced solutions can be modified to fit your needs). But if you’re building a primarily content-driven website that sells products in a standardized fashion, accepts donations or allows users to register for an event (to name a few), then you probably don’t need a proprietary system. Some estimates state up to 80% of websites are powered by open source technology systems or are hard-coded in a standard programming language like PHP or ASP. Chances are you fall into this category.

In the end, consideration of the above will go a long way in keeping your project on time, on budget and you and your technology partner on speaking terms.

Daily deals sites are red hot right now. Appearing on one of these sites can be a big exposure boost, but it’s also important that the deal offered works for you and your business. That sounds like a no-brainer, but the web is filled with horror stories of mom-and-pop shops or early start ups getting burned by the big daily deals sites like Groupon and Living Social.

This is a judgement-free post by the way. The daily deal thing works for some businesses and doesn’t for others–despite possible misconceptions by business owners or proselytizing by Groupon’s sales department.

Getting Down to Business

First, you need to realize that this will be a cost center, not a profit center. You will lose money doing a daily deal, and in many cases the boost in exposure will be well worth the expense–it’s your call. What we want to do is minimize the expense once you’ve made that call.

Here’s a few tips to help you out. Some of these apply to general negotiation, but this specific post is obviously specifically tailored to wheeling and dealing with Groupon and the like.

1. Know you’re outgunned: Be aware that you’re negotiating with someone who attempts these negotiations 10 times a day. Ostensibly, they’re good enough to get paid to do it professionally. They will press hard on terms; they’re supposed to. This isn’t a good/bad thing–it’s their job so they do it all the time. It’s not your job so you should prepare a bit. Figure out what you want, what you can afford and don’t budge. Accepting the reality of this situation can also offer some valuable perspective as you’re listing to their pitch.
2. Pick your battles and be realistic about demands: There are some conditions, like terms of use and duration of acceptance, under which they negotiate with a lot of flexibility. Then there are others, like dollars of revenue, under which they are more constrained.
3. Recognize the value of exclusivity: Be very clear on the existence or absence of any non-compete agreements. Don’t accept one from anyone except Groupon either. They’re the biggest fish in the pond by far, and in my opinion, the only one worth entering a non-compete to do business with. Groupon, last time I checked, requires a 90-day “no other daily deals” agreement. That might be fair in their specific instance, due to their market reach. In the other cases, it’s not and you should make sure to reject a non-compete agreement unless you get some real concessions made elsewhere.
4. Play low power to buy time and objectivity: Finally, whoever negotiates should pretend not to be in charge, whether they are or not. This sort of allows you to play good cop bad cop all by yourself. “That sounds good to me, but can you put it in writing for my boss?” is your best defense against making a poor decision in the heat of the moment. It is totally acceptable and can diffuse a high-pressure sales pitch. Forcing a quick decision is one of the oldest and best negotiating tactics because humans are emotional creatures and perform poorly under pressure. Use this tactic to buy yourself some time to think things over. As long as you play man-in-the-middle, whether you are or not, you have the ability to stop and start negotiating sessions. You can take the time you need to run numbers, do some research or just take a step back and think it over.

In any negotiation you will have parties with different goals. This doesn’t mean you have to be antagonistic, but you must be a good shepherd to your own interests and those of your business. Never forget that their job is to make the biggest possible pile of cash selling your product, then take 50%. Your job is to make the pile the right size for your business, and then take 75%. Good luck!

I’d like to extend a big thanks to Tom Kessler for starting the discussion that led to this blog post. You can follow Tom on Twitter @magicclams.

Harry Epstein’s Hardware is an 81-year-old hardware store on 8th Street in downtown KC. It’s one of those historic, funky, and ancient little places you could easily drive right past if you’re not in the market for an Adjustable Klein Spud Wrench or a nice Friction Thimble Micrometer … and I’m guessing most of us aren’t. They specialize in high-quality specialty tools and hardware for serious tradesmen.

I’m writing this blog not because of their inventory of seemingly endless random and “can you say that again” tools, but for their good use of social media. No they’re not tearing up Facebook with six-figures in followers and they’re not tweeting specials on Carbide Tip Scribers. Rather, as a small company, I feel they have properly integrated YouTube into their brand.

I found just two videos on their (rather crude) site, and in the most basic way, they work. They’re simple, not overly produced, semi-humorous and best of all, they play into their quirky identity and speak to their specialty hardware products.

This is one of the cardinal rules of social media – be authentic and true to your biz and keep in mind it doesn’t have to be overcomplicated.

We tell a lot of e-commerce clients that if you’re not going to A/B split test, at least copy Amazon… I have a similar stance on design. If you’re not going to hire an amazing web development and design agency (like us, amiright?) then there are roughly two things you should keep in mind:

• Keep it simple
• What is Apple doing? (I’m only half kidding; you’ll see why.)

So what is Apple doing? Let’s take a look at what I consider one of the best product pages online right now. The product page for the Macbook Air:

My favorite thing about this page is that the call to action (CTA). The little blue “Buy Now” button in the upper right sticks out like a sore thumb, but it doesn’t break the design language of the page in the process. They tastefully drew attention to it by making it the most extreme iteration of their design language.

The button is completely in line with the overall design language,  it’s just been turned up to eleven.

• It has the most drastic rounded corners.
• It’s the brightest and largest concentration of the page’s highlight color.
• It anchors the site navigation of this area on Apple.com by placing it last punctuating it with the bright blue button background gradient. (When you’re making a list and want something to stand out, always put it first or last.)
• It doesn’t look out of place, but there isn’t anything else on the page that looks like it, or more importantly, that competes with it. This is the big one – your CTA should be the most extreme example of your design language, but it shouldn’t look like it came from another site.

One great way to test your CTA’s visibility is the ten foot test. The literal version of this to step back from your monitor 10 feet and see what you can still deduce about the content of your page. Of course, the fake version is to just zoom out your browser a few steps:

You can still read the main title of the page, “The Macbook Air”. Great. You can’t make out much of the other text unless you’re eagle-eyed and even then the vast majority of it is still unintelligible, but that’s OK. One other thing above the fold (not that there’s a fold :) does still stick out, though. It’s that little bright blue button in the top right. You can’t tell what it says, but you still know it’s important.

And back to my earlier note about putting things at the front or back of lists when you think they’re the most important; you’ll notice the first item on that sub navigation list is Design. I’m shocked I tell you… just SHOCKED.

As usual, Apple’s page layouts are a master class in how to get the response you want from your audience. (Not that they never miss, they still can’t seem to make a mouse I care to use for more than about 20 minutes.)

As User Experience (UX) developers, it is our duty to make human-computer interaction as simple, efficient and clear as possible. Take this standard shopping cart checkout form for example:

It very clearly is inspired by the format we use to address mail for the US postal system. Familiar, yes, but it is not taking advantage of all our computers have to offer us. We have the ability to derive secondary inputs from primary inputs.

Primary information is human input or any information that can not be regenerated automatically

In this example, city and state can be derived automatically by a user’s zip code. All it takes is a free zip code database and a little effort.

Here’s that same input set, redesigned :

This format has many advantages:

• Copying of duplicate values via a simple interface
• Default values. Most companies have a country in which they do the majority of their business
• Primary inputs are hierarchical and secondary inputs are dynamically filled.
• Auto-populated fields (city and state) are still editable after the automation

The end result? The average user has to fill out 3 fields rather than 12.

Speeding up and simplifying this process increases conversions and makes our users happy. And that’s what we want, happy, converted users.

As an iPad owner, general Apple-advocate and tech geek, I’ve been getting asked this question every few weeks since the iPad came out. The frequency is accelerating with the holidays drawing near, so I’m going to reproduce some of the analysis here that I’ve been sharing via email with friends and family. First and foremost, this is not a post for someone asking, “should I get an iPad?” This is more like an iPad buyer’s guide. I’m assuming you’re already going to get one at some point because it’s relevant to your interests. I find this understandable because I love mine. It’s hands down the best casual web surfing and email device I’ve ever used and that’s not to mention gaming, displaying video and displaying pictures, all of which it excels at. So let’s get started with our choices. There are six iPads as of this writing, you can see them here at the Apple iPad product page. This leaves us with seven different options…

1. 16gb wifi – $499
2. 32gb wifi – $599
3. 64gb wifi – $699
4. 16gb wifi+3G – $629
5. 32gb wifi+3G – $729
6. 64gb wifi+3G – $829
7. Wait for some future release of the iPad.

So the deciding factors are budget, space, 3G capability and “now or later?”

Budget

The iPad is a really affordable computer considering bang-for-the-buck from a hardware perspective and a capability perspective. There’s a lot that you can’t do on an iPad, but what you can do you’ll be able to do better than just about any other device. This is basically Apple’s whole user experience model. The iPad just blows the doors off everything else for personal entertainment/education. It’s also noteworthy that thanks to the app store, a flexible interface and ultra portable form-factor, the iPad will continuously be updating its capabilities. Such as using it as a concert piano or to perform surgery. Being affordable in a certain context, however, does not make it cheap. This thing costs a handful of Benjamins, after all. And consider it’s a gadget and made by Apple. This means there’s a sure bet that it will get cheaper (or more capable for the same price) within 12 to 18 months and be outdated at some point. With those truisms as motivation, I’ll strike the two 64gb options from our list, because flash memory prices are currently plummeting like LCD screens were 3 years ago. Conclusion on Budget: Buying top-of-the-line when it comes to electronics is almost always a losing proposition. And if budget is a consideration at all, we don’t want to take that hit. Even eliminating the two most expensive from the range leaves us with several choices.

1. 16gb wifi – $499
2. 32gb wifi – $599
3. 16gb wifi+3G – $629
4. 32gb wifi+3G – $729
5. Wait for some future release of the iPad.

Space/Memory Capacity

What are you going to do with your iPad? Are you going to load it up with movies and music? The music is a non-issue if you have an iPhone or an iPod, because the iPad isn’t going to be a primary listening device. It may be a non-issue anyway, since you can load three days of continuous audio with just 4gb. So the question is really, “Are you going to be watching movies on the thing?” And if you are, are you going to store them there permanently? Or are you going to store them on a computer with iTunes and just load up a couple at a time? Some real-world data on iPad memory usage: I have been using my 32gb for months. My primary use case is surfing and email on my couch/in bed or very occasionally a coffee shop. I may or may not watch a movie or two on it at some point, but there aren’t any on there now. Here’s what is on my iPad at this moment:

• 58 apps
• 1,300 songs
• The last 12 months of photos my wife or I have taken with any camera or phone (994)
• 30 podcasts that are ~1.5 hours each (Recommend TWIT and The Talk Show)
• 13 videos (shorties: music videos and stuff I’ve shot with my phone)

With all that, my available capacity is still 18gb, which means I could fit ~6 full length HD movies on it with all the extras. (For reference, Toy Story 3 in HD is 3.29gb and that’s with tons of extras-two behind the scenes featurettes, the short that showed before the film in theaters and some production art.) Conclusion on space: size-wise the 16gb is too small. I would just be running way to close to filling the thing up all the time, the 32gb gives me plenty of room to breathe even if I want to cart around a couple HD flicks on top of all my other stuff during a trip. So that leaves us with just a few choices left.

1. 32gb wifi – $599
2. 32gb wifi+3G – $729
3. Wait for some future release of the iPad

3G or not?

Where are you going to use it? Mine is primarily a couch computer, so I didn’t go for the 3G. I also take into account the fact that there’s not too many places I’d use the thing where I won’t have WiFi anyway. Most public businesses have it these days, as does my home and work. I’m not going to use the iPad a lot in my car, so I think 3G is only for the serious traveler. Add to this that I can get to email and the internet via my phone if absolutely essential and it’s another nail in the 3G coffin. However, I sometimes wish I had the 3G even though mine is pretty much a couch computer. I’d only need it occasionally, but it would be really nice when I want it. Like if I’m on vacation and don’t want to lug around a laptop: I could take the iPad and not have to count on iffy open WiFi with weird user agreements. 3G is $14-$25/month and the AT&T service is month to month with no subscription or lock in, so you could pick and choose when you have the added expense. And you can buy it straight from the iPad. Having said all that, WiFi is so ubiquitous these days, you’d have to really be a road-warrior to justify the $130 price tag. Conclusion on 3G: WiFi is already ubiquitous and spreading more every day. 3G is for serious road-warriors only or those with no other smart cellular device access.

1. 32gb wifi – $599
2. Wait for some future release of the iPad.

When to Buy?

This is totally a personal philosophy thing. You’re buying a gadget, so no matter what you do there is going to be something shinier and newer in a few months. I mostly ignore this factor when shopping in this product category, or I’d never buy anything. If you know something new is coming next month hold off, otherwise just get one if you want it. Then enjoy it and don’t worry about the greener grass that will inevitably come. Conclusion on When to Buy: The current iPad is a great device. Some day it will be outdated and that’s OK, because it’s still a great device. So get one now and enjoy it.

1. 32gb wifi – $599

Almost… One last consideration: you need to have some sort of base computer running iTunes so you can sync the thing. You can buy content on the iPad itself, but you can’t get system upgrades without iTunes. (Which I think is a big mistep on Apple’s part.) The base machine doesn’t have to be great, but it has to exist and preferably have a big cheap hard drive for archiving content purchases you may not want to carry around with you all the time forever.

TLDR: Get the 32GB, Wi-Fi for $599.

Happy tapping!

Here’s an old Steve Jobs video talking about branding. He’s unveiling the “Think Different” campaign from 1997 and then shows the first TV spot at the end of the video. It’s a really great campaign, but pay attention to the very beginning of this talk:

The big takeaway is in the first few seconds of video:

“This is a very complicated world. This is a very noisy world and we’re not going to get a chance… to get people to remember much about us. No company is. And so we have to be really clear on what we want them to know about us.”

The whole branding thing is just like selling or pitching…

• Lunch pitch: ~15 minutes
• Bar pitch: ~5 minutes
• Elevator pitch: ~30 seconds
• ?

That last pitch is your brand. It’s the ultimate distillation of what you do. Someone just cold-surfed to your site or maybe they’re standing in the aisle at the supermarket looking at you and 20 other competitors. You’ve got five seconds, a logo and one-half line of copy. What is the one thing you want them to know about your business?

If you don’t know, then you’re in trouble.

We love Blaine Fisher. Blaine is a killer photographic talent working in Kansas City and traveling the world shooting for Sports Illustrated, Prudential, ESPN, Sprint, The Girl Scouts, Farmland and Weight Watchers; among others. He’s a close friend of the agency and is responsible for making us look good on more than one occasion. So, when he needed a new site at BlaineFisherPhotography.com, we jumped at the chance to make him something special.

We had three major directives from Blaine:

1. The site has to be easy to update by a casual computer user.
2. It has to show BIG photographs. (The target audience for this site is predisposed to having large high quality monitors and fast internet connections – i.e. creatives and creative directors.)
3. The site itself has to get out of the way of the photography.

The first thing we did was outline solutions to these challenges.

1. Easy to update – build the site on a customized WordPress CMS install. Ease of use is one of the many reasons the WordPress platform is so wildly popular.
2. Showcase BIG photographs – Make them as large as the medium will allow: fill the browser window completely. (No stretching or distorting allowed.)
3. The site itself can’t get in the way – Make a minimal GUI with collapsible elements to put the focus on Blaine’s work.

Then we sketched up some concepts for him to look at…

As you can see we went for the biggest image size we could fit on a web site-one that fills the browser window completely. Then it’s over-laid with a semi-transparent minimal interface that allows a user to navigate between the pictures grouped into various categories and tags. We also wanted the user to be able to “hide” the interface, or at least a significant portion of it, for a better view of the photos. This is also good for Blaine when he wants to show off the site to a client and wants to hide the user interface, since he isn’t a casual browser.

Once approved, the next step was making it happen with pixels. The Photoshop mock up is below.

The next order of business (and the real challenge) was to find a way of making his photos the full size of the open browser window. This is hard because the browser window size is a moving target depending on user configuration and then once on the site they can re-size their window at will. In order to have the current photo take up the entire window we needed an image to fill that space dynamically without distorting.

After a some research, we found a little jQuery/CSS magic to make it happen without resorting to less elegant techniques such as defining window sizes (user hostile) or building it in Flash (hard to update and not search engine friendly). With some light modification, we got the plug in working on our WordPress install. Then we made the main interface elements hide-able at the click of a button using some custom jQuery and were ready to get Blaine up and running. After some light training, he was ready to go. Check out the video below to see it in action…

Or just head on over to Blaine Fisher’s site, we launched it July 1st.

The most requested iPhone 5 feature may be the ability to actually order one. As of 1:00 AM this morning, myself and about a million other folks have been trying to pre-order the new iPhone 4. I started at about 7:15 AM myself. The results have been less than stellar. The white iPhone is nowhere to be found, and both the AT&T and the Apple pre-order sites keep going down (presumably) under the weight of incoming requests for the new gadget.

I wonder if all this lack of pre-order preparedness will carry over into demand problems when these things are supposed to be delivered on June 24th? (If no one can order one, it’s not going to be a problem.) For what it’s worth, there are reports of a better chance of getting through on AT&T’s site, although I couldn’t get that to work, either.

10:50AM UPDATE: Apple also isn’t taking phone calls at this time.

1. WolframAlpha, another search engine? I’ll probably never use this since Google is so good.
2. Holy hell that demo video was AMAZING! This thing is going to change the world.
3. 
   
4. *send*
5. Wait a minute… the results for terms I search the most, like directions and products, are total crap. I don’t even think that’s what this is for…
6. *deletes bookmark*
7. I hope no one mentions that email… Maybe I’ll just say I was tired.

I deleted my Facebook profile a few weeks ago because they unilaterally altered the terms of our agreement for the sixth time in five years. They did so in a way that explicitly benefited them over me. The original agreement went something like this (paraphrased):

Facebook: I’ll give you a private place to build something of value to you and your peers online. In exchange I’m going to show you ads.

Me: OK.

But then the agreement changed, and changed, and kept changing until I left.

I’m pretty tech-savvy and was never under any illusions about my sharecropper status at Facebook. I left when the arrangement became undesirable and in doing so, left any value I’d created with them. That’s all you can do when you don’t own the information. Right now, Facebook is the largest land owner online and 400 million+ people are sharecropping. We’re farming their land, they get a cut and it’s their way or the highway.

Social Media Sharecropping

Facebook gives us space and tools. We then create value by populating the space with user generated content. In exchange they get to extract value from the content we provide, but it’s totally different from the social value we extract. Their value is in the form of advertising and/or data mining (for other advertisers) but it’s a shared value proposition either way. This is basically the whole crux of the Web 2.0 movement. Users are adding value to the web and the owners benefit directly or indirectly which makes everything “free.” (I’m painting in broad strokes to make a point, bear with me…)

The caveat, and what makes the sharecropping allegory really stick, is that when we spend time adding value to their site and they unilaterally change the terms of the agreement there’s nothing we can do because they own the land, we just work here. It’s not easy for us to take our built up value (aka information) with us, if we can do it at all. There’s little to no data portability.

I’m singling out Facebook because they’re the elephant in the room, but there are tons of sites online where you can sharecrop or do something similar: MySpace, Flickr, Digg, YouTube, Twitter, Foursquare, Metafilter, Deviant Art, Etsy and on and on. It’s worth noting that many of these communities are more like co-ops or some other mutually-beneficial relationship with many degrees of data ownership and portability in between.

The Haves and Have-Nots

Digesting this concept can be tough, so I’m speaking in metaphors. If someone doesn’t know the difference between a web browser and a search engine, how are they to make the distinction of whether or not the value they’ve been curating and creating belongs to them? Maybe the better question is, does it even matter? The answer is the same as the answer to most questions; it depends.

I’m a bad candidate for sharecropping. Some are not.

Real sharecroppers are generally too poor to afford land; they’re a step above indentured servants. However, the hard cost of creating a web property these days is nominal. With free software, commodity hosting and a registered domain name; you can be up and running for the cost of a large pizza. This shifts the monetary wealth in our sharecropping metaphor from haves and have-nots, to knows and know-nots.

I am not poor at all in this new know and know-not sense. I know how to build websites, I do it all the time. Which is what leads me to the point I was at two weeks ago: staring at Facebook’s account deletion page.

I was done creating value for them. In most of my tenure as a Facebook user it was just a glorified address book to me, so I’m sure I was a low value user anyway. The point is I have other options. I can create content on the web on my own terms. I have several web properties that I unconditionally own and create value around. But wither the forced sharecropper?

Building Portable Value

The majority of people I interact with on a day to day basis  can’t build their own website; my best friend can’t, my wife can’t. True land ownership online is not an option for them. So if they want to create something online they’re left to sharecropping.

As I said before, the options are many. However, In my opinion the desirable options are few. Here are two of my favorites that I often find myself recommending to others.

Posterous – This is probably the best recommendation because it hooks into just about everything (see above) and does so with little or no technical knowledge from the user. In fact, it could be argued that Posterous’ best use is as a hub for exporting data to other sharecropping arrangements or “walled gardens”, but the key is that it does export well with no advanced technical knowledge. They also have a nice display interface themselves with lots of options.

WordPress.com – It has one-touch data export and once the data is out you can manipulate on your own terms. You do have to be technically inclined to do so, but it’s a nice feature for users who start out as sharecroppers and then build their informational wealth to a point that they’re ready to own some land. (I’m biased though, I cut my web development teeth on the open-source version of WordPress.)

There are other good options, I’m sure, but the important thing is that both of these services cater to the non-tech savvy without using it against them for data lock-in.

The Future

Some may argue this is all moot point because if a person is tech-illiterate enough they won’t care or understand why data lock-in is bad, but if they’re too tech-savvy they may just go off and build their own thing. I respectfully disagree…

It may because of articles like this, or it may be because people are just pissed they can’t get their photos out of Facebook, but there is a small middle ground that is growing; and I think it will continue to grow into the majority. They understand the importance of data portability and the concepts of an open web for one reason or the other, and they demand services that offer value in this form.

Tagged.com coughs up $650,000 after spammy+deceitful practices marketing their online social network. A well deserved, “Ouch”.

Full story.

Something we all knew is now official policy:

You may have heard that here at Google we’re obsessed with speed, in our products and on the web. As part of that effort, today we’re including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests…

…If you are a site owner, webmaster or a web author, here are some free tools that you can use to evaluate the speed of your site:

• Page Speed, an open source Firefox/Firebug add-on that evaluates the performance of web pages and gives suggestions for improvement.
• YSlow, a free tool from Yahoo! that suggests ways to improve website speed.
• WebPagetest shows a waterfall view of your pages’ load performance plus an optimization checklist.
• In Webmaster Tools, Labs > Site Performance shows the speed of your website as experienced by users around the world as in the chart below. We’ve also blogged about site performance.

Now when I first used Facebook I used their system of uploading information from my Google Mail address book to find friends. Little did I know (and I would not have expected) that Facebook would retain that information after I’d used it for the purpose that I gave it to them for, and later use it to tell other people about me.

This seems like a problem, although they do list it in the Facebook privacy policy. You can opt out of course, but to do so you’d obviously have to know about it first. Which is indicative of an even larger problem, to me.

Here’s Facebook’s privacy policy as of today at half size:

There’s 350,000,000 people on Facebook, and 600,000 more are signing up every day. How many of them do you think have read that? How many of them know what it opts them (and everyone in their address book) in to?

Yesterday, Google rolled out a new home page design. Or rather a new homepage design element, but it’s such a structural change that it could be considered a whole new design. (Their home page is so sparse, it doesn’t take much.) All Google.com shows now is their logo, the search box and the submit buttons…

…until it detects mouse movement, then the rest of the GUI elements fade in.

I like it. It gives Google the sheen of the sophisticated tech company they really are, without screwing up their minimalist design; no rounded corners, “Apple Reflections” or web 2.0 gradients thank-you-very-much.

But wait, this looks familiar. Here’s a shot of the original Google home page in 1999, when they were still in beta:

It looks like the big G is returning to its roots. And I for one, think it really works. Not that it matters what I think, just as you might suspect Google tested the hell of this thing before making it live:

…the variant of the homepage we are launching today was positive or neutral on all key metrics, except one: time to first action. At first, this worried us a bit: Google is all about getting you where you are going faster — how could we launch something that potentially slowed users down? Then, we realized: we want users to notice this change… and it does take time to notice something (though in this case, only milliseconds!). Our goal then became to understand whether or not over time the users began to use the homepage even more efficiently than the control group and, sure enough, that was the trend we observed.

The fade-in happens quickly enough that by the time you get your mouse to where you’re going, the control you were seeking is there. And since the search input field is auto-focused when the page loads, you can just type your query and hit enter if you don’t need/aren’t interested in this other stuff.

I love this UI decision. It lets Google have its cake by un-encumbering search users; and eat it too, by still providing for the other subset of users that visit Google.com as a jumping off point for their secondary service offerings.

As Bing shows signs of actually mounting an effective assault on the behemoth, and the Newspapers threaten to take their ball and go home find a business model that works without Google, they make a stylish return to what made them great in the first place: search, and that’s all.

After two full business days of relentlessly negative coverage for Microsoft, the noise from the echo chamber is deafening. More than 500 separate posts on mainstream tech sites and in blogs have amplified the original story, most of them simply repeating the accusations from the Prevx blog post with no original reporting or fact-checking. The story has now taken on a life of its own…

…You’ll notice I didn’t link to any of the Prevx blog posts or IDG headlines in the account above. Here’s why: Doing so increases the rank of those pages on search engines and makes those inaccurate headlines and summaries even more likely to bubble to the top of a search for troubleshooting information on Windows. And given that most of those stories have not been corrected, it would be irresponsible to give them more Google juice than they already have.

Some good reporting on some bad reporting by Ed Bott, a reporter with search on his mind, at ZDnet.

Rupert Murdoch/Newscorp are threatening to block Google from indexing their content, and it’s looking like they have a real incentive to do so, since Microsoft might pay them for it. (It’ll be interesting to see the zeros on that check since Google currently provides ~25% of traffic to Newscorp’s sites such as The Wall Street Journal and The New York Post.)

To anyone that works in the search, and most of us in the even broader web development industry, this sounds absolutely ludicrous. There must be some fundamental misunderstandings of the mechanism (search) at play for this to even be considered:

1. Misunderstanding What People Are Searching For

Murdoch thinks that people are using search to look for Newscorp sites, but they aren’t. People use search to look for information. When we type in the topic of a late breaking news story we don’t try different engines and key phrases until a source we recognize pops up in the results. That’s optimizing our information intake and it’s hard, we went to Google in the first place so we wouldn’t have to do this. Instead of optimizing our information intake, the majority of us will satisfice.  We click through on one of the results that’s provided; the one that looked like it might solve our problem in the three to five seconds we cared to spend scanning the page. We do this because the penalty is low and we know it usually works.

2. Underestimating The Quality Content Supply

Taking Newscorp’s content out of Google will only strengthen Newscorp’s rivals. As a content provider myself, I would love for Newscorp to remove themselves from Google’s index. And I’m not alone. There’s an army of new media publishers that have been doing a good job of slaying the print media dragon over the last few years and they would be overjoyed if a monster like Newscorp just took itself out of the online content provider gene pool.

Thousands of people will fill that void left by all the Newscorp results disappearing. Yes, a few loyal followers will follow the Wall Street Journal and New York Post content to Bing. (Or will they-if a user is specifically searching for a New York Post result, why not just search directly on the site itself? Why keep querying various third parties until you receive a result from the site you want?) People will keep using Google because it’s what they know, they deliver high quality results and they’ll keep clicking on the relevant search results that Google has always delivered, but non of them will be Newscorp results, and that’s a lot of clicks – people that are knowledge-hungry and primed to discover new information sources, ones that will replace Newscorp sources. It’s an opportunity that many online content creators will jump at.

3. No One Will Pick You Over Google, Even If You’re Google*

People trust Google. People trust Google so much that when a competitor’s search results are compared with Google’s and the brand names are switched, people pick the Google-branded results. No one thinks that Google is bad at search. When something is not included in Google’s search index, users don’t go looking for it or wonder, “gee why isn’t that Wall Street Journal article in Google, Google must be broken.” They think that the article in question is what’s broken, or that the website is down, or that it’s not included because it’s poor quality. This could be partially remedied by a traditional media marketing blitz, but that kind of marketing doesn’t work so well with the search savvy crowd that makes a conscious decisions about the engine they use; which makes that an incomplete solution at best, and at worst, an expensive waste of time. Either way, there will be serious damage to Newscorp’s various brands. (Damage to the tune of 25% of their current audience.)

*Yes, this brand bias will go away eventually, but that’s a long road; combined with the other factors above, Newscorp may never see the end of it.

Whither Bing?

This is a raw deal for Newscorp, but what about Bing? It would be great publicity for them and help keep the momentum they’ve generated, but it’s definitely not the high road. Paying 3rd parties to remove themselves from competitors’ search results isn’t a sustainable strategy and smacks of desperation.

It’s also a credibility issue with web developers and tech industry insiders: some prominent people are complaining that this is the start of a sky-is-falling scenario for the state of the current web. Microsoft is already much maligned in these circles because of the havoc that their deliberately non-standards compliant browsers continue to wreak on the web. This will just be one more notch on Microsofts let’s-piss-off the-community-we-operate-in-and-hire-from. Not that Microsoft cares, or at least they haven’t in the past.

3.1 The REAL Reason Newscorp Should Be Scared

You can take all of the above as biased rambling (I do work in search), but the real reason that Newscorp should be extremely concerned about the success of a search pullout is that Google’s response has essentially been, “we don’t care.”

“Google News and web search are a tremendous source of promotion for news organisations, sending them about 100,000 clicks every minute… Publishers put their content on the web because they want it to be found, so very few choose not to include their material in Google News and web search. But if they tell us not to include it, we don’t.”

And there isn’t anyone who knows more about the internet, or making money from the internet, than Google. Yes, they could be* are bluffing, but my money says they’re just looking at the future instead of the past, along with most of their users.

*UPDATE:

Google just announced it’s First Click Free program, allowing publishers to limit users to no more than five pages per day without registering or subscribing.

When you paste the following into the address bar of your browser when on google.com and hit return, you should find yourself as new participant of Google’s latest and more all-encompassing prototype test – the one with a new logo, buttons, and always-visible left-hand pane in results. Please note I needed to sign out first for this to work.

javascript:void(document.cookie="PREF=ID=20b6e4c2f44943bb:U=4bf292d46faad806:TM=1249677602:LM=1257919388:S=odm0Ys-53ZueXfZG;path=/; domain=.google.com");

Looks like Google is taking a page out of Microsoft’s (as in Bing’s) book. It’s a surprising move, but one that I think will improve their service. The time framing options presented in the all new left sidebar are something I’ve been wanting for years. (Time framing had been available in the advanced search area for a while, but now it’s a few less clicks away.)

Google is testing this in a few markets right now, and it will be rolling out soon if it gets a positive response. My gut says it will, but I’m sure it’s just an A/B split test for them-the test users will determine if it gets implemented or not.

We’ll be back on Monday after taking a long weekend, have a great holiday!

Social media terrifies a lot of businesses. Because we have to stop controlling and start contributing. It is indeed scary-I’m not saying it’s not-but the good news is this stuff has been around for a few years now and we can be sure it can go 4 ways…

1. You won’t commit once you find out what it costs. It’s just as expensive as traditional media marketing/PR unless you do it in-house, and then the time commitments are large. The big difference (and the whole big deal about social media, in my opinion) is that it usually works better as a committed in-house effort as opposed to marketing and PR which are most definitely better left to dedicated agencies for all but the largest organizations.
2. You pretend to commit, but don’t. Leaving hollow burned out remains of your brand in the form of incomplete profiles in various social communities online. Ease of entry, combined with a sensationalizing of the rare quick return in social media marketing, has made this the most common result of business forays into the market.
3. You commit, but not to the community, only to your own message. You end up damaging your brand in the various social communities you enter online. (This is the one you heard about that’s so scary… Example, example, example, and example.)
4. You commit to the community that you’re entering by using your expertise to add value. This lands you in a personal relationship with a bunch of people online that will be your advocates. (This is THE ONE! The one you heard about that pays immeasurable dividends to your business.)

If you’re not going to do the last one, then do the first one. Skip the middle two, because those are the ones where you spend money and time hurting yourself.