by Martin Dower

Devoted as I am to Safari it’s finally time to say goodbye and move over to the latest shiny toy in the box, Google Chrome. I’m not sure how I am feeling at the moment as I do love Safari for it’s integration into OSX but it’s just losing too much ground to Chrome. So, in a fanfare and a hail of bullets I quit Safari for the last time today.

Google’s Chrome just seems to run so much better on my MacBook and has a fantastic range of add-ins that I use a lot. In fact I would be tempted to say that Chrome has improved my productivity and certainly cuts down on the number of sites I have to visit and tabs I have to have open.

Being a huge 37Signals product user I’m able to slick-away the operation using Autosave, time and graphing, Campfire as well as more commonly used extensions such as Evernote clipper, Dropbox and Wikipedia.

• Avoid opinion, professional or otherwise, let testing give you the answer
• Have a clearly defined and measurable target for the page, immediate conversion may hamper conversion down the track so keep your eye on the big picture
• If your brand is unknown then one of your challenges is credibility, otherwise the challenge is product/service communication
• Long pages need cues to help people scroll down, this can make or break a long page
• Consider infinite scrolling as a solution, harder to implement but it effectively “right-sizes” the pages to visitor needs
• Don’t sweat what is long and what is short

This post was prompted by a discussion on eConsultancy.

Nope. In July this year he publicly announced the end of search and the death of Microsoft. The video is superbly exciting, well-informed and offers an all too rare perspective on the role of emerging technology.

A self-confessed Apple lover, Flash hater (Ed:ace!) and believer that HTML5 is the greatest thing since Google started to own the web 10 years ago. He’s evangelical about the iPad and iPhone as devices because of their massive adoption rate and where Microsoft once had 96% control of internet connected devices, it now has just 50% because the growth of mobile is replacing the old PC era. That’s a scary number for Microsoft, losing nearly half of your influence in just 3 years.

Google, meanwhile, has captured 80% of the index search business from which it then went onto top controlling the web advertising market. But at a price as ”Google’s success eventually filled the web with crap, so consumers began using other products to search: Wikipedia for facts, Facebook for matters of taste, time or money, Twitter for news, Yelp for restaurants, Realtor.com for places to live, LinkedIn for jobs. Over the past three years, these alternatives have gone from 10% of search volume to about half,” said McNamee.

As the “crap” built up other companies stepped into the space to provide a better, more focussed, search experience which also had the advantage of external branding. Until the birth of Facebook, Wikipedia et al your search results were, in essence, Google branded so big brands struggled to appear over the flotsam and jetsam of spammers and the product of bent SEO companies.

As Roger goes on to say ”As if all this competition wasn’t bad enough for Google, then along came Apple with the iPhone and App Store… Apple has branded, trustworthy apps for everything. If they want news, Apple customers use apps from the New York Times or Wall Street Journal. If they want to know which camera to buy, they ask friends on Facebook. If they want to go to dinner, they use the Yelp app. These searches have economic value and it’s not going to Google, even on Android…When Apple and the app model win, Google’s search business loses.”

But it does’t stop there. Roger goes onto say that HTML5 offers a better experience than Apple’s App model and it far cheaper to develop and deploy so could spell the end of the App Store.

The video is 10 minutes long, the presentation slides are so-so,  I suggest you listen to it when you are doing your expenses, or making a brew.

Google Plus could almost be Facebook Version 2 – which you have to think must be heading our way at some point. You can add me on Google Plus here.

Anyhoo, on with Robert’s useful post.

My tips for newer users of Google+:

1. Learn what circles are and how to put people into them. When I first started out I went crazy with circles, opening up something like 20 of them. That wasn’t very smart, it turned out. Now I’m back to seven. Simple ones like “friends, family, coworkers, geeks, VCs, tech press.” Etc.

2. Learn how to distribute content to circles, or public, or certain people. When you post here you don’t need to send it to everyone. You can send it just to people you’ve put in a specific circle, like “friends” or you can send it to a specific person, like me.

2b: Learn not to use your home feed as your main place to visit. Start a circle called “my home circle.” Now when you add people you can add them to multiple circles, but if you don’t want to see someone everyday you can keep them out of your home circle (unfortunately if you follow people they will always be on your actual main feed).

3. Find a few “seed followers” that you like to follow. Then look at who they are following. You’ll find lots more people to follow that way. For instance, I’m following 3,200 geeks, including most of the execs, tech press, VCs, etc. If those kinds of people float your boat, look through my list and pick and choose who you also want to follow.

4. Remember, posts with photos or video do better than just text posts, so see if you can figure out how to get other media in here.

5. If someone gets too noisy, let’s cover how to handle that.

A. Too many posts. Sometimes you’ll follow someone like +Chris Pirillo who posts a lot. What I’ve done with those folks, is put them into a “Noisy buttheads” circle. That way they don’t pollute all your other circles, although they still will show up on your home feed. Feel free to put me in that circle for now.

B. Too many comments on some posts. Some posts will go viral here. It won’t just happen to me. For instance, it might happen to you now that I’ve pushed you into 33,000 people’s view by resharing your post (more on that in a second). If this happens to just one post, you can click the drop-down-menu over to the right of a post and choose “mute.” You’ll never see that post again. This is a good way to get rid of some things that are cluttering up your feed.

C. Consistently high engagement noise (there are already about 50 people who are consistently getting high engagement, folks like me, Trey Ratcliff, Leo Laporte, etc etc) and for us you just need to segregate us into our own circle. Or just put up with that kind of noise (I enjoy engaging in a lot of rapid-fire comments).

6. Turn off email notifications, or learn to filter them with Gmail’s filters. I have turned them off. Too much email, too fast, especially if you get hit by one of the whales here (sorry for hitting you on the first day).

7. Setup your profile and make sure it’s hyper complete. Look at mine and then go set yours up here (I’ve spent a lot of time on mine).

8. Try to talk about something other than Google+. Try to say what you’ll be doing with this. Post something original. Or, start a good debate about something that you care about. Etc. I’m really trying to do this because I’m getting bored with talking about Google+, but I see a lot of new people coming in here, so wanted to write down my thoughts based on my first 13 days.

9. Try using keyboard. J moves down. K moves up. I’m sure there’s others coming.

10. If you use Google Chrome as your browser, there are a bunch of extensions you should try.

11. Learn how resharing works. For instance, I took your original post and reshared it with my audience. Right now that causes some duplication noise (folks following both of us will see your post twice, once from you, once reshared from me) and there will be separate comments under both. Fragmentation is gonna be a problem until Google fixes that here. But resharing is how things are getting very viral. For instance, I just reshared your item with 33,000 people. Now, what if 10% of those reshared it with THEIR audiences? This is why things get crazy very quickly.

Again, huge thanks to Robert for this post – it made my starting out with G+ much simpler. I’m not sure I’m ready to give up Safari and install Chrome but, hey, time will tell.

But I almost never directly use Facebook. I’ve also been aggressively culling my friend list so it’s down from over 300 to almost 50. By this time next year I will probably have less than 20 friends and not be using it. Twitter, on the other hand, has grown for me but primarily I use it as a link sharer so when I find something I like I tend to re-tweet to the small list of followers I have.

I am a heavy user of LinkedIn. This is, I suppose, the business version of Facebook and it’s highly useful me to stay in touch with my business circles.

Enter Google Plus. It easily fills the sharing role of Twitter. It covers off following tech geeks that I want to stay abreast of. It integrates (obviously) with our Google Apps accounts nicely. It’s still early adopter. It’s much better than Google Wave.

So this will be the end of Facebook contribution for me, I suspect – it’s a good place to see what the world is up to, magazine style but no real use for me at all. Twitter will take a beating as a result of the sharing function so I’ll end up transferring my Twitter effort to our corporate account, which is really rather overdue (I don’t really believe in the hype around personal brand).

So that’s my social world now re-organised. Ta Google, oh…and two fingers up to Zuckerberg for making it impossible to get my data out of Facebook easily.

Well, there are pros and cons for each approach so I thought I’d explore some of the major functions expected on a site and see which ones are, on balance, seriously worth considering but before I start this I thought I take a generic look at the advantages and problems or using third-party widgets on your site.

Advantages

• Best of breed is possible here, you can potentially have a widget that’s had thousands or even millions of man-days of development. That has got to be attractive
• Many of these widgets are hosted on the cloud, provided as SaaS maybe, reducing the load on your own hosting / server / communications infrastructure
• The cost model for most widgets it based around either low-cost license or medium-cost capex. Very rarely do you see an expensive capex widget
• Changing widgets can be pretty simple, allowing you to move with the times and adopt the latest, greatest, newest thing out there
• Using industry-standard widgets (Google search, Facebook Like) means visitors do not require a learning curve
• Ongoing improvements by the suppliers can usually be incorporated
• Browser and platform support is carried out by a third-party, reducing costs, overhead and (usually) lead-time
• Some widgets have APIs to allow add-on development
• Ease of adding new gadgets and widgets can quickly create a more interactive environment

Disadvantages

• Can be difficult to bespoke build some items, risk of shoe-horning the business needs into the widget and not the other way round
• Costs can mount up for simple license terms over time, especially if the widget has a poor RoI
• Managing lots of suppliers for different elements requires good project and cost management
• Suppliers come and go quicker, they stop developing a widget, or get bought, or go bust so you need succession planning
• Ownership of data can be a little blurred generating possible privacy and regulatory issues
• Easier for your competition to “copy” you be installing the same widgets
• Harder to differentiate your offering if you use standard tools
• Dependent on the uptime of the third-party providers (only recently Amazon EC3 servers went down and currently Sony’s Playstation Network is down!)
• Ease of adding new gadgets and widgets can quickly create a more dis-jointed environment

Overall it is worth considering a mix of approaches, some standard functions are actually better served as widgets (site search is a good example) but where the web-site is reflecting or providing key functions that differentiate you from the competition is is probably better to stick to bespoke and custom-built applications. By way of example; a good search engine is expected on most sites but is very rarely critical to it’s success (unless you are a search engine).

Before we dig into the actual widgets (part 2) it’s worth considering the Free vs Paid vs Freemium model for widgets. Obviously, a free service has the benefits of costing nothing to run but usually has the downsides of your videos being used as a revenue generation method via adverts, interstitials, sponsored links etc. Paid is a better option as that usually entails some service level agreement and sometimes the ability to “white-label” the widget. Freemium sits half-way in between and has seen its’ historical credibility waver a little recently but a great way to try something for free and then upgrade to the paid-version if it works for you. However, if the fully-paid-up version is only £50 a month then you’d be nuts to go for the free version if it costs only £50 to try out the real, industrial-strength, version.

(…contd)

This is enormously helpful as we no longer need to rely on knowing your postcode before we can suggest what products and services you might buy. In fact, that notion just looks plain stupid now despite it still being widely used in traditional marketing. So longer do we see groups of 17-24 year olds or C2 demographics or single mothers or people living in EH13 postcode. Now we see people across all spectrums who share a love of cars, dark humour, 1980′s gadgets, rambling etc. This is going to make our life as marketers a great deal easier, we just need to tap into those loves and apply them appropriately.

Would be really useful if we had a web platform that recognised those communities and talked to them in a consistent manner…oh yes, that what VITES is used for

When it’s all done in Tunisia in just a few weeks and then Egypt falls victim to a similar fate (this time it’s corruption and low wages) after treading the same path of oppression it’s no wonder a lot of unhappy groups decide to pick this moment to rise. The domino effect is now in full swing and whilst some countries will gain and (maybe) move to a better democracy you’d be wise not to forget the 2008 protests in the Ukraine after the country had a financial meltdown and the government was thrown out. Only to come back in a slightly modified form.

Twitter or Youtube aren’t the cause, poor governance is. Wonder when it will hit the UK? Maybe when middle England mortgage rates hit 10% and petrol cost £2 a litre.

Related articles

• Are We Watching a Twitter Revolution in the Mideast? (alternet.org)
• Social media, cellphone video fuel Arab protests (canada.com)
• Tunisia after the revolution (theworld.org)
• Arab revolts: Another good week for social media, a bad week for dictators (venturebeat.com)
• “Disrupting the Domino Theory: Libya and Bahrain” and related posts (globalcomment.com)
• Tweeting About a Revolution (epiphanysolutions.co.uk)
• Is social media changing your world? (kilgannonsays.wordpress.com)
• Social Media Sparks Egyptian Revolution (socialnetworkingnewsdaily.com)

I don’t think it needs to be that complex. True, most organisations will have some specific needs but 90% of the needs of most marketers should be simple to provide in an easy-to-digest application as most really only need to know:

# Which traffic streams generate what business and how much does that cost

# What is the conversion rate for each of the traffic streams and calls-to-action

# What’s the availability of the web service like and how does the outside world see it’s performance

# How are my A/B tests going, winners and losers please

# If I am using profiling on the web what are the relative performance metrics for each of the profiles

# Some historical reporting on overall performance

Google does indeed do most of this and if you had the time and inclination you could learn how to use the systems and pick out the 10 or so important metrics. Many marketers don’t. This is further hampered by the self-serving approach of most GA Authorised Consultants, as we all know that the first recommendation a consultant makes it order more consultancy!

This has been bugging us (and our clients) for a while so we’re in the process of developing a simpler web performance tool that focusses on the needs of marketers. We’re not suggesting you dump GA quite yet, merely that you consider a simpler, clearer approach to understanding web performance. KISS.

Before I go on a rant about comments, I must specify, my problem sits with the ability to comment on wall posts. Commenting on photos and statuses are cool in my book.

Anyway, back when I first started using the site, a friend would write a message on my wall and I’d almost automatically hit the “See wall-to-wall” link which showed me the running commentary between myself and that particular person. I’d reciprocate with a wall post and on it went. We weren’t just randomly posting on each other’s walls. We were having a conversation.

At some point (I can’t recall exactly when), Facebook began allowing people to comment on individual wall posts and for me that killed the conversation. I still use wall posts, they’re still a useful tool but now communication between friends feels broken and segmented rather than one flowing commentary.

Am I just being nostalgic wishing for a simpler Facebook to return without the Mafia Wars and Farmville invites or am I making a valid (but perhaps an obsessively obscure) point about online communication? I’d love to hear your opinions.