Sharing geo-based data as part of people’s usual social media is becoming more popular. Location based services like Gowalla and Foursquare have encouraged people to be more open with their whereabouts, allowing them to publish to Twitter and Facebook. Add the improved map feature on Flickr and the iPhone into the mix and we’re one step closer to seamless, timely, location-based information and images to share with our friends and family on the most popular (and/or appropriate) social media sites.

I don’t like doing major iPhone updates as there hasn’t been an update yet where I’ve not heard stories of iPhones crashing and generally being worse than before. Fortunately, I’ve managed to avoid any problems and get to experience the new features as though I’d opened a brand new iPhone!

I’ll be honest, the update last year wasn’t all that great in my opinion, the features I found useful day-to-day could have probably been counted on one hand. Since hearing about the new features of iOS4 I’ve been waiting in anticipation to play with the new features and already putting together a small list of things I love about it…

Folders

Folders is an easy one to start with as they’re pretty self explanatory. Basically, iOS4 allows you to group your apps together making your home screen less cluttered and more organised. The automatic naming of folders (using the apps you’re grouping to find their common category eg. Games, Social etc) makes the process quick and easy to do.

5x Optical Zoom

My experience in the past with Digital Zoom on any kind of camera has been less than fun. The results were often poor and pixelated making it about as useful at capturing an image as a Rhino with a paintbrush.

With it’s reputation already tarnished, I wasn’t expecting much when I took a few test shots and for a moment I was again left disappointed. I opened the camera app and pointed it to a random subject and zoomed in. The onscreen representation was pixelated and poor quality at which I huffed with disgust, then I went into my photo album to check the end result. The image was good quality and relatively sharp for a digitally zoomed image. My opinion of digital zoom was swiftly changed, it can be done!

Photos and Places

The photo album on iPhone has gone pretty much untouched (as far as I can tell) for the last few years so I was pleasantly surprised to see that Apple started to use geo-tagging in a way that’s useful to iPhone users. When browsing your photo album there is a new icon named “Places”, touching this brings to you a map view. Geo-tagged data is retrieved from the photos stored on the iPhone and applied to map based on where they were taken. I think it’s a different but useful way to view photos. With this feature I can quickly find photos I took at my wedding venue,  a friend’s wedding or on a recent trip to London.

Personally, I think Places is the best improvement I’ve discovered so far. It gives additional functionality and an alternative way view photos while encouraging iPhone users (whether they know directly or not) to apply more useful data into their photos, which in the fast world of the Web could lead to new and interesting applications for viewing photos.

We’ve been around a while, in fact we’ve been around pretty much since the explosion of the Internet in the late 90’s and during that time we’ve seen our fair share of snake oil come and go. There is one subject that stirs up more than it’s fair share of opinions and that’s SEO…or Search Engine Optimization if you’ve lived under rock for the last 10 years.

Never been a fan really, pretty much decided early on that if you follow the Search Engines’ (read: Google) guidelines and build sites using best practice then you’ll work out nice and dandy. But there does seem to be a huge following and the most diverse advice in this field, so much so that almost every SEO ’specialist’ will give you different and conflicting advice (for a price, mind).

I do accept that there are some tricks and neat stunts that, to a certain extent, can pull the wool over the engines’ eyes but not usually for long and not usually with any kind of long-term gain. So, making me chuckle this week, then, is SEOMoz telling us all that there is a science to how well you rank. Really? Fantastic!

Except, if you elect to use science to ‘prove’ something then you had better get the science right. SEOMoz may have misunderstood statistics and, worse still, cloaked this bad science in sciencey-sounding words like Mean Spearman Correlation. This has generated a flurry of arguments discussing the various merits of using different methodologies to analyses data. Worth the read, but only if you’re secretly hiding a love of stats.

Some nice rebuts too from Ted Dziuba and Dr E. Garcia – both who warn about paying attention to this kind of science. Alternatively, you can read how Google suggest you go about working with search engines (PDF).

The iPlayer is as popular as ever, enjoying its best month to date in April 2010, with 123m requests for TV and radio programmes.

The homepage now has ’sliding drawers’ which open to reveal more content in each of the categories; featured, most popular, friends, and ‘for you’.

Other changes include a complete separation of TV and radio content to make it clearer for users, while you can also flick easily between channels while watching live TV.

The best improvements for me are the personalisation features. I use iPlayer regularly and it should know what I like based on my viewing habits, so making use of this data to produce recommendations would have been a welcome step.

Instead of simply learning from previous viewing habits though, it seems that the new iPlayer relies on users adding programmes into their ‘favourites’ folder, and then lines these up in a playlist for you.

The introduction of social network integration is another welcome step; while viewing any programmes, you can click to recommend it on iPlayer, as well as sharing it on Twitter or Facebook via the recommend button:

The addition of user recommendations should also make content discovery much easier, as you can now read other users’ reviews of programmes, and see the most recommended in chart form.

Other developments to come include the addition of links to programmes from ITV Player, 4OD, Clic, Demand Five and SeeSaw, meaning that the iPlayer can direct users to these other websites, while also making the iPlayer a more attractive destination.

Key new features

Simple

* Cleaner user experience, with three discovery areas:

–Sliding drawers: Featured, For you, Most popular, Friends

–TV Channels: TV listings page, showing what’s on now

–Categories: browse by genre and sub-genre

* Separate TV & Radio

–No longer grouped together, easier to browse

–Radio console

–Pop-up console runs while you browse

* Channel-hop whilst watching live

–Quick links in viewing window, one-click to flip between channels

* BBC iPlayer Desktop

–Download favourites in advance to save time

–Easier to watch favourite programmes offline

* Improved viewing experience

–Fewer buttons

–Larger screen

–Higher quality video

Personal

* Favourites

–Tell BBC iPlayer what you like, and it will line programmes up in a convenient playlist

–New programmes, expiring programmes and unwatched programmes are flagged so it’s easier to keep track

* Improved recommendations based on what you watch and listen to

–Stored in local cookies, or via BBC iD

–Families can log in through separate IDs: individual experiences through the same machine

–Improved programme alerts delivered via email, so you don’t miss a thing

* Roam with BBC iD

–Log in to store preferences, so you pick up where you left off on another computer

* Customisable EPG

–List your favourite channels and stations

Connected

* Connect with Facebook

–Post content directly to your wall to recommend and share with friends

* Sync with Twitter

–Auto-tweet to recommend and pass links to friends

* Live chat with friends using Windows Live Messenger

–Log in to Windows Live Messenger through BBC iPlayer

–Forward links to others online: watch on-demand at the same time

–Comment live on programmes as they air

European law is now going to be tested to, in effect, allow people to opt-out forever from being watched on web-sites and with the introductions of Google’s new secure search engine (why exactly did it take them so long to introduce it?) are we seeing the beginning of the end for Google’s free web analytics (and more importantly, the hundreds of other uninspiring client-side, me-too, analytics applications that are peddled by myopic organisations). Clearly the Register think so.

It is interesting to see Google effectively “switch sides” on this and move closer to loving it’s users and somewhat leaving it’s corporate customers out in the cold. Yes, they will say that Google Analytics is free and provided “as is” but so many organisations have (maybe rashly) decided to use it as the standard reporting platform. What are they going to do now, I wonder? The ball is gaining some momentum with a company providing a browser plug-in to disable GA from your session. How long before that is a standard part of the browser and requires opt-in to activate it?

The recent furore over Google’s grabbing of personal data during the StreetView programme, Facebook’s alleged abuse of personal information and now the forcing of explicit opt-in for any cookie will change the game. Cookies are not evil, many organisations put them to really good and productive effect so the challenge for organisations now is to show really good reasons why they should track visitors and do so in an open transparent way and really add value.

Oh, and stop using random free services that are not well understood and have huge privacy issues – it’s just being lazy and treating your customer rather shoddily.

The downside of this is that Apple is now coming under increasing scrutiny from the various regulatory bodies around the world regarding it’s anti-competition strategy.

As I spend most of my week here in Dean Clough and other places in Halifax, there are a number of places I check-in more often than others. A few weeks ago, while picking up lunch for the Connected crew at a local cafe, I pulled out my iPhone and checked-in. It then occurred to me that the cafe staff probably had no idea that I was promoting their business as they were serving me. This was live user generated advertising.

As the social web gains more momentum, this type of service could shift the way advertising and promotion is approached. We’ve already seen a big take up of all business types using Facebook and Twitter to promote their businesses, throwing in live location based data could make things very interesting.

Mobile browsing has grown fast over the last few years thanks to the wide availability of smartphones and despite most sites work great in mobile browsers, they can still be a usability nightmare. Other options have been made available in the form of CMS plugins allowing you to apply a more app like experience to your site.

Not ones to ignore conventions (where they make sense), we’ve applied our own iPhone friendly skin to our site allowing you to get straight to our content wherever you are.

Let us know what you think!

I had the good fortune of being the one who had first dibs on the little critter so like a child at Christmas I opened it up, threw away the “Start up guide” (who needs them really) and fired it up. Aside from the physical device itself, the interface is a thing of beauty. Yes, the home screen does resemble the iPhone but as an iPhone user, that meant instant recognition of the User Interface (UI) and within a minute (literally), I had email, contacts, calendars and bookmarks all synced from my MobileMe and GoogleMail accounts. Obviously, this is in part due to the transferability of account information afforded to us by cloud computing.

I spent a bit of time getting reacquainted with my Inbox using the Mail client, responding to email, filing etc and the whole process feels like a seamless linear task. Holding the device landscape you get a fairly conventional layout displaying the contents of your inbox (or folder if you’re looking through your stored mail) with your selected email on the right. Turning the device to a portrait position allows you to focus on your chosen email, hiding the inbox/folder contents within a button in the top menu bar allowing you to access the information when you need it.

Of course I was still working so I did have to put it down and get on with other things but I periodically took a short break to browse various websites, reading blogs and news items and for me this has been the most eye opening experience so far.

I take a great interest in web design and read many blogs which are (like my personal site) designed in a way that each article or blog post is individually designed to fit the content, much like printed magazines, and I think the iPad makes this type of implementation really stand out. Ironically, they seem to resemble magazine articles more than blogs or websites.

This isn’t limited to design based sites either, all the sites I visited had a fresh new look about them, they suddenly became easier to navigate and information was more digestible. I must point out, this opinion is based on the orientation of the iPad being held portrait. Bizarrely, turning it to landscape, I think sites become normal again.

Room with (more of) a view

The problem with landscape is the orientation is the same as what we’re used to on computers, it’s the same letterbox shaped window with the site’s header, navigation and maybe the top 5 lines of body copy.

Turning it portrait opens up 50% more screen real estate which gives you a much better view of the information available on a page allowing your eye to digest more in one go. This view is very subjective and many sites I visited I was already familiar with the site’s layout and structure so others may (and will) have a different opinion on the matter. One thing for sure is if tablet computing picks up speed and becomes as ubiquitous as smartphones, it’ll add a whole new dimension to the fun debate of “the fold”

There are obviously downsides to getting to play with this early, namely the absence of the iPad app store (it’s currently only open in the US). My first 24 hours with the device was limited by what you can do with it’s native apps, which to be fair is quite a lot, but the real test will be when apps become available and I can test out the apps I use regularly on my iPhone to see how they fair.

Overall my opinion is set, I want an iPad of my own that I can carry around with me. I’d love to hear your opinions on the device, have you got one early? What do you think of it? What impact will it have on our day-to-day lives?

The copy approach could certainly work, it would be certainly cheap and (sort of) embraces the “crowdsourcing” philosophy that is gaining traction. However, if you are only as good as the next guy then you are simply “keeping up with the neighbours”. It’s not going to give you a competitive advantage unless your competitors are blind; which many probably still are.

True innovation, tested properly, can give a company competitive advantage if properly implemented – so real thought-leading organisations need to plough their own development and testing furrow whilst keeping an eye out for what others (not just competitors) are doing.

Not testing yet? You’re screwed, probably, even if you’re not screwed you’re certainly handicapping your marketing efforts.