In Online Retail, Usability Is Rated No. 1 – eMarketer – At the very end of this article is an important point. If visitors to your e-commerce site are there for research, you can think of your site like any other non-e-commerce site where the goal is efficient access to valuable information. Good to remember.
Music – AudioJungle – I haven’t bought anything from this music collection yet, but if you’re familiar with the other online options for sound effects or background music for video, you’ll recognize the potential here. Plus, it’s part of Envato, so you can expect quality.
Data Monday: Mobile Apps vs. Mobile Web – Clients are often quick to request we build an app when often a mobile website makes more sense. Then again, Jobs says the future is apps. Here are the user tendency numbers to help you decide.
Article: Twitter Moms Care for Content over Coupons – Congrats to moms everywhere for bucking the Twitter-Direct Marketing love fest. Promos and coupons, your days are numbered. Let’s all follow our mothers and demand more for our follows.
Twitter Launches Promoted/Sponsored Tweets Before USA World Cup Game – Save some of that Adsense money for promoted Tweets. Can’t wait to see the auction action for this new medium. Also, has anyone else noticed the number of ESPN3 pre-roll spots has increased as we near the finals? Love the #worldcup.
Launchlist – Your one stop website checklist! – A nice pre-launch checklist for web development. Some of the list items are pretty vague, but this is a great start for creating your own list with more detail.
These are my links for May 31st through June 14th:
jQuery Masonry · David DeSandro – Intriguing way to tesselate content areas. Better than CSS floats, David Desandro’s method minimizes empty areas caused by content area heights in the same row.
One-Third of Twitter Users Talk Brands – eMarketer – There are a finite number of influencers in the social space who will _ever_ consider talking brand or products. As this plateau continues, the competition for a share of voice with these influencers will become more and more fierce. Better spend some time on creative social presence, and stop just pushing out coupons.
GoPro : Wearable Digital Cameras – 1080p, timelapse, slow mo, waterproof to 180 feet: $200. @storiestold recommends this little crash cam. After losing one to a semi, he’s on his second. That’s all the endorsement I need.
SpyFu – Let’s you spy on your competitors’ search marketing efforts. See their keywords. Hackalicious.
25 ways of encouraging and rewarding customer engagement | Econsultancy – Building a community or social app? If you build it, they will come, but might come back. This article offers some functionality that can help to make your community or app stickier. Participation is essential to the health of any community. It’s really the currency of social wealth.
HOW TO: Reclaim Privacy on Facebook – ReclaimPrivacy.org bookmark lets you check on your vulnerability by checking your Facebook privacy settings. Possibly the most useful part of this tool are the quick links to your Facebook settings pages for controlling specific exposure areas.
eMarketer – Is the click still king? Despite the recogition of the need to measure hard ROI, moat of us are still counting click throughs.
eMarketer – Consumers still prefer ads that offer discounts or deals.
These are my links for April 28th through May 4th:
HOW TO: Embed a Tweet – Here’s the official instructions for embedding a tweet. No more screenshots!
eMarketer Mobile - – Reviews are still most valuable to customers, but Facebook Page catching up.
Twitter to Launch Embeddable Tweets? – I wonder how each embedded tweet will be identified? Probably by ID? Ohh, I wonder if that means tweet carousels or slideshows will follow.
Web Design News 30/03/10 « Boagworld – An killer group of usability & blog tips from @boagworld last week. The dirty quickly:If your site is designed well (with a visual hierarchy, scannable content, and good typographic relationships, etc) there really is no fold. Yes, important content will always compete for the top of the page, but great designs draw the visitor naturally deeper down the page.Usability testing needn’t be a daunting task. Do it early, do it often. Grab a few people and freely available web tools like fivesecondtest and checkmycolors Finally, Mark Hayward lays down some tips for anyone who needs to get started with blogging, but has “I’m not a writer” syndrome.
Personal Tech: Apple iPad FAQ’s – @pogue answers all of the important questions I had about iPad. Video out, how’s the typing experience (really), USB, they 12hr battery life claim is not a myth.
Custom Post Types in WordPress 3.0 – Custom post types is going to be a game changer for my dev team. We currently use a few plugins to massage WordPress into a CMS, namely Flutter and Secondary HTML Content. Custom post types might eliminate the need for those plugins. RT @danielbachhuber.
Take your RSS Feed and Dlvr.it to Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr | Techcrunch – … and LinkedIn. Portland social syndication company Dlvr.it just got ‘crunched. Just out of private Beta, this is my favorite tool for sending social status updates to custom delivery groups. Powered by multiple RSS input sources, I can customize exactly what content I want to post where. Want examples? My blog posts are announced my Facebook Page, LinkedIn, and Twitter, as are my Delicious bookmarks. Any photo I post to my ‘life’ Flickr photoset shows in my personal Facebook profile status. My Pandora favorites are announced on Facebook and Twitter…
Combine this syndication convenience with the power of their dlvr.it URL shortner, and you get the very best social media reach stats out there. Beyond retweets, think click-through trends, reach potential, most popular links you’ve posted… I could go on, but you just need sign up and check it out. You’ll wonder how you handled your social media presence without it.
These are my links for March 9th through March 12th:
Open Site Explorer: Link Popularity & Backlink Analysis Tool – Powered by SEOmoz’s data, this alternative to Google “site:” search or Yahoo Site Explorer let’s you discover the sites linking to you or your competition, and rates them by authority.
Blog Smarter | Zemanta Ltd. – Enhance blog posts automatically with related content and images. Gives you tips and advice as you write. Firefox extension. Promote your posts more efffectively. Must try this.
These are my links for February 24th through February 25th:
5 Fantastic Facebook Fan Page Ideas to Learn From – This article shows a few examples of what to use a business Facebook Fan Page for: a landing page with a simple call to action (which eventually utilizes FB photo sharing to host user photos), full functionality micro sites, and coupons.
Before & After magazine e-list – How to find the perfect color for your next design. As seen on Lifehacker. This is a PDF with some basic color theory and a tutorial on using colors in an image to build the perfect palette.
These are my links for February 22nd through February 24th:
UNBOUND Technologies – Social Data Append, Leader In Social Network Intelligence, – According to the DishyMix podcast, these guys have developed technology that allows you to identify the influencers in your social graph. That’s the silver bullet for brands engaged in social influence marketing. Identifying influencers has to be one of the most difficult tasks for SIM marketers these days; right up there with showing ROI.
Review of new “Beachtek DXA-SLR” XLR adaptor for HD-DSLR cameras | Philip Bloom – A new pro audio hardware de facto standard for a 7D workflow.I was wondering when the breakouts for the DSLRs were going to finally make the pro level. This answered everything I wanted to know. Mostly, I feel like I now know what will be the standard for recording pro audio in a 7D workflow.It’s still going to feel funny piping into that mini-jack, no matter how you slice it, though.Oh, and BeachTek: I have mega lust for the DXA-SLR, but please hire a graphic designer for that packaging. Yikes.
There are a few web pages that I always have open. Google Reader, Vitalist, and Workamajig (yikes). Sites like Mint and, (shameless plug) Twuffer are even beginning to make the tabs-never-to-be-closed list.
Fluid is written by ex-Apple Dashboard developer Todd Ditchendorf. It allows you to create Site Specific Browsers, or SSBs. Thanks to Fluid, “you can create SSBs to run each of your favorite WebApps as a separate Cocoa desktop application.” It’s Mac OSX Leopard only, so all you Tiger cats need to upgrade.
My immediate goal was to make an SSB of Google Reader. I think of Google Reader as a separate RSS aggregator app anyhow, so why not make it totally separate from the browser? I downloaded Fluid from the site, unpacked it, and moved it to my Apps folder.
Create a Fluid SSB
When you launch Fluid, it asks you for the URL of the site to app-ize (appify?), what you want to call the app, where to put it, and even what you want to use for the app’s icon. If you leave the default on that last option, your app switcher will use a giant, blurry version of the favicon gleaned from the web.
Google Reader SSB. (yes, thats 1000+ unread)
The magic happens, and the next thing you’ll see is your new web app all neatly bundled in it’s own page, complete with it’s own taskbar. To really burn up time that might otherwise be productive, think about your web apps having their own taskbar and what that allows you to do. Super nerds will love the Convert to MenuExtra SSB option so you can drop the app down from next to your clock, then fold it up again. Google Calendar perhaps?
That’s right Gmail fans, you can now participate with your Apple Mail and Outlook cohorts in email client groan fests. And all you protective tweeters out there who like your Twitter in a comfy, toasted, no-butter browser style aesthetic, Fluid was made for you. I’m off to make a stand-alone Twuffer app.
According to CrunchGear, a new service called Pastebud (@pastebud)will be released tomorrow enabling copy and paste for iPhone. From what I can tell, it cleverly uses 2 Javascript bookmarks and a web service to store the clipping whilst you switch apps. Cool, and a great temporary fix while Apple figures out how to make this possible internally on the iPhone.
Wait, Pastebud is going to store, at least temporarily, all the little clippings we’re all copying. That means they are going to have access to stats about not only what pages we’re looking at, but the exact phrases we’re interested in. How ’bout that for a targeted marketing opportunity?
That kind of statistical detail is worth a lot to advertisers. I wonder if Pastebud will be account driven? Hmm. In any case, I’ll bet we see a some sort of “most copied” web site or report ala Google’s Zeitgeist which will be interesting, if not profitable for Pastebud.
New users are signing up at the rate of 300,000 per day.
180 million unique visitors come to the site every month.
75% of Twitter traffic comes from outside Twitter.com (i.e. via third party applications.)
Twitter gets a total of 3 billion requests a day via its API.
Twitter users are, in total, tweeting an average of 55 million tweets a day.
Twitter’s search engine receives around 600 million search queries per day.
Of Twitter’s active users, 37 percent use their phone to tweet.
Over half of all tweets (60 percent) come from third party applications.
Twitter itself has grown: in the past year alone, it has grown from 25 to 175 employees.
— END UPDATE
The actual figure for Twitter user stats is hard to get, unless you’re a Twitter employee. Here’s a list of links that are helpful in estimating just how many Tweeters are out there.
http://www.twitdir.com displays a running total of the number of public Twitter users in it’s directory.
Turn on 2 fingers and click for right click on a mac laptop.
If you haven’t noticed that your Apple laptop doesnt have a right click trackpad button, I envy you. For those that have, you may have figured out that you can hold ctrl and click to bring up the right click menu.
Here’s a new, easier way from Lifehacker’s Top Ten Right Click Tools that I’ll be adopting immediately. In System Preferences, (click the Apple logo in the upper left) choose Keyboard & Mouse. Check the “Tap trackpad using two fingers for secondary click” checkbox.
Now, to fire trigger the right click, put two fingers on the trackpad, and click!
Some sites will tell you that you need to upgrade your Flash player to see their content. Don’t always believe it. Check your Flash Player version, and compare it to the latest Flash Player version here: http://tinyurl.com/yrlrvb. Sometimes, the developer makes an assumption about which browser or operating system you might be using. If you don’t match that assumption, they will toss you the “upgrade your Flash Player version” error. Don’t believe the hype!
