Page 13 of 17« First...101112131415...Last »

Ok, maybe Twitter is useful…

Posted on 30. Aug, 2007 by Dean Whitney in Uncategorized   and has   0 Comments

Twitter is a micro blogging site where generating huge amounts of buzz among the web’s early adopters thanks to a simple concept. All twitter.com does is ask: “What are you doing?”

The idea is that it offers a way for individuals to provide more detailed status updates to their friends, family and contacts. And, crucially, it delivers those updates across a variety of different media – either through its website, over instant messaging or by SMS to your mobile phone.

I’ve been talking about Twitter for some time now. I wasn’t sure why – but it seemed pretty clear by its popularity that it could be useful. I’ve had different ideas for campaigns but its becoming clear that Twitter provides a valuable service in the most distributed Web 2.0 fashion. Twitter allows people to follow information how they want and when they want. A certain population has embraced it. Now we can see how marketers and media is embracing Twitter.

In April 2007 ZDNet created a ZDNetBlogs Twitter page and ‘walla’, instant cool Web 2.0 functionality. Viral, distributed, accessible by mobile, email, widgets, IM etc. You can follow ZDNet blog post via your Twitter account.

Bravo to ZDNet for this experiment. So far there’s only 340 followers but Twitter growth doesn’t seem to be slowing down soon so I think there’s plenty of time for the subscribers to pick-up.

MTV is also using Twitter to promote the MTV Video Music Awards (VMA). A prominent link on the main navigation reads ‘Twitter’, I’d say that is in indication that Twitter is engrained in pop culture. This MTV Twitter account is written as updates from Moonman, MTV’s iconic and mischievous mascot and the name sake of the VMA award, MTV’s equivalent to the Oscar. The site uses the Twitter API to display the tweats (a single Twitter post) also on the site.

Chillin’ with Baby from Cash Money in the MTV photo studio. Guy’s got so much bling I feel like I’m looking at the sun. -mtvmoonman 01:57 PM August 22, 2007 from web.

You can also simply text “Text FOLLOW VMA to 40404” and receive updates via SMS. MTV started this experiment in July and has 570 followers and has made 23 posts so far.

There’s many ways to use Twitter to engage people. It will be interesting to see how this evolves.

Content-Aware Image Sizing

Posted on 22. Aug, 2007 by Dean Whitney in Uncategorized   and has   0 Comments

Ariel Shamir of the Efi Arazi School of Computer Science in Israel has developed a promising technology that enables image resizing that is much more intelligent than rescaling or cropping. See the amazing video for details. Hopefully this tool will find its way into Adobe CS4.

White label social networking solutions – comparison chart

Posted on 14. Aug, 2007 by Dean Whitney in Uncategorized   and has   0 Comments

TechCrunch is my favorite blog! It’s like I have my own research department. My previous post featured a fantastic comparison chart about immersive worlds and today they published a comprehensive review of white label social networking solutions – comparison chart and the post “34 More Ways to Build Your Own Social Network“. Its amazing how many there are today, and there are maybe a dozen that weren’t included. The chart below covers both downloadable and custom (made-to-order) white label social networking solutions. For do-it-yourself, hosted solutions, please see this chart and the post “9 Ways to Build Your Own Social Network”.

Casual immersive worlds comparison chart

Posted on 06. Aug, 2007 by Dean Whitney in Uncategorized   and has   0 Comments

Techcrunch published a useful comparison chart of casual immersive worlds. In light of the $350 million acquisition of Club Penguin by Disney its clearly an important channel to watch.

Will it Blend? – iPhone

Posted on 01. Aug, 2007 by Dean Whitney in Uncategorized   and has   0 Comments

Everybody knows that the iPhone can make phone calls, play movies & music, surf the web, and a lot more. But, Will It Blend? That is the question. Brilliant viral video concept by Blendtech, they have created a microsite willitblend.com where they blend things like a can of coke, golf balls and yes, even an iPhone.

"comScore Widget Metrix" Service Flawed

Posted on 11. Jul, 2007 by Dean Whitney in archive   and has   0 Comments

comScore today announced the launch of comScore Widget Metrix, a new service to track the usage of widgets across the Web. comScore currently tracks Web widgets, which are data files that can be embedded into a site’s HTML code and are typically displayed in a small viewing pane on the site.  They are most often used to display customized or personalized content on a Web site, such as to share photos or music recommendations, and are commonly found on blogs, social networking sites and other personalized pages. 

The problem is that comScore defines widgets as embedded flash (.swf) objects. This does not include HTML and desktop widgets. Sites like Yourminis, Widgetbox, Pageflakes etc. are predominantly html based widgets and even include widget tools that allow you to build your own widgets from rss content.

With that in mind its clear that Web widgets represent a huge market opportunity – the Flash widgets alone reach over 117 million people!

Clicktale – A new kind of web analytics

Posted on 02. Jul, 2007 by Dean Whitney in archive   and has   0 Comments

Most statistic services, whether user centric (eg NielsenNetRatings) network centric (eg HitWise) or site centric (eg Omniture ), will generate statistical reports on page views, click paths, links, time spent, visitors profile and referrers and other parameters. Some solutions like Google Analytics provide “heat maps” of most watched or clicked areas. But aside from setting up an expensive usability lab study no service allows you to see precisely what goes on when someone visits your site.

Clicktale is a new service that allow you to record a website visitors’ every action as they browse your website. Watch movies to understand visitor behavior, gain valuable insights and improve your website’s usability.

(click to enlarge)

In addition to movies, ClickTale provides a unique set of statistics that address important usability questions. For example, the “Percent of Page Viewed” statistic can answer “how much of the webpage did users see and how often did they scroll to the webpage’s bottom?” and the “Active Browsing Time” statistic can answer “how long did users actively browse a webpage, as opposed to just having an open inactive browser?”

ClickTale is easy to set up and amazingly useful. The web page script that it uses is unobtrusive and has a minimal impact on the client side processor. They have a number of plan options ranging from a free version to a $99 per month professional plan.

Brilliant New TED Conference Website

Posted on 29. Jun, 2007 by Dean Whitney in archive   and has   0 Comments

The TED organization (TED stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design) runs an invitation-only conference every year for the famous, brilliant and well connected. I’ve been on the waiting list for a few years. Last I subscribed (iTunes Link) to the TED conference video podcasts and have been enjoying the 20 minute presentations each morning on the tread mill. The conferences have featured such an amazing array of speakers; Bill Clinton, Bono, Rick Warren and many authors, designers, business leaders etc. In April TED launched a new, brilliantly designed website with amazing content.

Here’s some highlights:

The site is a great example of using both Flash and browser technology to create a rich experience. The home page features a brilliant Flash based navigation element that allows you to select your view either by visualization or list and drill down by theme. In visualization mode the view presents images that represent topics, as you roll over the images a flyout panel provides a description and list of videos. By default the thumbnail sizes are determined by the most recently updated. You can change that view to size up by ‘ most talks’, ‘ most emailed’, or ‘ most discussed’. As you adjust the visualization the view animates to the new settings.

Once you click down to the video level this page displays a full description of the talk and speaker, and all the social computing features to embed the video, share, email etc.

*Click the images to enlarge

The video player provides a chapter navigation on the scrub bar.

The ratings tool is also quite unique providing the ability to quickly checkbox tags and rate the video which then displays a tag cloud.

Visit TED.com for some inspiration!

Twit This

Posted on 14. Jun, 2007 by Dean Whitney in archive   and has   0 Comments

TwitThis is a Twitter add-on now available for microblogging site Twitter. The browser booklet add-on allows you to send post the page you are viewing to your Twitter account. There’s also a “TwitThis” button you can put on your personal page or website so that readers can automatically Twitt your page. Of course there’s a handy WordPress plug-in so that you can automatically include the TwitThis link on each of your blog posts.

TwitThis is a mashup that utilizes the Twitter API and TinyURL, a service that creates a short version redirect of any URL, so your Twitter tweet doesn’t have to be seven lines long. Twitter has grown a strong following of developers and a long list of tools and mashups.

Useful Web 2.0 Technology Acronyms

Posted on 31. May, 2007 by Dean Whitney in archive   and has   0 Comments

  • AJAX: Asynchronous JavaScript and XML
  • API: Application Programming Interface
  • JSON: JavaScript Object Notation
  • LAMP: Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP
  • REST: Representational State Transfer
  • RSS: Really Simple Syndication
  • SOAP: Simple Object Access Protocol
  • XACML: eXtensible Access Control Markup Language
  • XFN: XHTML Friends Network
  • XHTML: eXtensible HyperText Markup Language
  • XML: eXtensible Markup Language 
Page 13 of 17« First...101112131415...Last »