June 23rd, 2008 — General
It may not be as feature rich as the Compete.com interface, but Google Trends now offers side by side (graphical overlay) statistics for daily unique visitors for two or more sites.
http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/06/google-trends-shows-traffic-stats.html
March 18th, 2008 — General
Read on to get first impressions of both the latest browser releases and some of their neatest features.
Firefox 3 Beta 4 has been available to the general public for some time and is likely the last beta before they put out a release candidate. My first impression of this browser is: NICE! I really don’t have much bad to say about it. As promised it is extremely efficient and noticably faster. After playing with it for less than a day I already had a bunch of my friends and associates ditching their stable 2.x build and jumping ship for a beta. I think that says a lot in and of itself. The type of people I convinced to upgrade include one gentlemen that uninstalled IE7 after a forced upgrade on our network last week (because he claimed it slowed down his machine) and another guy who doesn’t mind trying the latest stuff, but has probably never loaded a beta on his work machine ever. Not only did they agree about the performance benefits they didn’t even complain after using it for a few days! So bottom line is the new Firefox beta is wonderful and worth a test drive
IE8 on the other hand is a bit rough around the edges. I think Microsoft is on the right track with their pursuite of ACID perfection and by the time they reach beta 4 will also have a much snappier browser that people will prefer over IE7. For now, expect the crashes and page rendering issues that are expected at this early stage of development. Don’t even expect to be able to use your Windows Live Hotmail service - it won’t render (GMail works :). Activities will be a useful built-in addition to the browser once more activities are available. They offer a nice stepping stone towards the Firefox add-on model and make it easy for noobs to get much needed interactivity in their Microsoft browser without any brain trauma of dealing with browser add-ons. WebSlices haven’t shown their worth to me as of yet. It seems like the HDDVD vs Blueray battle when it comes to WebSlices and RSS. With RSS fully entrenched and reaching critical mass, WebSlices will likely be too little too late for the Microsoft camp.
So what is going to be great about IE8? I think AJAX navigation will save countless users the frustration of trying to use the browser back button at inopportune times so general ease of use is one reason. I would definitely say web developers will see it as a blessing and a curse. In basic testing it definitely renders content differently so they will have to deal with yet another browser variation (not to mention the IE7 emulation mode and “quirks mode“) but it does offer built-in developer tools that will help them fix those layout issues on the fly from within the browser. Firefox users have been using the Web Developer Add-on for years and it really is a necessary plugin given the complexities of modern day web development. It will definitely be interesting to see how this browser evolves and if it is enough to stem the flood of Firefox defections.
Firefox 3 I am saddened to say, jumped on the IE7 look-and-feel wagon. According to their web site they claim to have done extensive usability research to support this redesign but I am more inclined to think a graphics designer honed in on the “key shape” idea and everyone in marketing just went along for the ride. Besides the ugly factor, everything else about the new Firefox seems spot on. The enhanced auto-complete is almost good enough that I might even consider starting to use it. The single click favorite management is also a really cool addition, once you know it exists. Search shortcuts are also at the top of my list. I like being able to switch between search providers in the search drop down but adding a single letter to my search terms seems a more power user friendly way of handling things (if only I could do this from within the search box that I am used to typing in). Hey, what do you know, the download dialog box isn’t displayed by default! The download dialog box is the only feature more annoying than the “Do you want Firefox to remember this password” dialog. Did I mention this dialog is gone too! You are now prompted to remember passwords in Firefox from a new toolbar button similar to the one employed for pop-up handling.
If you are planning on trying either of these browsers be prepared to endure the beta-ness of both. They are still in beta and crash rather frequently on both XP and Vista.
February 5th, 2008 — Social Networking
Have you used Twitter yet? If you haven’t you should (you can start by following me). There are now officially 1 billion articles supporting the usefulness of Twitter - this in addition to the 1 trillion ways to waste time with Twitter. Google recently offered Twitter some assistance in dealing with the super tuesday tracking and Twitter just switched to Verio for their hosting for undisclosed reasons in addition to claims of providing better performance under high load.
So it seems that Twitter is all the rage, at least Jaiku and Pwnce would probably say so:
So why is Twitter going nowhere fast? Well, for one we have all heard about their business model, or lack thereof. But I think what hurts them more than not knowing the best way to convert 500k visitors to cash is all the crummy tools and products that are being built by independent third parties on unreliable APIs. Things just don’t work. I can’t remember the last time I tried to use any of the latest greatest twitter add-ons, tools or interactive sites without it either throwing an error or timing out. I couldn’t even get the direct message reply RSS feed to load into my Google Reader successfully. Hopefully these problems are basic infrastructure issues that will be resolved with the move to Verio. I would hate to see Twitter’s billion plus uses disappear at the expense of sloppy traffic mongers hungry for the link juice that the Twitter buzzword brings to their site however short lived it may be.
Of course there are some decent tools available in flock and jott. I gave flock a tough review before I had really set it through its paces. After spending more time with the browser I really like it. The Twitter integration isn’t great (maybe this is why it is getting a thumbs up?), but the people sidebar makes keeping tabs on the people you follow much easier than the Twitter site. It would be nice to include a right-click menu to interact with the tweets directly (reply, direct message, tinyurl integration) but it does the trick for the most part. Jott has direct integration with Twitter and Mosio and when it works it is great. Often times Jott is plagued by the same problems as the Twitter Facebook plugin - communication failures with the Twitter API.
The present day internet user’s attention span has a digg half-life and will not tolerate this. People are far more willing to stick with a useless crummy app/site as long as it is always available *cough* myspace *cough* but the instant they start experiencing issue upon issue they will be looking for the competition.
As a side note, another fun tool I recently started playing with is QNA which is a Mosio/Twitter mashup that allows you to direct message questions through the Twitter interface and have them answered by agents. In keeping with the spirit of super Tuesday I couldn’t resist the following:
Your Question
——————————
——————————
QnAgent Answer
——————————
No, just has bad social skills (like taking on a fake southern accent when in the south)
January 16th, 2008 — Social Networking
Facebook launched a new extended profile feature today that will allow you to simplify your default profile display. It works by “hiding” applications and other profile boxes that may be cluttering up your profile. This functionality was previously offered by third party Facebook applications like CleanProfile and fills an obvious need in the Facebook community. Even in the last two days I have had a handful of people specifically use the term “clutter” when referring to Facebook. As simple as the interface is to use, the clutter can be overwhelming to a new member.
To clean up your profile click on your profile link after logging in. If this is your first time decluttering, Facebook provides a nice notification box at the top of the screen describing the new service with a link to the extended profile manager, otherwise you can scroll to the very bottom of your profile and click the “edit extended profile” link.
The extended profile manager will list the total number of boxes you have enabled on your profile and will offer suggestions to hide the boxes located at the bottom of the screen. Check any boxes you want to hide and click OK. Your profile will now contain links at the bottom of each column to “show more profile boxes.” Obviously this isn’t rocket science and all the new feature does is prevent existing content from being displayed but it sure beats the MySpace model that requires you to clump jumbled code into the various sections of your profile page.
January 16th, 2008 — Social Networking
From the Hitwise Newsletter:
MySpace Received 76 Percent of U.S. Social Networking Visits in 2007
Facebook traffic increased 50 percent year-over-year;
95 percent of traffic to MySpace.com was returning in December 2007NEW YORK, NY – January 16, 2008 – Hitwise, the leading online competitive intelligence service, today announced that MySpace.com averaged 76.35 percent of all U.S. visits in 2007[1] among a custom category of 53 leading social networking websites. Facebook.com, Bebo.com and BlackPlanet.com received the next largest number of visits, as each received 12.57, 1.24 and .87 percent, respectively. The remaining 49 social networking websites in the custom category accounted for 8.97 percent of U.S. visits.
Market Share of U.S. Internet Visits to Top 10 Social Networking Websites Rank
Name Domain Dec-07
Dec-06
YoY % Change
1
MySpace www.myspace.com 72.32%
78.89%
-8%
2
www.facebook.com 16.03%
10.59%
51%
3
Bebo www.bebo.com 1.09%
0.99%
10%
