GPS’s Time to Shine? – It’s times like this when I’m glad I included the Yahoo! Shopping Blog in my aggregated Official Yahoo! Blogs feed. They provided the nifty tidbit of info that searches for “global positioning systems have doubled over the past 30 daysâ€. The Google Trends graph for ‘GPS’ within the U.S. also indicates that while there’s been a surge of interest around the holidays every year, this is by far the largest.
Are there ‘people’ in your online community that act like angry 11-year-olds? Do they ridicule others, make ridiculous claims, cause drama, and try to be as much of pain in the ASP (if you’re using Microsoft technologies) as possible? Social networks expert danah boyd posted some thoughts about problem users, and asked how we might fix the problems that bring out their negative behaviors. I think I have some answers…
danah writes: “people regularly seek attention (even negative attention) in public situations and […] public forums notoriously draw in those who are lonely, bored, desperate, … [Read the rest »]
Another prediction here at Social Strategist has proved true. From my Platforms of the Web post in July:
Google Earth already is capable of rendering real-world buildings in 3D. People skilled in image manipulation are taking thousands of photos of a location and combining them to create a full 3D view of it. What happens when we take these creations and make them into a virtual representation within a Second Life-like world[…]
CNET News reports that Multiverse Network, a virtual world developer and competitor to Linden Lab’s Second Life, has partnered with Google to provide virtual world builders recreations … [Read the rest »]
Your web service needs connections, in every sense of the word. When you need people, you go to where people the people gather. These days, those places are social network services, and if you ignore them, you’re ignoring both your current customers and your potential customers. You need to know how best to leverage social network services(SNSs) to benefit your current users, and thus, gain new ones. I’d like to help.
The first and most important thing to remember is that while you have a place on a social network, your company… [Read the rest »]
Taking a break from working on my next post, “Social Network Strategy for Web Servicesâ€, I wanted to share two interesting links with you:
Five Reasons Why The Mobile Web Sucks – Publishing 2.0 gathers up all things wrong with the mobile web and drops it as a bomb on those who have gotten too caught up in the charge of the iPhone army. Unfortunately, even this list is still thinking of the mobile web as if everyone were willing to pay the cost of an iPhone or similar mobile device. The real truth is that until costs for data … [Read the rest »]
How frustrated are you when you can’t find what you’re looking for? When you’re looking for your keys, your glasses, or some scribbled note with a 3 AM revelation, you have only yourself to blame. But when you’re looking for a business’s hours of operations, some sense of person’s work experience, or a certain fact or figure, the people responsible for that information had better have a presence site. In my last post I talked about how important it is to understand the purpose behind building websites, and defined the traits of sites meant to be destination sites. … [Read the rest »]
You do not want a ‘Web 2.0′ site. Web 2.0 is a near-useless term, because there are no clear lines to show where the web has changed. But clearly, it has changed, and with the proliferation of new site concepts and the technologies that enable them, there are more uses for a web site than ever. As businesses start to turn to their IT departments and say, “We want our website to be Web 2.0,†I can only watch and laugh as the same mistakes made in the 1990s are repeated, when businesses didn’t have an IT department or a … [Read the rest »]
LinkedIn is smarter than a lot of people are currently giving them credit for. Compared to Ryze and some other business-focused social networks, they’ve put together a really well-developed site. I can’t blame them for being caught off guard by Facebook suddenly going from a college student network to the next hot business trend with platform potential.
For business networkers, the fate of LinkedIn vs. Facebook will depend on a few things:
We are facing a communications medium extinction on a scale never before seen… or so I hear. Every day in my feeds I see someone saying that something is ‘dying’. Whether it’s newspapers, blogging, e-mail, or even telephones as we know them, if you believe the hype then you better start building time capsules to show your children what you had to work with before holonews, lifelogs, and thought-sends came around. But to paraphrase Mark Twain, the reports of their death have been greatly exagerrated. Read on to find out what ‘death’ really means, what life after death looks like, … [Read the rest »]
We’ve come a long way from most websites using the height=â€â€ and width=â€â€ parameters of an <img> tag to load huge images, then squeeze them into a 200×100 box, leaving them looking more pixelated than a Pacman family portrait. High-speed internet enables higher-resolution images, people understand how to correctly resize an image now (or have help from photo sharing sites that do), and CSS gives designers more control than ever over placement of images.
But lately I’ve seen some really interesting examples of continued innovation in something as simple (and thus, ubiquitous) as how an image is displayed.
