I just read an article by Danny Sullivan on Seach Engine Land, which goes into detail about Google’s Universal Search and the directions its heading for in 2008. The post is quite long, so make a cup of Joe’s and concentrate. It’s a review of all the changes Google has introduced in the past months since the introduction of Universal Search. Read it here.
Vladimir on January 31st 2008 in SEO & SEM
So, MySpace has decided to join the social network development community. While other social networks, like Facebook, have introduced their developer platforms over the past months, MySpace seems to have been sitting on the sidelines taking notes from the field. According to Mashable, they’ll be addressing some of the problems associated with social network development platforms such as privacy, monetization and data ownership. These issues have been obstacles, especially in the case of Facebook. User experience will be top priority, while developers will be probably be enabled to monetize their applications through some sort of shared revenue program.
MySpace applications should be embeddable on other sites, and will support Google Open Social from the very beginning. The official opening is on February 5, but you can pre-register now (requires MySpace login).
Vladimir on January 30th 2008 in Web Development, Social Networking
LEGO, the company that brought fun to many a kid in the past decades, is celebrating its 50th anniversary during January. I spent many interesting hours putting together all the various kinds of models, from the smallest ones to large scale constructions like bridges and ships. In fact, LEGO may be to blame for getting me interested in design and engineering, which later culminated in a mechanical engineering degree (among other things). Today, looking at all the majestic creations people make from LEGO bricks, I cannot avoid to remember the line from the movie Indecent Proposal, when Woody Harrelson teaches an architecture class and says “Even a brick wants to be something…” (originally derived from architect Louis Kahn). Well, the LEGO brick has certainly become something!
From this:
To this:
Vladimir on January 29th 2008 in Design
Skyfire, a company which specializes in mobile web browsing technology, released a Beta version of their new mobile web browser which should deliver PC browsing quality to mobile phones. The idea is to allow mobile web surfers to do anything they would on a PC based web browser, without any restrictions or limitations. There are already mobile web browsers that are very good like Opera Mobile and Opera Mini, Internet Explorer Mobile, which all do a very decent job of presenting web content.
Skyfire promises greater speed, no technology limitations (supports latest Flash version, Quick Time and Java embedded content).
“We’re talking about full-featured PC versions of your favorite web sites. Skyfire gives you speedy page loads, full audio, video, images, dynamic Flash content, advanced Ajax, Java and more – just like your PC.”
Okay, that sounds pretty good. The browser is still in Beta, but you can sign-up for testing right away. There is only a version of the software for Windows Mobile phones for the time being (and US based numbers only), but Skyfire promises versions for Symiban as well. Here’s their video which shows a demonstration of the new product:
It’s free, so if you are in the US, have a Windows Mobile phone, sign up for the Beta release and get an early taste.
Vladimir on January 28th 2008 in Mobile Phones
It’s been a while since I last posted anything about Facebook. There has been a lot going on in the news about it, mostly concerning privacy issues, rumors, and about who bought a stake in the company and for how many zillion dollars… This time the news is Facebook released a JavaScript client library to the public a couple of days ago. This in itself is interesting, although the Facebook API has already been in use for a while, allowing the same thing only through server-side programming (for example in PHP). The news appeared on numerous sites, but I came across this post on AllFacebook which spawned an interesting discussion about the new library. Basically, the client library offers nothing particularly new, other than Facebook can now be queried using client side scripting only which will make life easier for those who want to have less server side coding.
Vladimir on January 28th 2008 in Web Development
Even though the Macbook Air was unveiled days ago, I didn’t want to write anything until someone actually put it under some working conditions so we can all get an idea of what Air is all about. When I saw the first images I was impressed by the design, which didn’t surprise me since Apple is well known for beautifully designed devices, but was immediately vexed by the high price tag (~$1800) considering the hardware that’s offered. Well, Engadget released a detailed review of the Macbook Air, and to use their words “the Air is a tough call”.
There are plenty of points about the new Apple laptop to discuss, but it’s best if you take a look at the review and the discussion thereafter. Like the iPhone, there are reasons for buying Macbook Air, but also plenty of reasons for choosing an alternative.
Vladimir on January 27th 2008 in Mobile computing
Yes, that’s the sad truth, but before all guns are pointed towards Microsoft for this, I must say there are reasons the IE development team took this road. Their blog post explains this in detail (the whole backward compatibility issue, the state of things now, and the future support for standards). Although simply putting Internet Explorer 8 into a single standards mode was expected, they chose in the end to allow web developers to opt-in to the IE8 standards mode by adding a meta tag in the source of the page, which would explicitly tell IE to render the page with the “best standards compliance possible”. The default render mode is “quirks mode” (compatible with current content) and “standard mode” (IE7 standard mode).
Compatibility seems to have been the main reason for this kind of approach in the end, as roughly half of the top 200 US web sites were in “standards mode”. A rather large discussion was spawned about this, so get ready for a few hundred comments to read. There are some really spot-on suggestions and ideas, and of course some (well deserved?) criticism. Well, at least they passed the Acid 2 Test. 
Vladimir on January 25th 2008 in Web Development
I posted about HTML5 preview when the first outlines appeared in December. HTML5 is in working draft now and it appears there are a lot of changes that have been introduced. Here’s a summation of some of the changes (there are simply too many to show them all):
What’s new?
What’s going to disappear?
These are only the elements, there are corresponding lists for attributes as well. See in more detail here. The changes are not final nor official. For an official specification of HTML5 it’s best to consult this page at any time.
Update: I found a site which hosts an HTML5 validator. Needless to say its “highly experimental” (to use their words), so if you are already messing with HTML5 pages this may be useful.
Vladimir on January 25th 2008 in Web Design
A couple of months ago I came across and posted about Skreemr. Basically, it’s an audio search engine, which tries to dig up audio content on the web and index it for easy(ier) searching. Well, as with all things nowadays, it’s good to have an alternative to something, so someone brought my attention to another audio search engine called Woonz.
The site has been up not too long ago (maybe two months), and I probably wouldn’t have seen it, was it not for the afore mentioned “tip”. It features a simple search engine interface - type in keywords (performer, album, song, whatever) and get results sorted by relevance, with options to listen to the song, or download it form the location where the song was found. It’s important to say that the site doesn’t store actual MP3 files on its own server(s), but simply finds locations where these files can be found. Even though there is no advertisements or traffic monetization so far, judging by what they said on one of their pages, that is sure to come in the future.
I did about two dozen searches - both general and more specific, and got fairly good results (within what I expected), although in some cases I got results which were not what I wanted, although the songs offered were in fact named correctly. For example a search for “Bryan Ferry Fever” brought back “Kiss and Tell” (the correct name of the song) so that was good. Searches for house music (David Guetta, Junior Jack, Armand Van Helden…) returned plenty of relevant results, so there were no problems there. 
The same proved to be true for searches such as “elvis” and “beethoven”, so classics and classical are covered as well.
There is room for improvement like site performance, showing audio file quality, size, duration, improving streaming preview performance, adding a feature like personal playlist (in the popup player, with download/purge options for later), but since the service is still young, I am sure they have plans for further development.
Vladimir on January 24th 2008 in Search Engines
BurstMedia released results from a study which tried to get some conclusive data about online consumer behavior in regards to video content. The results show that consumers are interested in video content, but are not very willing to have their viewing interrupted by video advertisements. Most people view online video content to stay informed and to be entertained, and are mostly male in the 18-34 age span. They are weary of in-stream advertising, while many abandon viewing ad-fronted videos altogether. On the bright side, about 20% of the tested people (about 2600 of them) seemed to remember the advertising bits that interrupted them, but the rest simply ingnored advertising or abandoned the site in question. According to the study, it’s not surprising that the young age group is more receptive to in-stream advertising (about 38% found this form of advertisements more appealing than other standard creative units).
For advertising purposes, it seems that good ol’ viral brand or product promotional videos are still the best option. Embedded advertising in videos seems to be a bit too intrusive as things stand, so a careful approach is required on this one, if the advertising investment is to have any positive effect at all. But that will probably change, as the whole online video scheme, even though a few years old, is still growing and evolving.
See the whole study here along with charts and everything.
Vladimir on January 24th 2008 in Video
