Posts tagged it’s
It’s Time to Ditch StumbleUpon for Pinterest
Feb 3rd
StumbleUpon is one of those sites we’ve had on our radar for quite sometime. We covered the company’s redesign last year, which re-focused the site on topic features. So when StumbleUpon snuck in a strange change the other day without telling anyone, we were shocked. This update made it impossible to get direct links for the pages one is stumbling unless they choose to not sign-in to the service.
The entire point of StumbleUpon, for the user, is to build up a taste graph that will better deliver stories that the user would like. But many sites depend on referral traffic from StumbleUpon, which is something outside of the StumbleUpon user’s direct stumbling experience.
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“As part of redesign that spawns user experience that you write about, we look a lot at how users are using our service,” said StumbleUpon’s VP of Business Development and Marketing Marc Leibowitz. “We have some things in mind to address this concern.”
StumbleUpon’s response is that, well, they were “just trying to improve the user experience.” And besides, they told us, two-thirds of users use the Web bar.
“Signed-in users, when they’re encountering the Web bar it is about their stumbling,” Leibowitz said. “Visitors can easily close the Web bar.”
In other words, if you do want to see direct links, just don’t sign in.
What a great solution. Truly. Not only will StumbleUpon not be able to get an idea of that user’s taste graph, that user will miss out on the entire community aspect of the site.
Leibowitz cited accidental clicks on the “X” button of the Web bar as StumbleUpon’s main reason for getting rid of the Web bar entirely.
“People would accidentally click the button – they don’t have an extension such as Chrome or Firefox extensions, so they can’t go back to their Stumbling unless they go directly to StumbleUpon.com.”
This sounds like a complicated solution for a pretty easy problem. It would it have been pretty easy for StumbleUpon to just add a box that pops up when the user clicks “X.” It could say something simple like: “Are you sure you want to close this page and leave StumbleUpon?” Instead, StumbleUpon says, it is thinking only of the users – not the people who receive tons of referral traffic from the StumbleUpon discovery engine.
“The trade off is that we have to make some concessions around the way we show the URL,” Leibowitz tells us. “There’s no way we can change the way the URL is displayed in the address bar, but there are some ways we can make it easier to copy and paste the source code.”
For StumbleUpon users who are still looking for a way to see the direct URL, try using a StumbleUpon Firefox add-on or Chrome extension.
What Will Happen to StumbleUpon Referral Traffic?
Unfortunately for sites who depend on StumbleUpon for referral traffic, there aren’t too many alternatives.
“My website used to get 70-80% of referral traffic from StumbleUpon,” writes ReadWriteWeb commenter Jeffrey Davis. “After the redesign, that percentage dropped to 40%. I suspect now that it will drop even further…especially since SU is now hijacking the pageview.”
Pinterest is now Davis’ number two referrer.
This is only one isolated case, but it’s telling. Perhaps it’s time for marketers to start shifting their strategy from StumbleUpon to Pinterest. Because it doesn’t look like StumbleUpon will be backpedaling on its latest decision anytime soon.
Has referral traffic to your site suffered since the StumbleUpon redesign? Tell us about it in the comments.
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Honda Puts Ferris Bueller Super Bowl Commercial Online Early & It’s… Lame? – ReelSEO Online Video News
Jan 30th
 ReelSEO Online Video News |
Honda Puts Ferris Bueller Super Bowl Commercial Online Early & It's… Lame?
ReelSEO Online Video News He is also founder of The Viral Orchard (http://www.viralorchard.com), an Internet marketing firm offering content writing and development services, viral marketing consulting, and SEO services. Jeremy writes constantly, loves online video, … |
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It’s Like Facebook For The Art World
Jan 26th
Forget the random pictures of babies and puppies, alarming status updates from family members and political rants. On My-ArtMap, you will be immersed in art. It’s as simple as that. The site, which is targeted at an international audience, is available in English, French, German, Italian, Russian, Spanish and Chinese. You can create a username and password for the site, or login using Facebook Connect. It is also available as an iPhone app.
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My-ArtMap is a social network exclusively for the art and art market. Like the Art World, it is populated by art professionals, including auction houses, galleries, museums and art collectors. The site just exited beta, shortly after acquiring many new members from Spain, Italy and Germany. It is heavily focused on Europe, at least for the time being.
“Facebook is a great project, but the international art market is very closed and the requirements especially for this market are really different in comparison to other markets,” says ArtMap CEO Stefan Sebök. “Facebook and Google are too big and not specialized enough for the art market!”
The site’s news feed is known as the Newscafe. Much like Facebook, it surfaces stories posted by fellow users. But unlike the Facebook algorithm, My-ArtMap does not differentiate between highlighted and most recent stories.
The “Galleries” section allows users to create their own virtual art galleries around specific topics. These images can either have a certain theme, or could be a collection of artwork. For some reason, even though I set the language to English, the text in this section keeps popping up in German.
Users can also create groups around a specific topic to discuss ideas privately.
The site still has quite a few quirks. It’s unclear how the Newscafe algorithm sorts stories, and sometimes the text doesn’t translate. Still, this is an interesting project that seems like it could become a very useful tool for the social networked Art World.
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Who’s Using Pinterest? Yup, It’s Mostly Ladies
Jan 26th
Well, there’s a reason it’s not called Dude-terest. The latest darling of the up-and-coming social sharing space, Pinterest, has experienced rapid growth in both users and industry buzz in the last few months. If you had a sneaking suspicion that the majority of those users happen to be young females, you were right.
Pinterest’s users are 80% women, according to recent data from Google Ad Planner, as presented by Ignite Social Media. The site is biggest among the 25-34 age range, followed by 35-to-44-year-olds. These site’s popularity among people in their late 20s and early 30s is illustrated (quite literally) by the proliferation of images related to wedding planning and home decor.
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There’s nothing inherently female-centric about Pinterest. At its core, it’s an image-sharing service that lets people curate their favorite visual stuff from across the Web. It just happened to have caught on particularly strong with the young female demographic group. The site is just beginning to take off, though, and its community could evolve in any direction moving forward.
Gizmodo described the service as a sort of “Tumblr for ladies” and cited internal staff discussions in which the men expressed confusion and uncertainty and the women expressed enthusiastic approval. That’s just anecdotal evidence of course, but it’s supported by numbers from the likes of Google and ComScore.
Here at ReadWriteWeb, the guys are a little more receptive to the Pinterest and its potential use cases. In “A Guy’s Guide to Pinterest“, Dave Copeland outlined why the site isn’t exclusive to women and detailed his own experience getting started with it. Fellow colleague Jon Mitchell thinks Pinterest actually tackles sharing better than Google+ does, in part because it lets users follow things more granularly and selectively than Google’s “circles” model.
“It helps me bookmark visual things, which I only had text-based ways of doing before, and that has proven to be a surprisingly large amount of the stuff I take in on a daily basis,” Mitchell told me in an IM conversation.
Personally, I’ve been using Pinterest somewhat passively for a few weeks, checking in semi-regularly and periodically pinning stuff. I’ve started focusing on curating imagery and content related to “the future of music” since that’s a topic I track quite closely at ReadWriteWeb. I’ve also started a board dedicated to Instagram photos taken in my neighborhood in Philadelphia, figuring it’s worth experimenting with the value of local-centric content on a fledgling social service like this.
I’m still waiting for that “Ah ha!” moment in which I realize why I’d want to use Pinterest on a daily basis, but so far I’m digging it and I certainly understand the value people see in it, regardless of gender or age.
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Apple’s Growth Rate Is Simply Incredible… And It’s Accelerating
Jan 24th
There are plenty of impressive stats in Apple’s December quarter earnings report, such as 37 million iPhones shipped, $46 billion of overall sales, and $13 billion of profit.
But Apple’s most impressive stat continues to be its growth rate: Apple is not only huge, but it is growing at a rate far greater than its peers. And, even more incredible, its growth rate is accelerating.
As a company gets bigger, or as a market matures, its growth rate typically falls. It’s only natural: The numbers get bigger, so the percentage of change eventually shrinks. But for Apple, during the Christmas quarter — its busiest time of the year — that hasn’t happened yet.
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Specifically, last quarter, Apple’s overall sales totaled $46.3 billion, an increase of 73% over the previous December quarter. That’s an acceleration over Apple’s growth rate from the December 2010 quarter, when it posted 71% growth. And that was better than the year before, when it grew 32%. That, too, was faster than the year before, when Apple posted a 6% growth rate in the bowels of the recession. So for the third year in a row, Apple has accelerated its Christmas quarter sales growth.
Why is this so impressive? Because maintaining your growth rate when you’re Apple’s size — never mind increasing it — takes a lot of work!
This past Christmas, Apple needed to add an extra $20 billion in new sales to grow by 73%. The year before, it “only” needed to generate an additional $11 billion in new business to grow by 71%. It’s pretty astounding, especially considering that Apple’s product lineup didn’t even change that much last year.
The reason it happened, of course, was the iPhone 4S “perfect storm.” Not only was it a new iPhone, but it launched during what is already Apple’s busiest time of the year, the holiday quarter. And it expanded Apple’s footprint to new carriers, such as Sprint. Add pent-up demand to the mix, and Apple was easily able to shatter its iPhone sales record. Then consider that the iPhone is Apple’s biggest business by revenue and profits, and the big numbers fall into place.
Can it happen again? It’s only going to get harder. To match this year’s growth — 73% — Apple’s December 2012 quarter would have to beat $80 billion in sales. That’s a lot of iPhones. The way the smartphone market is growing, and the way the iPad looks like it’s going to do, anything’s possible. But it’s not going to be easy.
More charts: Apple’s Monster Quarter In Charts
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It’s Not Wrong for Google to Focus on Its Own Users
Jan 23rd
When Google shipped its Search, plus Your World update earlier this month, it turned out better than expected. Google left users the ability to click back and forth between personal and global modes or opt out altogether. Google’s personal search draws in the user’s Google+ relationships to tailor the results. When it launched, Google took the position that other social networks were welcome to participate, they just had to make a deal.
Google does make some effort to identify content from other networks. But some SPYW features only highlight Google+ material, even when other services are more relevant. If Google favors its own product over a better result, users get the short end of the stick. Some engineers from Facebook, Twitter and Myspace have built a browser extension called Focus on the User to prove the point. But what about Google+ users? For them, Google+ results are the better result. Arguably, Google should cater to them, as users of its service.
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Google’s Choice: Help Google+ Users Or Help Others
When a large-scale Web service puts an opt-out switch on a new feature, it’s because its designers believe users will like the feature. If the Google+ comments on our stories are any indication, Google+ users like this personalized search just fine.
But Google and its fans have two other use cases to consider. People who would rather have their personal website, Twitter or Facebook profile appear above Google+ are not well-served by Google anymore, nor are people whose social graphs exist on networks other than Google+.
Google has no obligation to these users. It can arrange its services however it wants. They’re free, after all, as the underpinnings of Google’s ad business. But Google itself has enough information to determine when a Facebook profile would be more relevant than a Google+ profile in its “People and Pages” box. It can tell when a Facebook profile has more subscribers and activity than a Google+ page.
The “People and Pages” box has hard-coded instructions to display Google+ instead. That might make Google less useful to people who don’t use Google+, but it’s more useful for those who do.
Focus On The User, Not The Service
The people who built Focus on the User used Google’s own search signals to route around the Google+ integration when other results are more relevant. Larry Page returns a Google+ result, but Mark Zuckerberg returns a Facebook result. Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land extensively tested the Focus on the User plug-in, and it worked like a charm; the profiles with the most activity and information came up first, whether they’re from Google+ or not.
John Battelle has had some interesting chats with Facebook’s Director of Product, Blake Ross, one of the developers of Focus on the User. The tool has gone through several phases, the first of which was just to remove all references to Google+. The tool released today is more thoughtful than that, as Battelle points out. It produces the most relevant result as measured by links, references from many other networks, and overall activity. You can read the code right on the website to see how it works.
Google+ Users Want Google+ Results
According to the Focus on the User developers, Google search should provide the most relevant result without assuming anything about the user’s preferred social network. That way, the result that best represents the person or topic being searched for will be at the top. By this definition, “Search, plus Your World” should represent the world most accurately.
But does that focus on the Google+ user? For those who want Google+ to be their social network, the best result for their “world” might be the Google+ page, even if the owner barely uses it or just re-posts things from Facebook or Twitter. The Google+ user wants Google+ results. Shouldn’t Google focus on the user of its own service?
The best solution to social search would be one that lets the search user decide what network(s) to prefer. To the extent that a social search engine doesn’t prefer the user’s own networks, it’s not social search; it’s just search. Maybe those results are more relevant, and maybe social search creates a filter bubble. But for those who want Google+ to be their “world,” Google’s social search works.
If Google+ social search is not for you, try Focus on the User and let us know how it goes.
Do you want personalized search results? How would social search work best for you? Sound off in the comments.
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It’s Embedded vs. Mobile Devices for the Hearts and Minds of Retailers
Jan 20th
“The Store of the Future,” as retail electronics vendors have depicted it over the past few years, features eight-foot touchscreen walls that double as mirrors, interacting with the customer as she tries on virtual clothes without sacrificing her own modesty, scanning the ID tags and profiles of items she’s already selected, and giving store clerks tools to dazzle the customer with demos and make on-the-spot deals without having to rush to the back office. These are the wonders made possible by embedded technology… ah, can’t you hear the voice-over announcer now!
The thing is, customers are already entering the stores right now with touchscreens, scanners, IM clients, Twitter clients, and live video displays – they’re just in the customer’s pocket or purse. So at the National Retail Federation’s big show earlier this week in New York City, there were dueling visions of “The Store of the Future.” The challenger looks more like a kind of smart Wi-Fi that communicates directly with the devices the customer already has, using hardware that could cost retailers a lot less.
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Embedded: Big, bright, and in your face
Representing the “champion’s” corner for embedded technology is Intel, whose message is that screens should be big. To illustrate its point, it gathered together an impressive list of consumer goods partners, including Kraft Foods, HSN (above), and Adidas (below), in live demonstrations of interactive kiosk technology featuring feedback cameras and live analytics. Imagine super-chef Wolfgang Puck welcoming incoming shoppers everywhere (literally) with, “How do you do, ma’am?” If you’re a man, you wouldn’t appreciate it much. That’s what the cameras and analytics are for; to determine what gender and approximate age you must be.
It is Intel’s software division that provides the masterstroke here, with what it unveiled this week as its Audience Impression Metric (AIM) suite. As with a Microsoft demo of the same technology RWW featured last Monday, Intel is literally aiming to reinvent the billboard, replacing ordinary signage with huge devices that may be able to ascertain your identity, guess your interests, and maybe say hi to you by name.
“Deployers don’t want an ad or message merely to be seen. They want it to be relevant,” reads a new Intel white paper on AIM (PDF available here). “Otherwise, if consumers pass by unfazed by what shows on a screen, they’re wasting time and money. Video analytics distinguishes how much attention people put toward digital signage. As someone approaches a monitor, cameras focus in, capturing a digitized impression of the signage viewer. Actual images are not used, thus keeping data anonymous. Through those impressions, the technology is able to discern a person’s gender, race, approximate age and, based on the contours of the person’s face and positioning, just how long he actually looks at the screen.”
Now, although the “H” in “HSN” originally stood for “home” – as in “home shopping” – it’s actually been extending its brand beyond the scope of just television. The publicity firm that helped HSN connect with Intel made it clear it also handles marketing for Starwood, the parent company of Sheraton and Westin hotels. Conceivably, digital signage such as this could transform an arm’s-length span of unused wall space into valuable real estate.
Something else you might possibly find in a hotel lobby might look like a rejected design for a refit TARDIS. It’s called the Diji-Touch (above), and it’s actually an Intel prototype concept for a kind of interactive vending machine that incorporates the same technology as the video wall. With two big screens at right angles to one another, it has better opportunity to capture customers’ attention walking down a hallway.
If you can believe this, Diji-Touch devices could be managed through a cloud-based content management system. While the cloud can’t exactly deliver Cadbury eggs or Jell-O, it could serve as a deployment point for customized advertising campaigns, and also (you knew this was coming) display ads from outside sources. So just the same way a company may buy display ads on a Web site today, it may buy ads on a vending machine tomorrow.
Mobile: Small, portable, and in your pockets
One company already very familiar to retailers is VeriFone, which makes point-of-sale (POS) systems and credit card readers. Normally, VeriFone fights in the embedded systems camp, but at the NRF show earlier this week, it came forth with a surprise: a portable catalog and payment system that could also be beamed via Wi-Fi to an iPad (shown above).
The idea is to extend VeriFone technology to smaller retailers whose proprietors may already have iPads. Imagine one of those middle-of-the-mall kiosks that may only have a temporary contract. With VeriFone’s software and an iPad stationed near the register, the clerk could show customers a wide variety of sale items without having to keep them in inventory first.
One of the more intriguing concepts for leveraging existing mobile devices came from Aruba Networks. It produces in-store Wi-Fi systems that lets clerks and sales associates roam the entire showroom floor, handling demonstrations, inventory checks, and final POS directly from their iPod Touch or iPad. On the right, you see one of the attachments Aruba was demonstrating, called a Linea-Pro 4. It’s a snap-on attachment to an iPhone or iPod Touch that includes a barcode reader and a magnetic stripe reader.
It’s cool device attachments like this one that should get Aruba’s in-store Wi-Fi installed on major retailers’ networks. But once it’s there, the opportunity arises for another kind of customer contact. Imagine apps, if you will, that sense when a customer’s own smartphone has entered the in-store Wi-Fi’s range. Conceivably, those apps could produce lists of store specials, check prices on non-priced goods, generate instant discounts or coupons, or even map the locations of store clerks wearing the Linea-Pro devices.
Aruba is calling the back-end architecture for bringing shoppers online MOVE. During the show, Aruba made it clear that MOVE is definitely being crafted to extend the digital retailing experience to the customers themselves.
So over the next three years, more retailers will definitely be reaching out to you with digital, interactive, multitouch devices, and capturing information about you as they do. The only question now is, will they be using their own devices or yours?
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Google, Google+ and search: Maybe it’s all an SEO play – CNET
Jan 12th
 Telegraph.co.uk |
Google, Google+ and search: Maybe it's all an SEO play
CNET His argument: By embedding Google+ into search, Google is essentially prodding people to join its social network out of SEO fear. Edelman has been noting Google's potential favoring of results before. He argues that Google favors its own properties. … Social media replacing SEO as Google makes search results personal Google+ is the new SEO Gravitating Towards More Social Search: Titan SEO Talks About the … |
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Staff Turnover Could Be IT’s Biggest Issue for 2012
Dec 30th
How long have you held your current position? If you answered less than two years, you are not alone. It seems that turnover could be IT’s biggest challenge in the new year: keeping talented developers. Network World’s Carolyn Marsan writes this week about the topic and it is well worth reading her story.
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This isn’t a completely new problem. I remember when I took my second job, about two years after I was working for a consulting firm in Washington, DC around 1980. At the time my father was not happy about the switch: he was working as an accountant for the same place (and ended up putting in 30 years by the time he eventually retired, yes complete with gold watch that I have somewhere). He thought it was too quick a transition: what would other employers think? Little did I know I was starting a trend in the tech field lo’ those many years ago.
A CIO quoted in Marsan’s article mentions how turnover is his biggest issue: “knowledge keeps walking out the door.” I was wondering what he is paying his developers as perhaps one of the reasons for the huge turnover, where all of his six-person team has been with him for less than a year. But it turns out his particular issues aren’t so simple. There are several dimensions.
Part of the problem is that loyalty is so over with. Back in my dad’s day, you wanted to amass a retirement portfolio, or get more vacation time, or other benefits from being with a firm for decades. Now, those seem old-fashioned, and there are fewer pension plans and more contract workers. Hypergrowth is what matters. Getting challenged, learning stuff. Layoffs can happen at a moment’s notice, making more of a “what is in it for me” attitude.
The CIO interviewed in Marsan’s article spoke about a very different developer mindset for today’s 20-something coders. “There have been a number of cases where we have had a system that runs into issues, bugs, defects or a major change requirement. We thought it would be a challenge for a developer to own it. But their first reaction is to want to scrap it and start over.” It isn’t just learning the ropes and moving up the ladder slowly but being able to collaborate and work with others, rather than starting from scratch on a clean slate.
Another problem is that we expect instant gratification in our work lives. We can download what we need almost immediately from the Internet. If we don’t get super-fast bandwidth and sub-second response times from our computer we get easily frustrated. If it takes more than a few minutes to understand something, we move on. I have noticed this in my own use of apps recently: I get very impatient when I can’t understand something at first, and tend to drop products that have even a modest learning curve. (This is one of the reasons why Second Life went nowhere: it was a lot to learn at once.)
One often-heard complaint is better workplace flex times. Back when I was in my 20s, I worked day and night sometimes to get projects done. There was no such thing as 9-to-5, telecommuting, or flexible Fridays. Today’s GenY wants it all.
In addition, IT has to do a better job explaining the business context of their code and be engaged in what the company is actually doing with their apps. Coding just for coding’s sake is passé, as it should be. Granted, this was true back in my formative years, but it has gotten more important as IT has become more of a distributed operation, and coders are closer to their departments.
Certainly, it is a delicate balance to train and retain highly technical people. But it does seem as if these times have made it more of a challenge. What has been your experience?
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Managing HP Thin Clients Using HP Thin Clients: It’s Possible
Dec 5th
A growing number of embedded systems – devices with built-in firmware and non-PC form factors – are running Windows, including point-of-sale terminals, kiosks, and digital signage. But up to now they’ve required a server capable of running Microsoft’s System Center Configuration Manager 2007 (SCCM).
This morning, Hewlett-Packard announced that for the first time, it will offer thin client PCs – systems that run Windows Embedded Standard 7 already – that have Embedded Device Manager 2011 (EDM 2011) pre-installed. This way, out of the box, customers that run Windows Embedded 7 (based on the Windows 7 kernel) don’t have to install a separate server PC (even if it’s just a virtual or cloud-based one) to monitor and maintain devices such as cash registers.
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Usually the pre-installation of software on a system is not enough to merit an entire story, but this is an exception due to 1) the system involved, and 2) the relationship of this software to that system. Embedded systems have historically been more difficult to manage and maintain than PCs. Until recently, their firmware kernels haven’t really been large enough to merit an abundance of graphical tools, so an embedded Linux admin finds himself having to be a master of command-line tools and scripting languages for automating scary processes like system updates.
For Windows Server, the SCCM 2007 software typically manages processes such as operating system updates, security configurations, and device inventory, though it was made for full-fledged Windows. But since last March, Microsoft has made EDM 2011 available for implementing SCCM to manage embedded devices… from a PC (or remote device). Now that EDM comes pre-installed on a thin client like a t5570e (right) or t5740e (above) costing somewhere in the mid-three-digit range, depending on configuration, admins can use a thin client to capture and redeploy fully configured system images to a collection of clients.
According to HP documentation released today, “SCCM Software Update Management simplifies the complex task of delivering and managing updates to IT systems across the enterprise. IT administrators can deliver updates of Microsoft products, third-party applications, custom in-house line-of-business applications, hardware drivers, and system BIOS to a variety of devices.”
Embedded devices such as HP’s thin clients utilize a Microsoft feature called enhanced write filtering. It’s a way of using local memory as a cache for storing the images of changes that software running on the client may try to make to the disk – for example, when a Web browser stores cookies. For a system whose real function is point-of-sale, you often don’t want permanent disk changes, so write filtering lets the disk’s original contents be instantly restored by simply rebooting and “forgetting” the changes.
That’s nice, until you – the admin – want to make permanent changes to the operating system like security patches or service packs. You might have had to write a script that turned filtering off, applied the patch, then turned filtering on again. And someplace in that scenario, you worked in some time for praying it all worked right before re-engaging the filter.
One of the benefits of using EDM is that it knows how to programmatically disengage enhanced write filters prior to deploying updates. Another is being able to enroll multiple like devices (e.g., all the front registers) as a single collection, and roll out changes to the entire collection on a manageable itinerary.
Microsoft announced System Center 2012 Configuration Manager (the successor to System Center Configuration Manager 2007 – that’s right, the year got kicked from the end to the middle of the name) last month, though it may yet take some time for SC2012CM to make its way into the field. For now, HP’s solution supports SCCM 2007 and EDM 2011.
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