Imagine this: You go in for a routine check-up. The doctor gives you some bad news and tells you need surgery. “What!”, you scream. But nonetheless, you know you need it, so you oblige. The day has come for surgery. You go in to meet the surgeon and the the surgeon says to you this: “We normally use a scalpel for this procedure with anesthesia, but for you, we are going to use a butter knife, some twine, and aspirin instead of the good stuff. Oh and by the way, you have to be discharged today. But hey! You’ll make it. You’ve gone through tougher times than this!”
Unfortunately, this is what has happened to the web and the way it’s being designed on a daily basis.
Remember the days of Flash? Seems like so long ago, but 2001 was a huge year for Flash. Everyone wanted it. So instead of fixing the Versioning debacle or educating our clients on why they can’t design their website for just one browser, we switched to Flash. I love Flash and it has it’s place (in many places), but instead of fixing the problem we just put a nice cover over it.
Flash isn’t the problem though. And it shouldn’t be solely blamed. It’s overuse was just one of many factors that have contributed to the nastiness of the web we now know. Read the rest of this entry »
Since its inception in 2004, Facebook has been the younger sibling of social networking giant MySpace. Facebook differentiated itself by only offering membership to individuals with a .edu email address. However, the social network’s original stance of isolationism was broken in 2006 when Facebook opened its doors to the general public, resulting in a 24 million person community.
Since then, Facebook has been gaining in popularity and momentum, threatening to catch up to the leviathan MySpace. However, some features and applications available to the MySpace crowds naturally kept the social network a clear leader. Personalization options such as the ability to upload music, ala individual soundtracks, and video differentiated MySpace from its plain-Jane counterpart. Read the rest of this entry »
Many companies are allowing, and even encouraging, their employees to use instant messaging as a form of effective communication in the workplace. Others are skeptical and argue that IM-ing can be distracting and time consuming if not used appropriately. The key word here is “appropriate.”When used appropriately, instant messaging can be an excellent tool for productivity.
In a study performed earlier this year, Researchers from the University of the Pacific in California, US, NationalChungChengUniversity in Taiwan and Miami University, US, decided to investigate the issue of productivity and brainstorming, because of IM usage and its rapid growth in the workplace.The main focus was to uncover what consequences this might have for the way organizations work.The outcome of the study showed that, on average, a group of students using IM would brainstorm and come up with one more idea than students not using IM.
Remember the term “information super highway?” When the Internet craze first hit, this was its biggest selling point. You could go online and find almost any bit of information you could ever need on any given topic. Sure, information could be found easily — but who wrote all that stuff and how could you trust it?
Now people focus on the Internet as less of a depository of information, and more of a host of information that is a collaboration among its users. The things people look for are more community based –such as information from others who share the same interests or activities. The increasing popularity of websites such as MySpace, Facebook, Gather, Flickr and Match.com are a testament to how Internet users are looking for something different – a human connection in this world of technology. So how do you create this human connection in a non human interface? How can you recreate conversations, memories, and human thoughts through a computer screen?
It seems that just about every new site these days tries to include some form of community aspect. Different sites have different features, whether it be blogs, forums, discussion boards, in-site messaging, personalized web spaces or a combination of features to create the community aspect. In an endeavor to create a successful social networking atmosphere, it is important to keep the following ideas in mind. Read the rest of this entry »
“Customers will buy more, and at higher prices, only when they see quality and service increase. So to increase revenue per employee, companies are increasingly dependent on the loyalty of first-class people.”
-The Loyalty Effect
Raising productivity is a matter of making intelligent tradeoffs. Employees must:
Understand the economics of their job functions.
Know a great deal about customer preferences and needs.
Mozilla.org is now in the early development stage of Firefox 3, to be known as Gran Paradiso. Although Firefox 2 just came out at the end of 2006, Firefox’s next major release is due to hit the general public by the fourth or possibly as soon as the third quarter of 2007, just a short time away. In fact, Gran Paradiso Alpha 1 version is being tested by developers across the internet right now as I write this insipid blog entry. If you are interested, you too can be involved in the next release of the superior browser, Firefox 3. Just go to mozilla.org and get your copy, and submit the bugs that you find. Mozilla suggests that the testers should be experienced developers, but if you are so inclined, give them suggestions from the user’s point of view.
As a developer, I know that this means that a superior browser, one that strives to meet all of the industry standards, will even be better soon, but what does it mean for the average user. Better security for one. Firefox is known as one of the safer browsers when it comes to your personal information, and soon it will be even safer. In my opinion, Gran Paradiso will be the safest browser in the industry. Another new feature GP will have is “one-click bookmarking” and brand new tagging system. This will make it much easier to save your favorite pages. This is a feature that I will definitely use often. For the entire list of proposed features click here and review them yourself.
So get Firefox 3 Gran Paradiso as soon as it is released and be a part of the Mozilla community. Dump that inferior browser for good! Your personal information will thank you later.
Finding the right email campaign application can be tough, much less attaining (and maintaining) a large list of subscribers. I was recently helping a friend get started with a campaign. Having some experience with this, I had a couple applications already in mind. It was a toss-up between Campaign Monitor and Intellicontact. Both good applications with intelligently crafted features. I wasn’t in a rush, but I just couldn’t decide. So I set up personal accounts with both applications and planned to revisit them in a couple days.
I immediately received the token welcome emails from both services - providing me instruction on how to dig in and use their applications. About a day later, after having ignored my new accounts, both services emailed me again. Here’s what each of them said: Read the rest of this entry »
I was visiting AOL today and they had a video posted on their homepage; intrigued by the title I had to take a look and I must admit that it’s a little disturbing. While I do believe that it has been edited in some way it’s very difficult to pinpoint where. Take a look for yourself and let us know what you think - Spirit or Spoof?
