Category: Technology

Browser Wars II

Browser Wars II Yahoo! (YHOO) and Sillicon Valley Web Builder hosted a really cool event tonight: Browser Wars: Episode II The Attack of the DOMs. The speakers were:

After an awkward introduction, Douglas set the stage by explaining how complex the web development industry was: software bugs that live in one version of a browser don’t get erased by the next version. People may use those older versions for months or years to come. Newer versions also surface new bugs. What we get are essentially compound bugs. Know how compound interest is a great & powerful thing? Well, compound bugs are equally powerful, but very, very bad.

Then Chris and Mike spoke. (Håkon, who was flying in all the way from Oslo, Norway, was running late due to a flight delay.) They were surprisingly cordial and professional. Some members of the audience seemed disappointed by this; they expected blood. Instead, what they got was a lot of mutual respect & admiration between the two. I found this very positive, especially if it’s an indication of a stronger collaboration between IE and Firefox in the future.

When Håkon arrived, that’s when the jabs began. He discussed the Acid2 test and how poorly IE7 supports it. Again, they were professional, yet playful. All three are hillarious speakers. It was like three college buddies vying for the same girl – none wanted to totally trash his friends, but still wanted to make himself look better.

Håkon also added this piece of news: future versions of Opera will include a native <video> element and support the Ogg video file format because it’s a patent-free open standard. This means there will be no need for plugins to view video on Opera in the future. There may be a similar element for audio files as well.

Noticeably absent was a representative from Apple’s (AAPL) Safari team, even though they were invited. When asked about this, the official excuse given was that the Safari team was too busy to attend. “Two busy to take two hours out of your day?” asked Douglas. “Håkon flew twenty hours from Oslo to be here. They’re less than an hour away from our office.”

“I drove by them on my way here,” added Chris. See what I mean by hillarious speakers? Still, the absense of Apple was disappointing.

After their brief presentations, the speakers took questions from the audience, some of which included (all paraphrased):

Q: What are they doing to improve JavaScript performance?
A: All have made improvements to JavaScript’s garbage collection mechanisms, but admit there’s still much to be done.

Q: Will they support more interactivity with the operating system?
A: Not necessarily, since there are security issues to worry about. But there’s already some level of support, like Firefox’s extensions and Microsoft’s ActiveX.

Q: In light of new technologies like Adobe’s Apollo and Microsoft’s Windows Presentation Platform (WPF), should we abandon Ajax?
A: Heck no!

Q: Will they support SVG?
A: No, because it’s not that easy to support; an SVG browser would mean a whole new kind of web browser.

Q: What are their strategies with mobile devices?
A: Opera leads in this area; Microsoft is continuing to improve their mobile IE browser; Mozilla admits it’s an important space but didn’t say anything concrete about entering it or not.

Q: What are their personal opinions on how they should innovate?
A: All agree that they’ll continue to strengthen their support for web standards, browser security, and other improvements for developers and end users. Mike added that standards organizations (like the W3C) are great for deciding how to propose flexible, interoperable solutions to common problems, but not for innovations.

There were other great insights & one-liners from the speakers. I hope someone else was able to capture them (anyone liveblog the event?). I’ll include them in this entry as I find them.

Fantastic event! Props to Chris, Mike, Håkon, Douglas, and all the organizers for putting this together!

UPDATED 3/5/2007: Here’s more coverage of this event.

Thinking About RSS

RSS icon Emily Chang will be speaking on a panel entitled, “Using RSS for Marketing” at this upcoming SXSW Interactive Conference. On her blog, she asks for feedback on insights & topics related to RSS.

This got me thinking (which, I know, is dangerous). Fundamentally, what is RSS?

Fundamentally, RSS is an XML-based stream of data. Or, as Wikipedia defines it:

A family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated digital content, such as blogs, news feeds or podcasts.

Okay, that’s not helpful at all.

Conceptually, RSS is a free way to share real-time information with the world. Cool, okay, now it sounds more like radio waves or television broadcasts. Analogies are good.

How can RSS be used?

Currently, RSS is most commonly used to distribute updates from websites like blogs, vlogs, and podcasts. This information is time-sensitive and archives can be just as important as updates. Other real-time information that can be distributed are weather, traffic, and stock prices reports. These are also time-sensitive, though archives are not very important.

Conceivably, RSS could also share non real-time information, like dictionaries and encyclopedias. Or non-textual information like maps and technical diagrams.

RSS readers are currently built to display chronological information, so this would not be a standard way to use RSS. Arguably, it’s not an effective way either. There are other ways to retrieve static information, such as using web services. But possibly, the RSS format could also be used as a web service?

So what is RSS and how can it be used?

RSS is a way to share information, with some kinds of information being better than others:

  • Real-time information = blogs, vlogs, podcasts, news, weather, traffic & stock prices
  • Static information = dictionary info, encyclopedia info, maps & technical diagrams (maybe?)
  • Archivable information = blogs, vlogs, podcasts & news
  • Non-archivable information = weather, traffic & stock prices
  • Textual information = blogs, news, weather, traffic & stock prices
  • Graphical/video/audio information = photos, video, audio, maps & technical diagrams

As a marketer, are any of these information formats useful to your business? Or rather, would your customers find any of these information formats useful?

Perhaps. In my opinion, RSS isn’t just for blogs, vlogs, and podcasts though. With some thinking, perhaps you’ll find more uses for it too.

Want an iPhone?

Apple iPhone Want an Apple iPhone (AAPL), but can’t because of stinkin’ cellphone carrier contracts? This new service seems to have the answer: Cellswapper.com!

I’m not affiliated with them in any way, nor have I used their service yet. I heard about them on TechCrunch and thought their service sounded pretty damn cool.

When the Motorola Q (MOT) first came out, I got it right away, first-generation bugs and all. And oh boy are there bugs. The OS occasionally locks up on me. There’s dust inside the screen. And the original battery dies inside of a day, requiring the bulkier extended battery. Sigh…

I don’t think I’m going to be an early adopter of the iPhone. I’ll probably consider the second generation of it though. So the excitement of Cellswapper.com isn’t so much that I can get out of my Verizon (VZ) contract to get an iPhone. It’s mostly that I can lose the Motorola Q.

A Woman’s New Best Friend

Yellow Diamond Ring You know what’s insane? De Beers’ stranglehold on the diamond industry and their deliberate pricing strategies.

What’s the rule for an engagement ring? That it should cost about two months’ salary? I see peers in Sillicon Valley spending more like three to six months’ salary sometimes. Insane!

So it fills me with joy when I hear that manufactured diamonds are becoming as good as mined diamonds. The benefits are endless:

…environmentally friendly (no open-pit mines), sociopolitically neutral (no blood diamonds), and monopoly-free (not controlled by De Beers).

Not to mention, hopefully, much more affordable too. Unfortunately, due to technical constraints, they haven’t been able to manufacture clear diamonds yet – only yellow diamonds (which happen to be very rare in the wild).

But before you run out and buy one, you’ve got to ask yourself: “Will your sweetie mind a manufactured diamond?” Has De Beers’ apparent monopoly also brainwashed her into believing that only mined diamonds = true love? (And if so, do you really want to go through with this? Just sayin’.)

P.S. Here’s a handy guide of manufactured diamond producers.

What’s In Your Pipe?

Yahoo! Pipes You’ve probably heard by now. Yahoo! (YHOO) just released a new service called Pipes.

Pipes is an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator. Using Pipes, you can create feeds that are more powerful, useful and relevant.

I described it to a non-technical friend as: “A way to create mash-ups of RSS feeds through a WYSIWYG UI.” My friend said, “Wha?” then bonked me on the head. So I punched him.

After he regained consciousness, I tried again: “It’s a way to make a new web site from a bunch of other web sites.” “Oh! Cool!” he answered as he rubbed his head. He’s not too bright, you see.

He’s probably not the target market for this tool anyways. But I am. And here’s how:

I’m currently looking for an apartment in San Francisco, CA, that has a garage. Sounds simple enough, right? Unfortunately, Craigslist doesn’t have advanced search options that allow me to really pick out the listings with a garage.

So I created this Pipe. All it does is filter out a bunch of text like “street parking only” and “no garage”, making it a heck of a lot easier to find an apartment with a garage.

This is just one really simple use for this tool. Apparently, there are more profitable ways to use it too. Rok Hrastnik from site-reference.com has written a lengthy piece entitled: “How Marketers Can Use Yahoo! Pipes to Increase Their Online Sales” to show just how.

If you understand RSS and technical concepts like filtering and aggregation, give Pipes a try. Maybe it can improve your online sales. And if you know of a good apartment in San Francisco with a garage, let me know!

The Pageview is Dead

Here Lies the Page View 1994-2010 Last December, ComScore reported that someone finally topped Yahoo! (YHOO) in pageviews. It was News Corp’s (NWS) MySpace.

This seemed like big news at the time. “Oh my goodness! Someone beat Yahoo!” Unfortunately, a poor metric was glamourized: the pageview.

David Dueblin at On Tokyo Time amusingly writes:

The page view metric (PV) is already dead! Not everyone got the memo though…

The pageview was important because it gave Internet advertising companies a way to measure the number of users as a means to price their advertising placements. They used it like newspapers and magazines used subscriptions. In the past, this was effective.

The adoption of modern web browsers, however, has changed the game. And advertisers either don’t realize this, or have known it all along (perhaps as far back as late 2005) but didn’t want to tell anyone. Steve Rubel of Micro Persuasian suggests that some advertisers may not want a more accurate metric either:

This is a dirty little secret in the advertising business that no one wants to talk about. Media companies love to promote how many page views their properties get. They’ve used the data to build equity. They will fight it tooth and nail to protect it, perhaps by not embracing interactive technologies as quickly as they should. But that’s not going to stop the revolution from coming.

Modern web browsers have given us the ability to change a piece of a web page without reloading the entire page. This is more popularly known as Ajax. And this technique effectively makes the pageview obsolete. How? Mike Davidson explains it well:

This would be the flow in a, say, Google-engineered network experience:

1. Click over to “GoogSpace”, or whatever we want to call it. (+1 page view)
2. Click through to read and reply to all mail (0)
3. Visit a few friends’ pages (+3)
4. Edit my profile page (+1)

That’s about 5 registered page views. The rest of the interaction comes from XML/HTTP requests.

Here’s the same sequence on MySpace:

1. Click over to MySpace. (+1 page view)
2. Log in, because MySpace doesn’t remember logins very well. (+2)
3. Click through to read and reply to all mail… about three per mail. (+21)
4. Visit a few friends’ pages. (+3)
5. Reload a few pages because of server errors. (+3)
5. Edit my profile page. (+10)

That’s about 40 registered page views… and it’s not an atypical pattern at all, from what I’ve found. Many people have also mentioned that web-based IM generates a ton of clicks for them as well.

In other words: the stuff on your page can dramatically change without having to load a whole new page. Since your page doesn’t change, it doesn’t technically count as a pageview. And if you can’t count it as a pageview, what can you count? What’s a better metric?

Evan Williams of Evhead answers with: “It depends.”

If you’re talking about what’s important to pay attention to on your own site, you have to determine what your primary success criteria are and measure that as best you can. For some sites, that could be subscribers, or paying users, or revenue, or widgets deployed, or files uploaded, or what have you. It may even be pageviews.

Here’s a summary all the metrics I’ve seen used at Internet companies or mentioned elsewhere:

  • Number of signed-in active users (as opposed to number of user accounts)
  • Number of repeat unique visitors (tracked by cookies)
  • Number of relevant actions (for YouTube, it could be number of videos viewed per user)
  • Number of clicks made (Ryan Stewart of The Universal Desktop calls this the “interaction rate“)
  • Number of feed subscribers (though this wouldn’t measure visitors to your site)
  • Time spent (this can be artifically inflated, however)

I agree with Williams. It depends. The best metric is the one that’s relevant for your application and/or market. In some cases, advertisers are going to care more about the number of active users in your system. In other cases, the number of relevant actions & clicks made.

The pageview is dead. Long live the pageview.

The Web 2.0 Lorem Ipsum Generator

Last Friday, the MIT Advertising Lab gave me a fun idea: a Web 2.0 Lorem Ipsum Generator!

So I grabbed some JavaScript “lorem ipsum” generation code from subterrane, compiled a list of made-up company names from TechCrunch’s company index (as of today), randomized the names, and whipped up this handy generator. Now you can greek your mock-ups in true Web 2.0 style!

UPDATE 2011.12.7: This generator now has it’s own site! I present to you The New Web 2.0 Lorem Ipsum Generator.

Battlestar Wikipedia

Wikipedia vs MicrosoftBizThoughts… Wikipedia… Major controversy… check it out. (Okay, I admit, it’s not funny at all when I do it.)

I first heard about the controversy on TechCrunch. And yes, this article’s title is a rip, er, I mean homage, to TechCrunch’s article “Battleground Wikipedia” and Battlestar Galatica. (I know, I won’t quit my day job.)

The controversy started when Microsoft (MSFT) employee Doug Mahugh, an Open XML evangelist, hired Rick Jelliffe, a standards activist, to edit and correct the Wikipedia entry on Microsoft Office Open XML. This was seen as a conflict of interest and against one of Wikipedia’s core principles: “that articles must be written from a neutral point of view (NPOV).”

I think such controversies are inevitable in an open & collaborative authoring environment such as a wiki. While the NPOV rule is necessary for articles to remain unbiased, what if you see obvious errors about your organization, or worse, yourself? Wikipedia’s own founder, Jimmy Wales, went through this. As have others. Another case involved John Seigenthaler, ex-publisher and current chairman of the Tennessee newspaper The Tennessean. In November 2005, he discovered that the Wikipedia article on him indicated that he was involved with the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy. After having it removed, he declared in an op-ed to USA Today that: “Wikipedia is a flawed and irresponsible research tool.”

This begs the question: Is an open & collaborative authoring environment an imperfect tool for research? How accurate is it, if there are no gatekeepers for quality? Alexander Halavais, assistant professor of interactive communications at Quinnipiac University, decided to test this question in 2004. He intentionally created 13 errors in Wikipedia, from outright lies to seemingly credible facts. In contrast to the four months that John Seigenthaler’s inaccuracies existed, Alexander Halavais’ errors were corrected in less than three hours. This has made Halavais a believer, even though many academics still remain skeptical.

In December 2005, Nature tackled this skepticism with a study that compared the accuracy of Wikipedia against Encyclopaedia Britannica. They found that the average science entry in Wikipedia contained around four inaccuracies while Britannica contained about three. Not bad for an open & collaborative authoring environment! Britannica has since responded with criticism against the study.

In Halavais’ blog, he sums up the Microsoft controversy and Wikipedia factual accuracy well:

Wikipedia is built on the idea that good material will rise to the top. It specifically does not ban idiots, ideologues, or conspiracy theorists. Why is it that money should make things that much worse? I think this highlights a larger problem. We don’t care who you are, as long as you are not paid, seems to me to be a fuzzy and difficult line to draw.

Wikipedia is built on the idea that the community is large enough to root out misinformation or bias and fix it. Why not trust that?

I don’t believe Mahugh’s actions were that atrocious. I think it’s fair to raise an eyebrow, but it should raise an eyebrow to the intrinsic accuracy concerns over open & collaborative authoring environments (if you believe there are any accuracy concerns).

Mahugh went out of his way to find an expert in the XML community and even specified that: “We don’t need to ‘approve’ anything you have to say, our goal is simply to get more informed voices into the debate… feel free to state your own opinion.” Sounds to me like he was trying to carefully navigate the NPOV rule while improving what he felt were inaccuracies in the entry. What would Seigenthaler, or even Wales himself have done?