Stritar's chronolog

Reinventing the blog, part 1: Dissecting the most innovative and best-designed blogs

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 15:23:46 GMT

The blog is getting mature. Ever since Gawker did its eccentric redesign a few years ago, we've seen a lot of other blog (networks) doing similar things, trying to reinvent how the blog should look like in 2013. After the initial hiccup, Gawker managed to fortify its position and attract new users, showing others that people do like to see different things, things that are imitating the experience of reading electronic magazines on mobile devices. Today, there are many great cases of how a modern blog should feel, and since I'm thinking about doing something similar myself (it's been almost 4 years since I did this!), I decided to dissect a few of the most innovative ones, hoping to get a picture of what works and what not. Here are my picks of the most creative and best designed (mainstream) blogs on the Web, those that are standing out from the crowd and are unique in what they offer to their readers.

Fast Company

Fast Company is a great example that demonstrates the power of images - especially if you have access to professional photographic material. The home page is clean and the highlighted article is integrated into the main key visual, which works very well. The same logic of the huge picture is implemented to the inner pages as well, and this picture is transformed into a gallery if required. There isn't much of related content on a single article, and the social buttons are custom, which I think we will be seeing a lot of in the future.

Fast Company uses an effective combination of the key visual, article header, additional flavor text and custom social buttons.

Fast Company uses custom typography, infinite scroll to avoid paging, takes good advantage from the article abstract / subtitle to make you curious (it's displayed on the article as the introduction as well), and their website is responsive. It is also interesting that they keep a single article visible above the fold on their homepage to retain focus. From the design and user experience perspective, this solution is one of my favorites.

Gawker

Gawker's innovative approach was to use two columns for news on the home page - one for top stories and one for latest stories - and ditching the main menu. While this may have been one of the most important evolutions modern blogs have made, I don't think this feature works well on the homepage, since I don't really notice the right column when I browse the site. However, this feature becomes more useful on the inner pages, where this module is duplicated, and where most people land on the site.

Gawker and the omnipresent main menu that changed the game.

This realization, that single blog posts should be treated as primary landing pages, is very important, and Gawker was one of the first to fully integrate that concept into its user experience. People don't browse blogs anymore, they consume social media that brings them to blogs.

Gawker also uses a big picture (not in such a cool way as Fast Company) in the post, and it's very smart and concise that this picture can be replaced with a video. I like the way comments are solved, showing only the most popular threads, and not the complete conversation (with the amount of comments they have, it would be probably useless otherwise). I'm also keen on the internal hot meter they use, which they seem to use to distinguish the top and latest news. However, they should ditch the "like Gawker" block exposed on each article, it's very misleading. The mobile site should also be replaced with a responsive version.

Mashable

Mashable's redesign introduced quite a few interesting features I look forward to adopting. They have minimized the main menu, offering a drop down popup menu that allows further classification of news. This menu is well coded and does a pretty good job of taking care of incidental mouse moves (not as good as Amazon though). The homepage uses three columns to display articles, even though I'm not fully sure how that works ("The new stuff" is probably all articles, "The next big thing" are probably highlighted by the editor, and "What's hot" by the crowd), and this feature's column header is fixed upon (infinite) scrolling. The design is, driven by their specific social media ninja audience, of course, responsive.

Mashable has a clever integration of social media activity on the top of the article.

What I like about Mashable's new version the most, is the clever social media integration. They have the total number of shares displayed on the top of the article, as well as a little graph that displays the dynamics of social activity for a specific post. These social media statistics are probably also used to feed the columns on the homepage, even though most people probably don't understand what's happening. But perhaps that's for the best - if it works well in recommending the articles, thumbs up.

Again, we are seeing a picture above the article, which can be video as well. That's good. What I don't like about Mashable is the three-column footer of the article, it is the same as the homepage, displaying a single category. I can understand the need for such a thing, it could work, cloning the homepage on the landing article page, but for me, it's just too overwhelming.

The Next Web

The Next Web's new design is somewhere in between Mashable and Gawker. The homepage uses two columns, the Channels, which can be configured and switched from popular to latest, and the main window, which offers a pinterest-style display of articles, similar to the one Mashable uses. This left menu box is fixed and used both on the home and inner pages, and it works as the main menu to navigate the content of the portal. The main main menu is simple and works as a hub for other TNW stuff.

The Next Web's navigation and post header, together with instruction to use the keyboard.

The Next Web also has custom social media integration, and offers the users to navigate with the keyboard. This navigation works very well with the left box - meaning the users is navigating the current selection in the box, offering an experience similar to switching a remote on a digital TV, knowing what the next channel will be. I'm not sure how many users notice and use this feature, but this integrated content and navigation approach is very interesting.

The site is responsive, uses a big picture before the post, together with the detailed information about the article. Another interesting thing - the images break out of the paragraph form. Overall, a very solid performance with a minimalistic design.

Quartz

While Quartz may not be one of the most well-known blogs out there, it still very much deserves a mention for its creative implementation. The clever menu that collapses when you proceed to the article, the interesting fixed list on the left that can be configured and pivoted according to your wishes, making the navigation much easier and again, integrated with the content.

Quartz fully integrates the navigation and content.

There's another innovative feature on Quartz for which I haven't decided if I like it or not, but it is very interesting nevertheless. When you scroll to the end of the article, the next article is automatically displayed, together with a new URL. This is made as a redirect (the url changes), but it does not seem like one at all - when I get the time I will try to see how they technically achieve this. This article change is integrated with the left box, which makes the complete experience pretty interesting, similar to the one The Next Web has. What Quartz misses is better social media integration. They went a step back and decided to use links to share pages instead of widgets, which probably doesn't help their traffic that much, but it's aligned with the design. The site is responsive.

The Verge

The Verge's homepage is probably the most unique of them all. While I would make the main menu less confusing, I really like the tiles for the most interesting articles. This is followed by the video section, and by a ton of other articles - too many of them, to be honest. But things get more interesting once you get to a specific post. The menu gets smaller, there is a clear navigation to the next and previous articles at the top, and the breaking news floats.

The Verge's posts are close to perfection - full of images and quotes, together with embedded galleries.

The design of the inner page is very creative, there is a huge image (not on all articles, it seems only on the reviews) with social share widgets, a secondary title is also used. I really like the quotes inside the text, and the jump-to thingie is useful as well. You can see that someone took a lot of time to shape the content, the text is wrapped around images, the galleries are embedded within the text. This gives you an impression you are browsing a high-end iPad magazine rather than a web page. There aren't to many other elements on the page, so the overall result is very clean and easy to read. On the other hand, that polished content structure probably makes it quite hard for the site to be responsive, which The Verge is not.

Wired

The legendary Wired magazine has an online edition that would make a lot of people proud. They have been always known as innovators, and were one of the first to introduce the grid display of articles instead of a list. This means the emphasis is more on the images and headings than it is on the text. The popup menu is put somewhere inside this grid of posts, which is a daring, but effective solution. This menu neatly moves to the top on the inner pages.

Wired's article headings have big titles and teasing abstracts.

Again, we are seeing two different types of posts as on The Verge, the basic one, and the advanced one. The advanced one is a feast to the eyes, with a huge heading and abstract that get you interested, the pictures that break out of paragraphs. But there are a few things that are not suited for such an established magazine. In a gallery, each click reloads the complete page, which can be very very annoying. I don't think hunting for ad views makes it worth it. I would also make the right column a little less overwhelming with content (not only ads, but everything else as well). And the site is not responsive.

Breaking down the elements

Based on the analysis, we can conclude that new specific elements started to emerge with the next generation of blogs. These elements are the results of us consuming content in a different way that we were a few years ago - before social and mobile. Most of them are taking care of "the homepage is not the landing page" situation, while trying to persuade people to proceed with browsing the content, lowering bounce rates.

	Fastco	Gawker	Mashable	TNW	Quartz	Verge	Wired	Total
Unconventional navigation		1		1	1			3
Fixed (floating) menu			1	1	1			3
Responsive design	1		1	1	1			4
Big key visual before text	1	1	1	1	1	1	1	7
Advanced key visual (gallery, video)	1	1	1					3
Abstract, teaser, subheading	1	1				1	1	4
Suggested content within limits	1	1		1	1	1		5
Custom social media integration	1		1	1				3
Polished content (wrapping, quotes)			1			1	1	3
Custom typography	1		1	1	1	1	1	6
Infinite scroll	1		1		1			3
Pinterest-style homepage			1	1		1	1	4
Integrated content and navigation				1	1			2
Total	8	5	9	9	8	6	5

Conclusion

Typical design and user experience of mainstream blogs have evolved in the past few years, and we will be seeing similar concepts adopted by the mainstream media as well. The social and mobile era have changed the way we consume content, while heightening our expectations - most of us simply count on great experiences. Luckily, the world is full of great innovators who are not afraid to take risks and implement new creative features that will become a standard in the years to come. I'm already looking forward to how other major players will respond to the new situation.

Check out the complete Reinventing the blog series.

Using JSON (with asp.net) is like wiping your ass with silk

Sat, 05 Jan 2013 18:45:44 GMT

I love mashups. Actually, I love everything about them, I love using them, I love making them, I love those who do everything they can to empower them. In my opinion, mashups are one of the most significant concepts the Web has invented, since they represent unlimited possibilities of integrating and reshaping things that are already done. The platforms out there are stable, so it's the creativity that sets the limits. These days, you can easily take data from anyone and do something else with it. Just don't forget to use JSON.

I'm an old school guy who has been working mostly in enterprise software environments, which means using XML for data integrations, besides, RSS used to be the man. The first generation of Twenity (Twitfluence) was using XML feeds, and this blog is using mostly RSS for fetching entries from other sources. XML was the standard we all spoke, very cute and readable, but on the other hand, not so easy to parse. At that time, this fact didn't represent such a major problem, since a few more lines of code took care of everything. But today is a different situation.

It was Twitter who first started dropping support for XML, which annoyed the hell out of me. I had to start rewriting things for JSON. This turned out to be one of the best things that ever happened, since JSON seems to be loved by everyone. It's super easy to use with jQuery, but since I'm a server-side type of a guy, it's even more important that it's cleverly integrated into asp.net. Fetch the data, store it, do crazy shit with it.

JSON is serializable into a .net object with a single line of code. Create the class with parameters compliant with the the specific JSON structure, serialize the response string into that class, and everything automagically works. Piece of cake, unlimited opportunities. Take Twitter for example:

Make the basic Tweet class:

public class Tweet
{
public string id_str;
public string text;
}

Create the request to access a tweet (funny, the hardest thing to do):

string url = "http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/show/274508827146215424.json";
HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest)HttpWebRequest.Create(url);
request.Method = "GET";
WebResponse response = request.GetResponse();
StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(response.GetResponseStream());
string jsonResponse = reader.ReadToEnd();
reader.Close();

Which will return something like this (play here):

{
"created_at": "Fri Nov 30 13:42:59 +0000 2012",
"id_str": "274508827146215424",
"text": ""Facebook knows what we say, Google knows what we think",
"source": "web",
...
}

Serialize the response string into an object:

JavaScriptSerializer js = new JavaScriptSerializer();
Tweet tweet = new Tweet();
tweet = js.Deserialize<Tweet>(jsonResponse);
Response.Write(tweet.text);

Pretty neat. Since I've started using JSON, mashups have become easier than ever to make. With one of our latest projects, we've integrated our application with Twitter, Instagram, Foursquare and Flickr. For breakfast! XML may have its advantages, but for such things, JSON is simply the greatest. All hail the new lord!

A case study in agile development: the algorithm for Ljubljana Realtime's event discovery

Mon, 22 Oct 2012 20:01:16 GMT

When we started working on Ljubljana Realtime, we decided to approach it in an agile way. Amongst others, we wanted to use a few interesting lean concepts such as rapid development, Minimum Viable Product and the Build - Measure - Learn iterations. Less than two months later, the results are in, and they are very pleasing. The MVP in the shape of an activity map was developed in a few weeks, only to show there is a lot of social noise which will somehow need to be taken under control. But that's currently low priority, since the first pivot is already taking place, slowly shifting the focus from the rich map application towards an event discovery algorithm and stream. That's where I see the most potential of Ljubljana Realtime, and in the last weeks, that's where the most work was done.

Launch

Ljubljana Realtime event discovery engine uses Foursquare trending venues and geo-tagged posts from Twitter, Instagram and Flickr to discover what's happening in real life. At least 6 people checked-in on Foursquare or two different people tweeting or posting photos in a single hour could mean something is going on. These events are posted to Twitter and Facebook, with links to the posts. A few versions of this algorithm were already deployed, each one solving new problems, resulting in a few micro Build - Measure - Learn cycles in a single month.

Iteration 1: Foursquare, no duplicates

The first version of the stream (bot) was a simple one, at that point it was meant to work as promotion for the map. The only thing it knew how to do was to wait a few hours until it posted the same thing again. I think Foursquare checkins are alive for three hours, so if a trending venue was still trending after that time, new people had to checkin and the venue was still buzzing.

Problem: Plain, no real added value.

Iteration 2: Adding activity from other sources

When we were trying to make some space on the crowded map, we started grouping posts from Twitter and Instagram by the nearest Foursquare venue, which meant having less boxes on the screen. This turned out to be quite a complex thing to do properly, but it was worth the effort. On only a few occasions, one venue would have multiple posts in a single hour, and in most cases, that meant something was happening there. This provided another very interesting potential for the activity stream. Actually, it made the stream bigger than the map could ever be.

(I love it when such things happen, when you are trying to solve a problem, and it turns out there is much more hidden behind the resolution.)

Groupping posts by a venue. Did Ljubljana Realtime just discover an athletic meeting taking place?

The next problem: Activity in some venues, specially generic ones such as "Ljubljana" would trigger the stream almost every day. Similarly, some large venues, such as supermarkets, would be trending too many times on Foursquare.

Iteration 3: Balancing the posts

The algorithm needed an update, which would lower the amount of times when a venue would be recognized as an event, either on Foursquare or on other channels. At first I though about an upgrade which would set the amount of people or tweets needed to trigger the "event discovered" action for a specific venue. This would enable us to reduce the importance of some venues, but it would also require manual work. Luckily, we came up with another brilliant idea: the more times a venue is trending, the harder it is for it to be trending again, at least for the next few days. Automatic balancing.

Venues with the most discovered events. Generic ones, besides massive places, such as train stations, cinemas, squares and shopping centers are too dominating.

The next problem: At this point, we have launched other test instances of Ljubljana Realtime (Maribor, Zagreb and Zurich), to see how the system behaves in other environments. Some cities are bigger, some are smaller, which means they produce different amount of activity. Besides, different services are used differently in different cultures.

Iteration 4: Supporting local instances

Foursquare is big in Croatia (Zagreb), but not so much in Switzerland (Zurich), which means Zagreb Realtime's stream had a lot of Foursquare trending posts, while Zurich's had a lot of "Increased activity on Twitter and Instagram" posts. It was obvious that local instances needed different algorithms. While having an option to set the amounts which would trigger the post on a specific venue would be too much to moderate, having the same logic on a specific region could work. And it does. Zagreb now needs more people checked-in on Foursquare, while Zurich needs more unique people tweeting or sharing photos.

Number of discovered events by type (Foursquare vs. Twitter + Instagram) on each day. Foursquare trending venues are dominating Zagreb, while social streams are dominating Zurich Realtime.

The next problem: The basic algorithm requires two different people to tweet/post from the same location in one hour. In case of Zurich, this amount was set to three, but it turns out this situation happens rarely, around 10 times fewer than with two people, or only two to three times a day. Obviously not enough.

Iteration 5: Improving the "increased activity" weight

You can only have a whole amount of people tweeting in the past hour. Two or three. In our case, we needed something in the range of 2 1/2. The modified solution adds the number of posts divided by ten to the number of users, which means that currently, at least two people making at least three posts in an hour will determine a trending event in Zurich. This is not a perfect solution from the event discovery view, but it does what urgently needed to be done: prevent having too many tweets in the stream.

The next problem: we currently have four Twitter accounts that tweet events for these four cities. Our target was for each of them to make around 10 - 15 tweets a day, which seems like a number that is not spam. But how can a person see which of these events is THE event?

Iteration 6: Going super venue level 2

The latest version of the algorithm now recognizes two levels of events. An event (mostly 6 people on Foursquare, mostly 2 different people tweeting), and an outstanding event (around 12 people on Foursquare, around 4 people tweeting). Our goal was to make this super event happen only once a few days, on rare occasions two times per day, and it has already happened a few times.

Sometimes super events happen, with tens of posts in a single hour, such as the one for Philips Fashion week. These events definitely require more exposure.

The next iterations

At this point, I'm very satisfied with how the algorithm works, even though a few other modifications need to be done (specially to support different days of week specifics and behavior). By measuring what is happening, learning from that information and building the next releases based on that knowledge, the activity stream logic has come a long way from the initial version. Measuring is crucial, and rarely we have went to such extent to enable this in the widest way possible (e.g. the update to balancing the posts based on the previous events would be trivial by itself, but we wanted to log things that would happen but didn't happen, besides things that actually happened).

These cycles of Build - Measure - Learn can be a lot hard work, but they provide great results, which are also very fun and rewarding. Some people simply need to see how deep the rabbit hole is. Do you have any other interesting cases or experience with this approach?

Discover what's happening in Ljubljana in real-time

Fri, 28 Sep 2012 13:37:29 GMT

I've always been a big fan of the power of the crowds. When a mass of people can achieve much more than a few skilled individuals can. And ever since we've started playing with Twitter's API, I've been think about the possibilities of this magnificent data source. Besides Twenity, we've done a few other Twitter mashups like Twitter walls, but this wasn't enough. We wanted something more - geolocation. Displaying information on a map in real-time. But since there aren't that many tweets equipped with GPS coordinates, we needed to include other services for more diversity as well. Which we did, and Ljubljana Realtime, a social event discovery application, was born.

Launch

Data and services

Ljubljana Realtime currently feeds on four different services: Twitter, Foursquare, Instagram and Flickr. It would be great if we could add other services as well, but Facebook doesn't allow public geo search, Google+ doesn't support geo search at all, and other services either aren't appropriate or don't offer an API which would allow us to get their data.

These four services are visited once a minute, and all posts in a radius of around 5km from Ljubljana city center are found: tweets, Foursquare trending venues, pictures from Instagram and Flickr. A variety of information created with different purposes on different occasions.

The area covered by Ljubljana Realtime. Different services require different searches, based on maximum allowed radius.

The application

These posts are displayed on a map, which was the original idea for the prototype. The last hours of posts on Google Maps, which can be zoomed and filtered at will. But the whole display felt a bit chaotic (still does), since there are many posts in vicinity of one another. That's why we knew we need to group similar posts, and we did this by the post's nearest Foursquare venue. Then a funny thing happened: this simple solution enabled something magnificent, something that could be much bigger than the whole posts-on-a-map application.

Anyways, since geo location is heavily connected with mobile devices, the application is responsive and fully compatible with most smartphones. Perhaps there will be native apps as well at one point.

The stream

Back to the magnificent. Originally, a Twitter bot was intended to come with the application (I love making those), which would tweet all trending foursquare venues to promote the application. But this seemed a bit lame, we needed to add something cooler. Something that would add more value and detect an event before a 4sq trending venue would happen. This is where the mentioned grouping of posts by venue came in handy, and the logic is as follows: if two or more people publish form the same venue in a single hour, this could very well mean something's happening there. And in most occasions, this turned out to be true. Read further for more details.

Discovering an event before a trending venue on Foursquare.

The event discovery stream is available on Twitter and Facebook.

The problems

Besides unstable APIs, the biggest problem we are currently facing is the geolocation itself. GPS chips in mobile phones are often not accurate enough, so people are located tens or hundreds of meters from their actual location. Combine that with the amount of Foursquare venues out there (imagine tall buildings), and you can understand Ljubljana Realtime sometimes has problems with connecting a post to a venue. Not to mention duplicated venues. We've eliminated some of this effect by only using venues with a certain amount of checkins and different users, but this will surely be the greatest challenge the project is facing in the future.

An event which is not.

The results

Problems aside, in most cases, Ljubljana Realtime event discovery works great. In a week or so since it's online, it discovered many events that were happening in Ljubljana (night run to the Castle, an athletic meeting, one of the first iPhones 5 in Slovenia, a public garage sale in park Tabor, etc.), and on many occasions, it discovered these events before a trending venue happened on Foursquare. Which is great. The potential is obviously there, and newer, improved versions and algorithms will surely behave even better.

A few of the great discoveries Ljubljana Realtime made.

The plans

This project is being developed in an agile way, where the application's behavior is constantly being monitored and changes deployed rapidly according to discovered strengths and weaknesses. The MVP (minimum viable product) is there, and with a few minor modifications, Ljubljana Realtime will soon be ready to expand to other cities and regions. Now it's up to you to help us, and it's pretty simple. When something magical is happening on and you are tweeting about it anyways, be a sport and click the arrow to include your geolocation in the tweet. By doing this, you will help others to discover what's going on in our beautiful city.

That's it for now, party on.

p.s. for all the Slovenians out there: the coordinates embedded in a tweet are pretty accurate even though Twitter will say you are in Italy. If you look at the picture of the map below the tweet, there's a polygon around Italy which sadly contains Slovenia as well. Hopefully, Twitter will remove bug someday.

Dear Twitter, please reconsider this madness

Tue, 21 Aug 2012 15:01:53 GMT

Dear Twitter. You were always one of my favorites. I love it how you managed to create a subculture, something that Facebook will never be able to do. You've allowed people to collectively create information that travels the world in seconds. Your role in many global activist projects is invaluable, and your stance on privacy issues something that inspires the world. You help us find out about things before they actually happen. When the Icelandic volcano was erupting in 2010, I was watching the #ashtag word clouds being broadcasted live on CNN. It was then that it struck me that the media will never be the same again, the power of thousands reporters wins every time. You made it to the mainstream, shaped transmedia into Twitter + television. You were becoming the ultimate foundation for real-time information. You made me realize so many things by being one of the most prominent platforms of the social era. You were the man.

And now you are starting to kill the platform.

Anyone who's read What Would Google Do? would know this is a huge mistake. This book (from 2009!) has a chapter about the value of platforms and distributed systems, and I've been obsessing myself with this revelation ever since. Wrote a blog post about it, which was retweeted by the book's author Jeff Jarvis himself, and it made me even more in love with the idea. Now I'm sure platforms are the future, because they have the ability to outlast services.

The most important things about platforms are the ecosystems around them. Yours was always more appealing to me than Facebook's. Because of the information Twitter has (almost all of it public), because of the culture that's emerged around this information. Twitterers, Developers, even Lurkers and Ninjas, the amount of innovative things that people have managed to build around your core is amazing. Not just silly games and marketing schemes, actually valuable and inspiring things (we've tried it too!). I always believed you were cooler than Facebook, that you have a brighter future, since you weren't trying to keep people inside your services. You seemed to know what made you in the first place.

I understand it's the high level mashups you are interested in, but still, the platform is the most important thing you have. Why not let other people reinvent your user experience, like others are trying to reinvent email? You want that, you want people to make Twitter whatever they want, while creating, consuming and curating the data that's inside you. You need thousand of different clients that feed your infinite hunger, enabling you to build your business model around the tweets that are generated. You want developers to use, abuse and reshape your essence. Because platforms are like networks, there value grows exponentially with the number of nodes they have, and these nodes help platforms evolve even further, in unimaginable ways.

And now you are trying to kill bits of this platform, those bits that help create the most valuable thing you have - hundreds of millions of Tweets every day. They may be just Twitter clients, but they might as well be the most important thing you've ever had. Your fans, your supporters, your ambassadors, your army, your ecosystem. Your future is more important than your monetization, not just to me and to them, to everybody who loves what you are, and to those who don't get you. Your future is important to mankind. That's why you should stay what you were meant to be. You should stay the open platform.

The final destination, part 1: technologies and concepts enterprise IT will have to adopt

Mon, 02 Jul 2012 18:38:09 GMT

In the past years, we've witnessed a very important transformation: the consumerization of information technologies. Billions of connected users living their life online, overwhelmed by millions of information systems that have been tailored to suit their every need and desire. Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon came a long way with their products and infrastructure, but the enterprise isn't losing any time. Learning from the new paradigms and adopting new funky technologies, that have traditionally been developed in corporate laboratories. Can the Fab 4 also predict where enterprise IT is headed? And what will it become?

A few weeks ago I participated in a panel for PI-PL on Ljubljana's Faculty of Economics, where I was asked this exact question: where do I see corporate IT in 10 years. A very hard question indeed, but the more I thought about the it, the clearer it became. Enterprise data, software and technology will sooner or later integrate everything. Simple as that. But to fully understand how this will happen, we must first try to identify the most important trends that have shaped information technologies as we know them today. Yes, most of them don't have that much to do with the enterprise. But things are changing.

Cloud technologies

While cloud computing may have been present in the enterprise for quite some time, it's still pretty much dominated by web players like Google (mail, docs, etc.) and Amazon (hardware), who are also flirting with the enterprise. Who wouldn't? There are massive benefits for businesses to move their stuff to the cloud, from scalable physical Infrastructure to higher level Platform or Software as a service information systems.

Perhaps the most important thing the Cloud achieved was to render technology infrastructure irrelevant. It doesn't matter any more, what kind of environment you use. What type of security, infrastructure, servers and network you have installed. You can outsource these things to others, and it will be much easier and cheaper, while all your migrating-to-a-bigger-thing problems will be solved with a swipe of a credit card. I was fascinated that Microsoft now offers Linux based servers on their Azure cloud services, which can be changed to Windows with a click of a button. Architecture doesn't matter anymore, and this fact helps IT departments to focus on more important things than system administration.

APIs, mashups, platforms and ecosystems

Heavily connected with the whole Cloud concept, data and information never had it easier to travel from one place to another. System migrations (moving data from one information system to another) and system integrations (connecting multiple information systems into one) have always been one of the biggest challenges of IT. But the web didn't have as much resources as the enterprise, so it had to simplify things. By offering APIs (Application Programming Interface), web applications allowed others applications to work with their data in an easy way. Mashups, hybrid information systems built on top of others, were born.

Pretty much every noteworthy web service has its own API. This helped a lot of them to become a platform. You know, like Facebook and Twitter, who have created an ecosystem, where thousands of other applications live around them? Soon, similar concepts will dominate the enterprise too. There are already players like Salesforce, who not only offer business-oriented Software as a service solutions, but the also a Platform for other developers to build services on top of their services. And since everything is so open, all this data can easily be integrated with other information systems or transferred to a different environment. Modern information systems don't have problems with understanding each other, but IT departments have problems with understanding information systems, since different, more business oriented skills are needed to support these integrations.

Mobile devices and new distribution channels

More than ten years ago, when I was an Information Sciences student, there was still a debate going on about the benefits of web based enterprise information systems over traditional Client - Server architecture. In the end, the Web won, mostly because distribution was so easy, you make the update on the server, and every user gets it instantly. Employees need nothing but a browser. They are acquainted with the environment ever since they started using Hotmail, and took it for their own ever since they started using Facebook.

But today, it seems the Web is losing its ground as the leading infrastructure, since a new technology came into town. Capable mobile devices, like smartphones and tablets, now enable access to information systems from anywhere, anytime in real-time. Besides, they arrived with their own app markets, which enabled a whole potential for software distribution, and perhaps more importantly, for software billing. You give a fair share to the store owner, who also promotes your solution, and you can freely focus on developing and marketing the product. It's true that mobile apps may not be as flexible as web applications, since the users need to install the updates (even though this can also be achieved by combining native mobile and hosted HTML 5), but the trend is clear. Apple already has its Mac store, Microsoft Windows will follow soon. Distribution of mobile and Software as a service information systems is becoming trivial.

Big data and The internet of things

Traditionally, banks, retailers and financial institutions have been the organizations that operated with the most data in the world. Well, things are changing, and we can only wonder who owns the most bytes today: is it Google, Facebook or someone else? Since there are less transactions than there are interactions, we can estimate consumer oriented information systems with billions of users are the biggest in existence. While this data is accessible to the enterprise to some extent, there are also hundreds of other systems the enterprise or its employees use, and they all create massive amounts of data and information, which needs to be integrated into a wider picture.

Not only that. Today, there are already are more connected devices that we have initially anticipated. These devices (cameras, sensors, tools, etc.) create even more data, which the enterprise needs to process. This trend of wired gadgets is called The internet of things, and together with the large amount of interconnectable information systems businesses use, points to one important trend: the typical enterprise was never faced with so much data and information, which somehow needs to be integrated and understood in an interdisciplinary way.

New ways of doing things, on a higher level

In the mean time, these consumer oriented (B2C) web corporation not only became a few of the biggest technology companies in existence, they've also invented new ways of how to get things done. From Google's 20%, to flat organizations without management, more and more companies (not only startups) set out to revolutionize how business is done. In the service oriented society, creativity is important, but so is productivity and the ability to ship fast. Done is better than perfect.

With new types of management concepts, such as lean and agile, modern organizations are becoming more and more flexible. Not only in doing things, but also in switching from one technology to another. These companies have developed their own way of thinking about which software to use. And it probably has a lot to do its price, how fast can you start using it, how scalable and connectable it is, and how fast can you dump if for another. IT requirements are moving to a higher level, and information systems have become just pieces of a puzzle that needs to be completed.

Design and user experience

Design and user experience probably still don't have that much to do with enterprise IT, but they are very much worth mentioning nevertheless. Face it, users are becoming more and more demanding, and software developers need to make better and better software. Even though the above mentioned facts are probably the dominating factor for the choice of which information systems the enterprise will use, design and user experience matter more and more.

Businesses have always had problems with implementing new software, educating the users, going through the whole status quo change. But beautiful and useful software penetrates faster. People perceive beautiful things to be more useful, and it's the whole intuitiveness and usability of software that helps them adopt something without too much resistance and problems. Some software vendors already found out user experience is the new competitive advantage, and in the end it may be the thing that tips the scale. But the whole point behind it is that I can see better, more clever and detailed, information systems force out older ones on an even faster pace. The whole world of information systems need reinvention, and user experience design will be the science behind these upgrades. Benefits are becoming more important than features.

Social, crowdsourcing and gamification

More than 3 years ago, I was very excited to present a concept we have been developing in Neolab on Days of Slovenian IT. I called it IT 2.0, since it meant integrating social services into enterprise software (at that time, Enterprise 2.0 was more widely used for stand-alone social software such as wikis or corporate blogs). The truth is, I didn't get the chance to sell it well, and in the mean time, disruptive social services managed to fully find their way into the enterprise. But business won't stop here; there are many other fascinating things the internet has invented that can fully be applied to corporate environments.

Gamification, the art of using gaming mechanics in non gaming environments, is getting more and more claim beyond the web. Both for motivating employees, as for motivating clients. We all like to play, so why should work be any different? And we all like to participate in something bigger, that is why crowdsourcing, where people coproduce something, can bring such exciting results. Can you see where I'm headed?

We are all human, and in the end, behaving on a very basic level. Sometimes we perform better, sometimes worse, and we all hold hidden potential even ourselves aren't aware of. That is what software in the workplace can sometimes help us discover, and it's something more and more businesses are aware of. Social, gamification and crowdsourcing are only a few approaches that can make us feel better and more motivated, and they are all concepts that enterprise IT will adopt sooner or later. Behind every company, there are only people.

The final destination of enterprise IT

These are the concepts and technologies that will shape enterprise IT of tomorrow. And with it, new challenges will emerge, together with new profiles of people, who will understand and use all of the above. These profiles, such as data scientists and business analysts, will help enterprise IT do what it was destined to do: Integrate life, the universe and everything.

But that's another story. Coming up soon.

Check out the complete The final destination series.

The future (of software) is in platforms

Sun, 08 Apr 2012 16:26:11 GMT

I don't know if you've had the chance to read What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis. You should, it's a very powerful book, even though it's been written a few years ago. Things have changed a bit since then, when Google was on top of it's game, but that doesn't mean the ideas presented in the book aren't more actual than ever. One of the chapters that made the biggest impact on me was the one about platforms and distributed systems. Google managed to conquer the world of Web 1.0 by being decentralized, allowing others to embed YouTube videos, Google Maps and Ads anywhere on the Web. This orientation provided the fuel for Google's further development and growth. Today, this way of thinking is not a competitive advantage anymore, it's becoming a necessity. As you will see, current online market leaders of various industries are not those who provide the service, they're the ones who provide the platform.

Platforms rule because mashups rule

Platforms, as opposed to products and services, allow others to build on top of them. Not thinking about control and centralization, they provide the basic building blocks other can use to develop even more products and services. In the world of Web 1.0, this meant using an embedded YouTube video instead of having your own video player, but Web 2.0 has been heavily defined by ecosystems of services built around other services. With APIs these platforms provide, developing high-level mashups has never been easier from the technical point of view, and this type of architecture benefits everybody. The platform vendor gets additional developers that extend and market it's service, while the satellite mashup gets the distribution channels, users and data they need to get somewhere faster. A modern synergy packed symbiosis.

Oren Michels, CEO of Mashery, which provides API as a service, talking for Silicon Gardens in Kiberpipa

The technology platforms

Today, pretty much all of the technology market leaders are platforms. Google allows various levels of use of it's services, from embedding things to using different APIs. Facebook's games and other apps ecosystem is huge, with providers such as Zynga already gone public. Twitter and it's massive amounts of tweets generated in real-time produced the Twitterverse - an array of fascinating high-level services. Foursquare, a geo-location network allowed other interesting concepts, such as augmented reality and games, on top of its service. Amazon offers you to build your own store, and Apple's and Android's mobile app stores are hosting hundreds of thousands of apps developers can build, deploy and distribute in short amounts of time. Salesforce offers a platform for enterprise IT, WordPress for writing and blogging tools. I could go on, but you get the picture. Platforms are the future, because they evolve collaboratively, with thousands, if not millions of people co-creating them.

A massive Salesforce conference in San Francisco, which I've visited on my Silicon Valley trip (thanks Davorin!)

The real-life platforms

Not only in software and technology, platforms in real-life are also becoming more widespread. The whole Apple iPad/iPhone gadgets ecosystem is one of the most obvious cases, where various providers offer sound systems, dongles, add-ons and other accessories that upgrade and make the original item even more appealing. Nespresso and Dolce Gusto are another interesting products. Nestlé provides the platform - the small coffee pads, which they are pushing to the market, while different manufacturers make coffee machines and other complementary products. The platform becomes more useful because of its satellites, which make the platform even more successful, turning this relationship into a virtuous circle.

Coffee machines by various vendors for Nestlé Dolce Gusto

So what should I do?

Firstly, you should embrace this way of thinking and understand what's happening. Platforms have been around since the beginning of software, even though you maybe haven't thought about them in such a way. Computer architectures, Operating systems, Programming languages and Development environments are all platforms, on a more basic level - but they provide the foundation which others can build on top of. Other platforms are build atop of these and others atop of those. Platforms are everywhere, and with every new level, they are less technically, and more conceptually oriented. Think about where you fit in.

Next, find a platform that suits what you are trying to do. Personally, against many odds, I believe more in Twitter than I do in Facebook, since Facebook is trying to keep as much as possible inside its service, while Twitter acts distributed. One of our projects is Twenity, a game we've developed around Twitter influence measuring.

If you're feeling lucky, you might want to become a platform on your own. While this may be almost impossible to do, it's something I wish I will have the chance to do someday. Neolab already has its own development framework, and if we do manage to make enough surplus or find an investor that will take us down this road, I'll be the first one in line. That is, if we don't decide to join an established platform and rather build on top of that.

Things have changed. The future (of software) is in platforms. Are you already a part of the show?

Twitfluence is dead, long live Twenity! Launching December 21st 2011.

Sun, 18 Dec 2011 17:41:51 GMT

In three days, a new type of online influence measuring service will be launched, an exciting new version of Twitfluence on steroids. Unlike Klout or PeerIndex, Twenity won't try to set a new standard for calculating social authority, it will rather behave as a game on top of your social activity, which will allow players to go through quests, unlock levels, badges, compare themselves and compete with each other. A project made by Neolab and IlovarStritar that will try to combine the elements of gamification and social authority measuring. Who's hot and who's not, the game.

Launch

The algorithm we'll use is the v0.60 of Twitfluence, but on an improved engine, and that's pretty much everything that will stay the same as the prototype. Twitter is the original source for data, but if there is enough interest, new quests based on Facebook, Foursquare and other platforms will be designed and developed.

On Wednesday, December 21st, at 7 PM CET, Twenity will be presented and officially launched as part of the last wwwh of this year. We will stay in beta at this point, since there will surely be problems with some (influential) users and further patches will be done in the next few weeks. But after that, the sky is the limit. You're very welcome to join us in Kiberpipa, or you can watch the live stream online. Here are a few resources:

the official Twenity page
the v0.60 of the Twitfluence calculation
the event invitation (in Slovene)
the live stream where the presentation will be broadcast on Wednesday
the event on Facebook
our Twitter profile and Facebook page
more info about the Twitfluence calculation

"Twenity is an interesting new game that helps you discover your social capital while competing with your friends. This real-live RPG enables you to play without the need to actually do anything."

That's right: Vanity is the spice of life.

Supporting events on Twitter: how Pop TV and Soočenje owned the Slovenian Twitterverse

Sun, 20 Nov 2011 10:13:58 GMT

Supporting events on Twitter is becoming very popular, and it's a perfect case study of what Twitter can do. After all, this channel allows an additional layer for following things that are going on in real-life, in real-time. Coverage sometimes happens accidentally, if there are enough Twitterers around, but more and more often, it happens as a result of a carefully planned tactic of those behind the event. Only then it can fully work, enabling organizers, participants and observers a totally new type of involvement. Crowdsourcing event support can produce a better overview of what's happening than any well-trained team of journalists can provide, offering an experience that is broad, objective and subjective, interactive. And like using Twitter itself, some know how to do it, and some don't.

My experience

When I tried it out it myself, it was fun and rewarding, In May, Trkaj, Jacuzzy and our neighborhood Savska held a festival Blok Party, which attracted a lot of people. We were there, live-tweeting about it. We've also asked other Twitterers (thanks @loudandwicked!), who attended the festival, to use and amplify the same hashtag #savska, and in the end, more than 10 people tweeted about the event, producing over 50 tweets, most of them with pictures. Which isn't that bad on the Slovenian scale. My friend @jakasibicekaka did something similar, asking Trbovlje town councillors to tweet about a meeting with the #sejaOStrb hashtag, which attracted other people to participate as well (here's his blog post about it, in Slovene). Great results enabled by collaboration of many users.

It can work on a small scale. What about the major league, it should be even better? Let's analyze two nation-wide events that happened this week in Slovenia.

How to do it wrong

The first case mentioned was the Slovenia vs. USA friendly soccer match. At the stadium, the National soccer association (@nzs_si) promoted their Twitter account which does live coverage of matches. Which they did. But that doesn't mean they did the whole Twitter thing right. They forgot about the extremely witty journalist @IEBergant also tweeting about the match. They forgot about me, and they forgot about you and 8 other thousand people watching the game live, probably quite a few geeks included. While NZS used the hashtag #fuzbal (slang for soccer), some used the hashtag #nogomet (soccer), #slovenia, #slovenija, and the mentioned Igor Evgen Bergant used #soccerSI-US. The results: a scattered pool of tweets which didn't really offer users the complete picture. The event went mostly unnoticed on Twitter.

The Slovenian soccer association promoting their Twitter account on the match

How to do it right

On the other hand, Pop TV (@24ur), the biggest commercial television network in Slovenia, did it more than right. Their show "Predvolilna soočenja", which does political confrontations before the upcoming elections, won big time. And while using Twitter to support television has been done for ages abroad, this actually happened for the first time in Slovenia (at least so I think). And they did at least three smart things:

they've promoted the hashtag #soocenje, not minding about their Twitter profile
they've invited five influential Twitterers (@alivea, @had, @Lacn, @madpixel, @tamejhna) to the studio audience to generate the initial buzz on Twitter, besides live-tweeting from the studio. Here they are, appearing with @miharejc, who tweets for @24ur
they've broadcasted a selection of tweets with this hashtag live on television, and encouraged people to participate and ask questions on Twitter

The results were amazing. Hundreds, if not thousands of tweets all over place. Local trending topic. They owned the Slovenian Twitterverse like no one else before them. It worked like a charm. You can check out the partial report (which only displays 100 of #soocenje tweets, happening in 5 minutes!) on the following link or use the #soocenje Twitter search, if tweets are still available. Epic stuff, moving the Slovenian media sphere a few years forward.

Pop TV displaying and promoting #soocenje tweets live on television

#soocenje (besides various politicians and the show host) became a local trending topic in Slovenia according to sitweet.com

Conclusion

I'm only a level 26 27 social media ninja, but I know a few things. If you're organizing an event, the most important thing is: promote Twitter hashtags, not profiles. Even if they are nothing more than just clickable search queries, they simply work. Search Twitter in real-time and look for people who are talking about the event. Ask them and other people attending to amplify and use the same hashtag. Thank them if they do. Most of them will join you, since it'll make it more interesting for them too. Offer something more if you can (like displaying tweets on a website). Use multiple accounts (official, personal) with different wibes. Upload pictures. Retweet. Interact. Have fun.

Twitter, a funny service proving that a collective effort of many people will always provide a way more interesting picture than a single person can. More objective, more diversified, more everything. Perhaps even better than the original event itself. Real players are fully aware of that. Don't worry, even if you don't have the same power, publicity and followers, you can compensate with additional energy, time and mobile bandwidth. The results can be surprising. And if it does work, I promise you'll enjoy every little bit of it.

UPDATE (22.11.2011): I got contacted by @24ur, who told me this was already their second Soočenje show (I missed the first one - the irony - playing soccer), and the first one generated over 1800 #soocenje tweets. I also got feedback from @nzs_si and @IEBergant, they've agreed we should make a joint effort the next time Slovenia plays soccer, also involving the biggest Slovenian soccer portal Nogomania. Awesome stuff.

UPDATE (25.11.2011): Pop TV is on fire. Today, they've added another medium to support Soočenje on Twitter, their news portal 24ur.com, which is the most visited site in Slovenia.

The great technology wars and the transition of software from B2B to B2C

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 11:25:14 GMT

The epic article by Fast Company about the technology wars of 2012 provides great insight into what's happening in Silicon Valley and software in general these days. Four players, or the Fabulous Four, are mentioned to be the real market and innovation leaders: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google. Each of these companies found its place where it dominates and invents new business models, and each one is a role model for new generations of technology startups and leaders. And if you didn't notice, all of them sell software to consumers, not other companies (in case of Google and Facebook, you are the real customer, but advertisers pay for it). Software is becoming more and more consumer-oriented, and the clash of these titans will determine the outcome, the software of the future.

The Fab Four

Who are these fantastic companies? Amazon is the leader in e-commerce. Apple reinvented mobile devices and content distribution. Facebook is the largest social network in the world, a big brother in the making. Google is the biggest web and search company.

I almost won't argue with the choice of the Fab Four. To me, these are truly the technology companies that are moving things forward. To be honest, the list is bit of an understatement for Microsoft, even though that doesn't change the fact I'm trying to put out here. These four corporations (their software at least) are more B2C (Business To Consumer) than B2B (Business To Business) oriented. Even Microsoft, with its XBox, Bing, Windows (Phone and Tablet) programs is shifting focus to consumer markets.

The stock market comparison

The B2B software market is still huge, but electronic commerce, online advertising and the economy of scale of billions of users spending a few dollars is slowly outperforming more expensive business solutions sold fewer times, even if they are deployed millions of times as operating systems, products or services. If you check out the following charts, you can see information about market capitalization, revenue and historical price change of these companies (Facebook is not public yet, but it's IPO could be around $100 billion) compared to traditional technology companies such as Oracle, Microsoft and IBM. The numbers are pretty interesting (source: ycharts).

Market capitalization of Amazon, Apple, Google, IBM, Microsoft and Oracle in the last 10 years (as available)

Change in market capitalization of Amazon, Apple, Google, IBM, Microsoft and Oracle in the last 7 years (as available)

Revenue of Amazon, Apple, Google, IBM, Microsoft and Oracle in the last 10 years (as available)

Change in revenue of Amazon, Apple, Google, IBM, Microsoft and Oracle in the last 8 years (as available)

Change in stock price of Amazon, Apple, Google, IBM, Microsoft and Oracle in the last 7 years (as available)

Why does it matter

As a software architect, I see major shifts in user-centered software compared to business-oriented software. Even if you check Gartner's strategic technologies of 2012, it becomes more and more obvious what's happening:

software is made for and "sold" to users, not management anymore
product cycles and new releases are reaching Warp Speed
the focus is shifting from features to benefits
user experience is becoming more and more important
technology used is getting less and less important
system and data integration is becoming trivial with web services and APIs
there's a new generation of devices that run software (smartphones and tablets, the internet of things)
scaling and performance is not measured in Whateverbytes, but in number of users
new distribution channels (marketplaces) are going beyond the Web
platforms and mashups have emerged, where ecosystems of software are being build around the core service
online software is more disruptive and innovative, business software follows (from Web 2.0 to Enterprise 2.0, adoption of gamification in the enterprise, etc.)

Adaptation

Some business software companies, such as Salesforce.com have managed to adapt to this situation, offering a platform others can upgrade and develop on. We're adapting too, on a smaller scale. Neolab is still mostly focused on B2B software, since that's where we've built our market. Sure, we did a few web portals and are working on deploying our own user-targeted service Twitfluence, but it's business-oriented software that we generally work on. But that doesn't change the fact we are fully aware that the concept of software is changing, and we are on top of it, trying to embrace these trends and include new paradigms in corporate infromation systems. Social, user-oriented, user-friendly. Knowing that people are behind every company.

Software is maturing; consumers are getting more and more demanding, brands behind the software are getting more and more important. And as the Web expands even further, this fact will become yet more obvious. It's you and me who are the ones who are "buying" software. Which is great, since in the end the ordinary people, not corporations, will be those who will decide how software and technology of the future will look like. Interactive, useful and fun. Here we are now, entertain us.

Facebook vs. Twitter, Part 3: The phase of unification

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 08:22:32 GMT

I started writing about Facebook and Twitter because I saw these two services as the most impressive players of the social age. I received a lot of comments about the two of them not being comparable, which I disagree. They are the biggest global Web 2.0 platforms (LinkedIn successfully went public and has a lot of users, but it's hardly a platform) and two of the ten most visited websites in the world. They are social trend-setters, both super advanced on technical and conceptual levels. They are a lot, but with the latest sets of patches, they are also becoming a lot alike.

Originally, Facebook wanted to be a social network. On the other hand, Twitter wanted to be a news network. But seeing what's happening these days, we can ask ourselves: is it rather the other way around? Indeed, Facebook and Twitter are finally entering the phase of unification. Let's begin.

Two way integration

Twitter now officially supports posting to Facebook, while Facebook now officially supports posting to Twitter (for now, Pages only). Until recently, you had to use other services or install apps to fully connect both accounts, but these days, direct integration it's pretty much trivial. The wall between the two giants is obviously coming down. And they both noticed the need to recognize each other to proceed.

Facebook adds following

The symmetric relationships (friends) on Facebook made it what it is - a social network for keeping in touch with the people you know. The same goes for Twitter, the asymmetric relationships (followers) made it what it is - a news network where you can follow people you are interested in. This fact was one of the biggest differentiator between the two social services.

Facebook soon noticed they will have to somehow go beyond that, for the sake of enabling more accessible information to the masses and enabling unprotected, crawlable real-time data without privacy. They've started with Pages, intended for brands, which users can like and follow. But recently, like I predicted more than a year ago, Facebook introduced subscriptions for personal profiles, where you can follow people without the need for them to confirm you back, and they can post public updates. What an interesting turn of events.

Facebook adds a real-time stream

Facebook put a lot of effort into developing the EdgeRank, which recognizes the level of connection between two people. The previous version of Facebook had Hot and Fresh streams, the first one being based on the amount of activity and EdgeRank vicinity, and the other one on recent activity. Today, the main stream is a mixture of both, while a new feature was introduced. The so-called Ticker in the right sidebar, showing real-time activity from all your friends. Your own little Twitter inside Facebook, which they plan to evolve even further, adding automatic updates.

Twitter starts to close, adds multimedia

Traditionally, the Twitter app ecosystem was built around (outside) Twitter, while Facebook's app ecosystem was built inside Facebook. But Twitter's policy is changing. They've already acquired one of the biggest Twitter clients TweetDeck, and said they will prevent new Twitter clients from being developed. They've also added a multimedia library to each profile (feeding also from external services) and enabled an internal service for sharing photos. Bad news and a stab in the back for Twitpics, Yfrogs and such. Smells like Facebook.

Twitter adds activity streams

Social networks are all about profiles, streams and interaction. Twitter used to be plain, providing only simple profiles, basic tweets stream, replies and retweets. But the newest addition also includes real-time activity streams, where all retweets, replies and favorites are gathered in one place. I haven't gotten it yet, but people are saying Favorites are the new (Facebook) likes. Twitter is becoming very much a social network, trying to boost up it's social graph.

Conclusion

There are even more cases like this, but these are the most significant. I hope this trend won't continue much further. It was the differences between Facebook and Twitter made each one interesting and useful in it's own way, but I guess things like this are inevitable. Like operating systems or browsers, competitors are constantly copying each other's features and solutions, which actually proves mutual recognition. Why would social services be any different? It seems Twitter and Facebook are finally mature enough to enter the phase of unification.

Check out the complete Facebook vs. Twitter series.

Please help me upgrade my Twitter bot

Tue, 30 Aug 2011 20:33:12 GMT

Half a year ago I decided to make something out of my Delicious bookmarks. The magazine-style display inspired by Flipboard wasn't enough, I wanted to publish these links somewhere outside my chronolog, somewhere on Twitter. So I made a bot. It's doing quite well, posting like mad, but it's really not where I want it to be. Until now, it made about 3.000 tweets (around 500 per month), but has only 67 followers. I know my taste in content is a bit obscure, but still, only 67 followers?

This calls for an upgrade. And since I won't change my interests and bookmarking habits, something else needs to be done. That's where I need your advice. Crowdsourcing the concept and stuff.

The brand

This is probably one of the greatest fails of the project. At first, I thought of it as an extension of my blog. Hence the account @stritar_net, the name Stritar's chronolog, together with the description it has. Should I rename it and try to make it a standalone "brand"? Should I openly say it's a bot (Stritar's bot or something)?

The selection

The bot currently posts ALL my bookmarks to Twitter (as mentioned, around 15 per day or 500 per month) without any selection. But it could be done. Since my bookmarks are originally tagged, it could leave out those with too few tags (since I use the same method of counting tags to determine the initial weight of content for the magazine). Or specialize in specific segments according to tags. There could even be more of them bots. What do you think?

The frequency

Currently, the bookmarks I make go into a queue. I hate those Twitter accounts that post 10 tweets in 5 minutes and go silent for a day. I wanted to make it more smooth. So the queue always knows how many items it holds and adapts the frequency of posting according to it (less bookmarks in queue mean less frequent tweets). But that produces the situation where most of them are already a few hours or days out of date when they are published. A higher publishing frequency would solve some of it, but it opens a great dilemma: what's the lesser evil, over-spamming or being out of date?

The order

The order of bookmarks posted on Twitter is determined by two factors. The number of tags and the date they were published. More tags equals more importance. Older bookmarks get published sooner, otherwise they would get even more out of date. Should I do it the other way around and post more recent links sooner? This would make some of them more interesting and up-to-date, but other worse. Breaking content or consolidated content?

So many decisions… In this case, the best way probably doesn't exists, but trade-offs can always be decided for the better. Please let me know what you think, your help would be more than appreciated. I could help back if I can.

I've developed a magazine based on my Delicious bookmarks. And a Twitter bot.

Fri, 25 Feb 2011 07:34:38 GMT

Last week was marked a great social achievement of mine �� I managed to bookmark my 10.000th bookmark on Delicious. A lot of people have 10.000 tweets, but not many own 10.000 bookmarks, fully tagged and classified. I've been collecting these since December 2006 (probably one od my first 2.0 addictions), and they are becoming one of my greatest possessions – knowledge is the ultimate collection. Hopefully Delicious won't get shut down or left behind, so I will be able to continue with this obsession.

I've made a few interesting mashups with them already; as my most frequent actions online, my bookmarks represent the core of the chronolog. But things are changing fast and the desire for presenting information is moving into a new dimension. In case you didn't notice, tablets are mainstream, and the media industry already hopes they are the solution they've been waiting for. The Daily, which was released a few weeks ago, is the first no-print, tablet only magazine available (for iPad, Android version is coming), and other applications, based on social curation, such as Flipboard (which is amazing and inspired all of this) and OnSwipe are revolutionizing the way we (create and) consume content.

I find this evolution of displaying information fascinating and a bit ironic - going from newspaper form to blog form and back - but I've decided to play along, developing a magazine based on my bookmarks. Using the Html Agility Pack library for asp.net I managed to extract an image and a few paragraphs from each URL I bookmarked, using them to form a magazine. The number of tags I put on each link determines the initial weight, which is additionally modified with your views and likes, allowing it to constantly adapt its shape. Those links which are stronger, are displayed higher, have a bigger picture and more text which makes them more visible.

While contemplating about the potential of different APIs and all the pages I bookmarked these years, it occurred to me I could also make a Twitter bot. All the bookmarks I save are now getting automatically shortened with bit.ly and posted to Twitter, with a bit of artificial intelligence. The speed of posting is determined by the number of items waiting in the queue, adjusting to the frequency of my actions. It still has a few problems, but they are only appropriate for a prototype, whose posting algorithm still needs to be technically and mathematically improved.

The life cycle of my links I like has become quite a ride, as you can see in the diagram below, similar as the evolution of the Web, transformed by social, mobile and the upcoming domination of the tablets. And while the major players are able to spend millions on the development of new and creative solutions, small players such as myself can only play along. Luckily, I like to play.

The path each one of my bookmarks makes in its lifetime.

Why Web 2.0 is so important

Mon, 14 Jun 2010 20:10:53 GMT

The influence the Internet is having on our every day lives is reaching almost unimaginable levels. The extent of the information revolution can only be compared to inventions of speaking, writing and printing in the past, which are all major achievements that allowed new ways of sharing thoughts and ideas between people. Web 2.0 is the next step of this information (r)evolution, and to understand why it's so important, we have to observe all the significant applications it represents (according to Wikipedia). This will hopefully give us a better insight into the potential they bring to our personal and professional lives, besides their impact on the whole humanity which we still perhaps don't fully comprehend.

Social networking

Social networking sites enabled probably the greatest migration of people to the virtual world. People have a new opportunity to interact not only in real life, but also in cyberspace, where geographical and other physical barriers don't exists. I'm not saying this is a promising thing overall, some people are obviously overdoing it, but it's still useful for keeping in touch with people. Together with the implementation of feeds and streams which enable dynamic information, social networking could represent the biggest and most important component of Web 2.0, reshaping business, marketing, politics and just being plain amazing.

Video sharing

Yesterday we read the newspaper, listened to the radio and watched television. Today, we have a super-medium that supports all of it at once. Video, as the most complex form of multimedia, is something that you can record with your telephone and publish online in minutes, from where it can go anywhere. If distributing a video is easy, anything else surely has to be a piece of cake. This fact obviously holds massive potential for science and arts in general.

Wikis and folksonomies

Wikis and folksonomies are tools which harness the amazing effect of participation and collaboration of millions of people to create information and knowledge. Wikipedia is the biggest encyclopedia in the world, holding knowledge whole mankind can benefit from. Folksonomies, such as tools for collaborative tagging and social indexing enable structured knowledge, while recommendation engines help us get information from massive quantity of data available online. Today, if something important is discovered, everybody knows it in minutes.

Blogs

Most people have the need to express themselves, and blogs (and microblogs) are the perfect tool for that. Plain and simple: anybody can be a journalist and if you have something smart to say, people will listen. Those who are influential enough can even break out of anonymity and become opinion leaders.

Web services and mashups

Web services and mashups enable and use open flows of data from one online service to another, from one online platform to another. System integration used to be one of the most complex things in IT, but thanks to new standards, protocols and technology, data can freely travel from and to different sources. This provides a perfect ground for exchanging information and enables evolution from software services to software platforms.

Perhaps we should also mention cloud computing, which makes hardware requirements irrelevant – the processing power and memory is around in plenty – but computer grids with shared resources have already been around for decades. All the better to understand that Web 2.0 is more about concept than it is about technology.

Web 2.0 is important and revolutionary, both in a good and a bad way. It brings a new perspective and new opportunities to different arts and sciences, such as business, education, sociology, psychology, literature, politics and many other. My professional and academic work focuses mainly on it's influence on information science and technologies, but it's clear that this new paradigm has a huge global effect, whose scale we still can't fully estimate. Now we just have to hope younger generations don't get too overwhelmed because of it and will be able to adjust to this new reality without abusing it too much.

Creative online advertising at its best – Wired and Youtube

Sat, 27 Feb 2010 13:48:41 GMT

I used to work for an online advertising agency. For large projects we were usually trying to make a campaign extraordinary and special, something that would stand out from the rest and be creative and effective. When you are trying to achieve something like that you are usually limited by a great number of facts, such as the campaign budget, creativity of the team, capabilities of the designers and programmers, but perhaps most importantly, the technical issues and platform of the site that will serve the ads.

Looks like Wired.com and YouTube.com don't have those problems and are actually cooperating with the advertisers to go towards perfection. YouTube you know, but in case you haven't heard of Wired, it's an online blog and an off-line magazine, one of the most respectable with focus on new technologies. They have great content, high reach and are a big potential for advertisers and marketers. Some of them are actually prepared to go for it all the way. I have noticed two campaigns on Wired and one on YouTube that really stand out, all of them fully integrated with the site. Forget floaters and takeovers, in-site advertising is the bomb. We can only wonder how much money was spent on the design, development and the serving of the ads.

Acura

The Acura ZDX banner works in a such a way that the site's main menu and some content are reflected onto the car (fake, of course). This makes it look as if the commercial is fully integrated with the site, making it interesting and appealing. It doesn't do anything special besides that, but the graphic rendering is pretty good.

Apple

Apple's iPod nano and iPod touch advertisements on Wired.com are even more outstanding. iPod touch goes a step further, breaking apart the site and its main menu (fake again, of course), trying to communicate the motion sensitivity, multi-player gaming and other features of the gadget. This approach goes beyond in-site advertising, because it uses the takeover ad to emphasize iPod touch capabilities, giving it an outstanding look and probably a very high effect for both branding and direct response. You must be weird not to click it, even though you know where the link leads and you don't actually need or want it.

Nintendo

After Nintendo's Wii console came out, they made a really awesome Wario Land ad on YouTube. Emphasizing the gaming console's capabilities and motion sensitive controllers, they went even a step further than Apple. The final result is a totally destructed YouTube page, with most of the site's elements slowly being kicked off the screen. Creative and amazing, again with great direct and branding effect, use of beyond in-site advertising, and a great demonstration of focused communication. This one looks like it actually really does take the site to bits and pieces, because all the elements look real and updated. Nintendo was probably able to negotiate full control over their YouTube channel.

These are bits of advertising excess I have noticed while browsing the web. The mentioned commercials are usually online just for a day or so, so it's hard to catch them if you're not a regular user. I'm sure there are more similar cases like this on other portals too. It's been obvious for quite some time that advertising is shifting towards online, with effective and amusing results. Technical capabilities of this medium are probably unlimited, so we can expect even more amazing displays of creativity, design and modern marketing in the future.

Facebook vs. Twitter - Part 1: The battleground

Sun, 07 Feb 2010 10:50:45 GMT

Facebook and Twitter are probably the two hottest Web 2.0 services available. A lot of us are familiar with both of them, but it's hard to predict which has greatest potential in the long run to take on the title of the main social networking service. The competition is on, but it's also obvious the race is long, even infinite. The World Wide Web runs on a time of its own, and we have seen major players vanish and marginal players with great ideas take the lead in years, if not months. Because I like to speculate on things like that, I bring you the first part of my thoughts on Facebook vs. Twitter.

For now, I won't go into details, but we'll rather check out different categories and variables that represent the already made success and future potentials for both giants. The list of the comparisons is based on my opinion as a web developer, web 2.0 user and social media strategist, in no specific order. Later posts will go into specific fields and analyze how things are turning out.

The size

Today, Facebook is a few times bigger than Twitter, with 350 million registered users vs. Twitter's 50 million. The following diagram is already a bit old, but still gives an interesting overview on the comparison between the two giants. We must admit Facebook has been around longer, but that doesn't change the fact it's way up ahead in this category. More users mean more possibilities and greater potential. Facebook 1.

The revenue

Facebook already went cash flow positive, while Twitter is still thinking about its revenue model. This could turn out to be one of the crucial stages in Twitter's development, where bad decisions could change everything. Besides, it's a no brainer that making money is good, in our case probably even the main goal for everybody. Facebook 2.

The karma

Facebook’s karma is getting worse and worse. Ever since the infamous Facebook beginnings and stories of the stolen idea, issues concerning privacy and other weird decisions have been a pain in Facebook's behind. On the other hand, Twitter with its involvement on the Iranian elections and now with live reporting on Haiti earthquake, seems like the good boy of Web 2.0. Twitter 1.

The service

Facebook was built around a ton of services, such as events, photos, fan pages, etc. On the other hand, Twitter was build around one service, analog to Facebook’s status, but so much different in content. The so called microblog. External services, such as Twitpic also exist, where one photo becomes richer than the whole album with 100 photos on Facebook. Besides, we have to admit Facebook is becoming a little spam machine and we all know less is more, so this one goes to Twitter. Twitter 2.

The openness

Facebook’s API is focused on building applications inside the portal, where Twitter’s API is focused on having different clients to access Twitter. But concerning the time an average user stays on Facebook to play all the quizes and games, looks like this is an effective approach. Farmville alone, one of the most popular games on Facebook, is bigger than Twitter. Besides, looks like different Facebook clients are also more actual and available than before. Facebook 3.

The relationships

Facebook and Twitter have two different approaches on relationships. On Facebook, both people have to "confirm" each other to become friends. This is called symmetric friendship, which ends with 5.000th friend on Facebook. On the other hand, Twitter has asymmetric friendships, which allows people (and celebrities) to have millions of followers. This makes it more flexible and open and we can only wait for Facebook to do the same. Twitter 3.

The publicity

The celebrity base made Twitter big, and many popular microbloggers intentionally and unintentionally help to promote Twitter. Oprah did her first tweet live on her show and got immediately corrected by Shaq. This type of publicity is something Facebook just can't manage with current architecture. Here is the list of the most followed people on Twitter which gives it a lead over Facebook, because they are far more active and appealing than Facebook fan pages, managed by PR companies. Twitter 4.

The technical platform

If you had to take an estimate, it would be clear that Facebook’s platform and service is much more complicated from the technical point of view. Besides, Facebook has much more users who are more active, but still remains more stable and is online more often. Twitter has a problem with being over capacity often. Is this a problem with the core software architecture or just with the physical architecture and number of servers? Facebook 4.

The influence

2009 was the year of the Twitter, and Twitter was the top word of 2009. Ashton Kutcher kicked CNN's ass to become the first account to have a million followers on Twitter. This clearly show the shift of broadcasting information from mainstream media to opinion leaders. Facebook is for following people you actually know, Twitter is for following people you would like to know. On Facebook you are trapped inside your social circle, while on Twitter you are free to go and look anywhere. Real time search is more actual than ever and Twitter is faster with delivering news than the mainstream media. Even though Facebook groups have some activism influence, Twitter is becoming a platform rather than a service and in this surely means future. Twitter 5.

Conclusion

I think these 9 facts should cover the initial battleground between Facebook and Twitter. For now, I would go more towards Twitter, who also won this faceoff 5 points to 4. Leaving aside this rough analysis, history usually likes to prove that ideas that are the most simple and the most elementary, usually are the best and most history changing, and Google is direct proof of that. You can't go more minimalistic than Twitter, and collaboration of millions of users could mean a whole lot of information and potential. This gives Twitter an opportunity to go beyond Web 2.0, something even Google could be afraid of. On the other hand, Twitter is probably not that useful and fun for non-heavy Web 2.0 users, because it doesn't offer so many things to do. We probably shouldn't underestimate people who are bored online.

This competition will be fun and interesting and I really am curious what will happen. We will see soon, probably even too soon, but it's safe to say the ordinary web user will benefit from this battle anyways.

Check out the complete Facebook vs. Twitter series.