Google Wave and Twitter Marketing!

On December 8, 2009 in Internet, marketing, Website Design.
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I recently read the blog ‘Is Twitter The Main Force Behind The Wave?‘, which was wrote by Alex Sleat (a personal friend of mine) and discussed the use of Twitter to not only market Google Wave but also spread invites. In response, here are my thoughts on the first three points raised in his article, the fourth being an entirely different kettle of fish.

Should software or web apps be put under this much strain this early on in development?Although I think that pressure can add to and excel success, I do feel that in this instance Google have jumped in too early. They seem to have had a lot of negative feedback, which I would mainly associate to the way which Google discussed the concept as a revolution in Internet Messaging, yet in practise hasn’t worked out quite as expected. Twitter had a major part to play in this, with various trending topics hitting the top 10 shortly after its release.

It is good that the general public are becoming more aware and involved in beta testing, or should it be left to tech-heads?

Yes and No. Obviously it’s important for the general public to test out new software, as they often pick out different flaws or approach things in different ways to IT Professionals. However, I think it should be a confined and controlled test group of maybe 150-200? Leave the hardcore testing to the ‘Tech-Heads’, as they are the one’s who will find the deeper lying problems with BETA versions, which may require big fixes in some circumstances, in contrast to the usually smaller issues (GUI, glitches etc) which general users find.

Where would Google Wave be at without Twitter?Probably somewhere close to where Google Mail was back in 2004. Google has utilized (knowingly or otherwise) Twitter to pass around invites between parties. Without this (and other Social networking sites) there would surely be less people on Wave, consequently less general users testing out the software (as discussed in point 2). On the other hand, Social networking sites may have a bit of a negative impact on Wave, as more and more invites can be pushed out to a wider audience, consequently allowing more people to comment on the good (and more importantly bad) features.

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Google Developments!

On December 2, 2009 in Development, Internet, Website Design.
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Google have recently announced some new features, demonstrating again its dominance over the World Wide Web!

Google’s latest feature is the integration of ‘real-time result’s (RTR’s) including Twitter, Facebook and Myspace updates to be shown for relevant search results. Although the feature is currently limited to a minority of key words it will be built upon to produce more and more results in this fashion. It’s a brilliant idea, gathering such vast amounts of information in one place. Although Google haven’t released financial details, Facebook have announced they are making no profit from the setup.

Google Goggles (it’s a mouth full) is Google’s next development – Using images instead of keywords to produce search queries, consequently returning both visual and text based results (including, perhaps, RTR’s). This must use some similar code to the similar image feature (another amazing feature from Google) although it must also feed to a variety of databases in order to analyze and search indexed pages using said image.

Google still dominates the Internet search market, boasting a global share of about 70 per cent share globally. The company reported revenues of £3.66 billion for the quarter that ended on September 30 this year. The majority of the revenue came from Search Advertising. Google may be seen to have competition in local times from Wolfram Alpha and Bing, but its ever-evolving search techniques and developments just show that it really is the world leader in Web Development.

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Custom iPhone icon for websites!

On November 29, 2009 in Tutorials, Website Design.
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So, with mobile browsing becoming more and more popular, it’s increasingly important to optimize your site for a variety of screen resolutions.

Another nice little feature which I have recently implemented for both work and my personal site is the addition of an iPhone icon, so that when the website is saved to the home-screen on the iPhone it shows a sexy icon rather than a screenshot of the website.

To do this, I simply created a 57px x 57px box, with a transparent background in Photoshop. I used the rounded rectangle tool to create a nice little box, added a gradient and a light curve at the top to resemble the reflection. I finally added some symbols to the icons, and hay presto, its created!

To implement the icon couldn’t be simpler! Just upload the icon to the root of your site and re-name it to ‘apple-touch-icon.png’. Safari automatically checks the root for a .png of this name! If you don’t want the icon in the root of your site, just add the following code to your page/s:

<link rel=”apple-touch-icon” href=”LOCATION/apple-touch-icon.png” />
Custom iPhone icon for websites!

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Twitter AutoDM Feature: Good or Evil?!

On November 16, 2009 in #60SecondShout, Development, Internet.
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So, after about 4 days of Tweeting I have started to gather a small selection of lovely followers! (If your one of them thanks for taking the time to read this!)

So now I have a dilemma – Should I autoDM new followers? Lots of people see this tactic as ‘spam’, especially when promotional links are included and to be honest so do I. On the other hand a genuine ‘hello’ can go down well and make the tweeter (me) seem more human rather than a bot spamming with promo-tweets every hour or so! (I’m not a robot – Promise!).

Feel free to comment if you use AutoDM to tell me what program you use. Also, if you could retweet this blog (so I can get more results) it would be much appreciated! Thanks guys!

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