Firefox Developer: ‘Everybody Hates Firefox Updates’

 interface, Internet News  487 Responses »
Jul 102012
 

Mozilla’s Jono DiCarlo has come out to say what many a Firefox user has long been thinking: the rapid release cycle is killing Firefox.

DiCarlo has a long and well-argued post on how and why Firefox’s attempts to ape Google Chrome have not only made the browser less usable, but done the very thing Mozilla was trying to prevent — driving people to switch to Chrome.

The problem, argues DiCarlo, isn’t just the rapid releases, but the way Mozilla has handled them:

Ironically, by doing rapid releases poorly, we just made Firefox look like an inferior version of Chrome. And by pushing a never-ending stream of updates on people who didn’t want them, we drove a lot of those people to Chrome; exactly what we were trying to prevent.

That squares with the user feedback Webmonkey has received over the last year or so of rapid Firefox updates — comment after comment of fed-up users tired of the endless updates and dialog boxes. Less anecdotally, Webmonkey traffic from Firefox has declined from roughly 34 percent to roughly 30 percent since Firefox 4 and the rapid release cycle debuted.

MORE: Firefox Developer: ‘Everybody Hates Firefox Updates’ | Webmonkey | Wired.com.

 

Is internet display advertising really dead?

 interface, Internet News, Marketing  341 Responses »
Jul 092012
 

In a recent blog post, John Battelle writes, “Display advertising is dead. Or put more accurately, the world of ‘boxes and rectangles’ is dead. No one pays attention to banner ads, the reasoning goes, and the model never really worked in the first place (except for direct response). Brand marketers are demanding more for their money, and standard display is simply not delivering. After nearly 20 years, it’s time to bury the banner, and move on to…well something else.”

As a director of digital media at Rosetta, a focus of my role is on display and its role within our clients’ media mix, so reading John’s article raised some questions for me. If he’s right, and “display is dead,” what’s the next phase of digital marketing? I think the answer to that question depends largely on the advertiser’s business objective.

MORE:  Is display really dead? – iMediaConnection.com.

 

6 Ways to Stay on Top of Social Media

 Education, Internet News  356 Responses »
Jul 092012
 

To be successful in social media and community management you need to keep track of the constant changes to that ecosystem. That’s because everything you know about Facebook, Twitter, and other social spaces today will somehow be different in six months. Layouts will be altered, features will be added or removed, and new social networks may pop up.

So how should you keep track of all these moving parts? Here are six tips for staying on top of social media.

MORE:  6 Ways to Stay on Top of Social Media.

 

7 Apps You Don’t Want To Miss

 Agency News  286 Responses »
Jul 092012
 

It can be tough to keep up with all the new apps released each week. But you’re in luck: We take care of a lot of that for you, creating a roundup each weekend of some of our own new and updated app highlights from the week.

This week we found a few water-based games that require you to come up with a little strategy in order to win, and we found an old favorite game that has finally made its way over to Android.

MORE:  7 Apps You Don’t Want To Miss.

 

Google’s Nexus 7 is a fantastic $200 tablet

 Tech News  290 Responses »
Jul 092012
 

The 7-inch Android tablet is one of the scrappiest models in the gadget landscape. From one manufacturer to the next, one year to the next, these tablets have failed to find an audience or win any vocal supporters. Yet sales for the 10-inch iPad continue to vault higher with each quarter. All the while, companies keep trying to make 7-inchers work, hammering away at the form factor, making the same mistakes (underpowered internals, chunky bodies, poor performance), expecting different results.

The form saw its first measured success with the Kindle Fire, which cracked a few million unit sales in a single month during 2011’s holiday season. But the Fire’s reception then, and sales performance since, doesn’t suggest a raft of blissfully happy customers. While Amazon’s tablet has a couple of enthusiastic fans here at Ars, the guess in our review that it would “end up often as a gift from early tablet adopters to late ones” seemed to come true. You wouldn’t buy one for yourself, perhaps, but it was a good enough present for the technologically apathetic: Mom, Dad, Grandma, or Technologically Illiterate Sibling.

Enter stage right—well, more like stage from above, the God of Tablets bombing down in a skydiving suit wearing Google Glass—the Nexus 7. Google adopted the internals of Asus’s Memo 370 shown at CES in January, revamped the body, and bequeathed the device with Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. All while maintaining a $199 base price point.

The specs, design, and cost all make the Nexus 7 seem like the Holy Grail of tablets. As we’ll show later, it can even keep pace with the (significantly more expensive) iPads in many respects. It’s great. Suspiciously great. Suddenly we have everything we want (well, close to it), for less money than we probably would have paid for it. Selling hardware cheap—in hopes that more money can be made elsewhere—is not a new game. But the Nexus 7 suggests Google is going to play that game harder and better than we’ve seen in a long time.

MORE:  Divine intervention: Google’s Nexus 7 is a fantastic $200 tablet | Ars Technica.

 

LiveRail, Google Make Publisher-Side Ad Blocking Announcements

 Internet News, Marketing  276 Responses »
Jul 062012
 

Presumably, no Democratic candidate wants to appear on the conservative Breitbart website, and no cruise line wanted its ad to accompany a story on the January Costa Concordia cruise ship disaster, but both have happened. Both Google and LiveRail, the the real-time video ad platform for publishers, networks and agencies, made announcements on Tuesday about ad blocking technology that allows publishers to filter “inappropriate” or simply ill-suited ads from ther pages.

LiveRail unveiled its “Checkpoint” tool that lets premium video publishers control which advertisers and video creatives are delivered within their private exchange or real-time bidding (RTB) environments, with the ability to block unwanted ads before serving them to a viewer.

The technology allows publishers to quarantine and block potentially inappropriate ads from categories like alcohol and tobacco, or those containing violent or risqué content, which may have otherwise been served to viewers from third-party buyers like ad networks and DSPs.

MORE: LiveRail, Google Make Publisher-Side Ad Blocking Announcements – MarketingVOX.

 

Google to Shut Down iGoogle

 Internet News  271 Responses »
Jul 062012
 

Google has a long history of unceremoniously killing off its less-used services, having previously axed once-high-profile efforts like Wave, Buzz, Knol and Gears, among others.

The most notable Google service on the chopping block this time is iGoogle, the company’s customizable homepage. Similar to Netvibes, MyYahoo or the now defunct PageFlakes, iGoogle was a dashboard for the web, allowing users to embed gadgets like weather, email and news.

When iGoogle first launched in 2005 it was something of a me-too effort, duplicating features found in other services, but adding numerous Google-centric gadgets. Eventually iGoogle’s gadget selection grew to encompass everything from feed readers to web-based games.

Citing the growth of mobile and web apps that “put personalized, real-time information at your fingertips,” Google says “the need for iGoogle has eroded over time.”

Fans of iGoogle don’t need to panic just yet, Google doesn’t plan to completely shut the service down until November 1, 2013.

MORE:  Google to Shut Down iGoogle | Webmonkey | Wired.com.

 

Twitter to unveil major search and discovery update today

 Internet News  376 Responses »
Jul 062012
 

Twitter could be planning a major update to its search and discovery feature later today, according to one of its employees.

Twitter’s Pankaj Gupta, who runs the company’s Personalization and Recommender Systems, sent out a tweet yesterday congratulating his team on an improvement to its search and discovery tools that, he says, will dramatically change the service.

“Search and discovery in Twitter [is] set to change forever after tomorrow,” Gupta tweeted. “Team — congrats and enjoy the enormity of your impact few understand today.”

Twitter has quickly realized that improving the user’s ability to access relevant information from the service is a key component in its future.

MORE: Twitter to unveil major search and discovery update today

 

[infographic] Image sizes for all your favorite social site layouts

 interface, Web Design  297 Responses »
Jul 052012
 

Here is a great graphic tool that answers a question we’ve asked ourselves many times – what size does that image need to be? This graphic breaks down the layouts on all your favorite social sites, giving the dimensions so you can properly size your images, and get exactly the look you want. Link below, or you can find it in this post on our forum here.

 

Online Marketing Trends: Social Media Marketing: Most Used Tactics Across Social Media.

 

How to Create Successful Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn Ads

 Marketing, Your Brand  355 Responses »
Jul 052012
 

Wildfire has run hundreds of successful campaigns for brands across all three networks and can share with us exactly what works and what doesn’t. In Part 1 of their Social Advertising series, part of the Adrants white paper series, the reports shares:

- Best practices for writing ad copy
– Which creative images are most popular with audiences
– The differences in layout and styling on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn
– What not to do when advertising on Facebook

MORE: How to Create Successful Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn Ads – Adrants.

 

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