social

Web Intents: the future of web apps

interface, Internet News 412 Responses »

Jul 272012

Like. Read Later. +1. Tweet. Tumblr. StumbleUpon. For the last few years, little chiclet buttons have been spreading like measles across the web, appearing and vanishing as new tools and services rise and fall in popularity. The popular ShareThis button, which offers site owners the chance to at least corral all these social services into one pop-up box, currently offers over 120 potential destinations – and while nobody ever actually lists them all outright, it’s often hard to tell exactly who all the options are helping.

It’s a problem in need of fixing, and one that both Google and Mozilla have solutions in the works to handle – Web Intents and Web Actions/Activities respectively. Their executions vary, but the basic goal is the same: to move away from the site/app creator having to link to specific services to get things done, in favour of simply enabling them to provide verbs that the browser can handle on a user-by-user basis.

What would this mean in practice? Well, for example: at the moment, there are many different bookmarking tools, with two of the most popular being Delicious and Pinboard. To integrate a bookmark button on the end of an article, the site owner has to add two different chunks of code. In a Web Intents/Actions world this would simply become one ‘Bookmark This’ button. When the user clicks it, their browser sees the verb, consults its list of registered services, and hands over the data.

That’s only the simplest possible scenario, though. What stops Web Intents/Actions being a glorified ‘mailto: link’ is that they’re capable of far more, including two-way interaction that make them suitable for full web applications as well as simply chiclet replacements. Current Web Intents specifications handle the verbs Discover, Share, Edit, View, Pick, Subscribe and Save. With very little coding, for example, you can both send an image to an editor and receive the touched-up version back, just as easily as pulling information like contact details out of an external address book and into a specific form – all without a single custom API call or even knowing what the second party actually is.

MORE: Web Intents: the future of web apps | Feature | .net magazine.

Brands Flock To Pinterest, as Google plus sink to new low

interface, Internet News 286 Responses »

May 232012

Rather than challenge Facebook and Twitter for mindshare, Google is a distant fourth to Pinterest, with its “pin it” button now appearing alongside Facebook, Twitter and email buttons on prime web real-estate such as eBay and Amazon product pages.

Google has never been able to ” succeed ” in any of its social media initiative and this infographic makes it clear why .

Nissan, was among the biggest brands on Google plus for having one of the best new Google+ brand pages, even down to the animated GIF in its header image that gives the illusion of a car speeding by. Nearly 424,000 users have added the page to their “circles” Google+ lingo for following a person or brand and yet Nissans agency decided early on not to invest in developing content specifically for the page, which mostly contains repurposed content from Facebook.

“The bottom line was that it was pretty bleak in its traffic,” said Brandon Kleinman, director of social media and strategy at TBWA/Chiat/Day.The broad consensus is that Google+ is an empty city where the masses go to set up a profile but then seldom return.

SOURCE Online Marketing Trends: Brands Flock To Pinterest, as Google plus sink to new low.

7 Social Networking Apps for When Facebook Jumps the Shark

interface, Internet News 376 Responses »

May 212012

According to a recent poll by the Associated Press and CNBC, 46 percent of respondents think Facebook will “fade away as new things come along.” That’s an ominous data point for a company whose IPO dominated the news cycle last week, and claims some 900 million worldwide users.

Facebook seems to be infiltrating every facet of our lives. “Like” buttons appear on every website. “Like us on Facebook!” shouts at us during TV commercials. And more and more apps rely on Facebook to simply log in. It’s starting to feel more than a little oppressive — it’s like we’re living in a blue-and-white-painted jail cell.

And all this IPO madness is just foul icing on the cake.

So where do you turn when the world’s been stricken with Facebook fever? We rounded up seven apps that could satisfy your social networking needs should Facebook go down the tubes — or you just can’t take it anymore.

SOURCE 7 Social Networking Apps for When Facebook Jumps the Shark | Gadget Lab | Wired.com.

How to convince your boss to fund content marketing

Marketing, Your Brand 408 Responses »

May 092012

Though most companies today have some kind of online presence, 22 percent of marketers find that getting buy-in for online content marketing is still their greatest challenge. Even if there’s enough buy-in to give it a shot, marketers still need to convince their companies to invest in the staff and resources that will make online marketing possible. Successful online content marketing begins by convincing your own company that the ROI merits the investment.

via How to convince your boss to fund content marketing – iMediaConnection.com.

Whats Americas Most Engaging Social Network? Youll Be Surprised

Internet News 458 Responses »

May 072012

Try to guess America’s most engaging social network. Facebook? Wrong. Twitter? Wrong. Pinterest? Wrong again. According to comScore‘s most recent social networking data, from the month of March, the San Francisco based site Tagged engages users like no other service. It was the only site to finish in the top two in both of comScore’s engagement metrics.

Tagged users visited an average of 18 times each during March according to ComScore, second only to Facebook’s average of 36 visits per vistor. And each time a Tagged user visited the site, he or she stuck around for 12.1 minutes — which trailed only Tumblr 14.7 minutes and beat out Facebook 10.9 minutes.

Tagged co-founder and CEO Greg Tseng says he’s happy about ComScore’s March data, but that his company has been among America’s most engaging social networks for about a year now. The secret to Tagged’s success? A pivot Tseng and co-founder Johann Schleier-Smith made around the beginning of 2008.

SOURCE: Whats Americas Most Engaging Social Network? Youll Be Surprised.

Google+ updates its user interface, refines navigation and photos

interface, Internet News, Web Design 235 Responses »

Apr 112012

Google announced today a major redesign and a set of new features for users of its Google+ service. Navigation and several user interface features on Google+ pages have gotten a design makeover, and several new features aim to attract more users to share photos and promote more interactions with each other.

Google has overhauled navigation by making things simpler than its previous design. Pages now feature a cleaner, more minimalist look to match some of Googles more recent updates to other applications like Gmail. A new “ribbon” of icons for home, profile, pages, and photos simplifies access to some of its major features. These icons can now be customized to users individual preferences. The end result is that now pages have a very clean, streamlined look made up of app-like icons.

Google+s new look and features also emphasize photos now more than ever before. Photos are now displayed prominently, using more space on the browsers screen. The new layouts are larger and more elegant, and they resemble the photo displays on sites like Tumblr or Flickr.

Google+ Hangouts Can Now Be Initiated From YouTube

Internet News 487 Responses »

Aug 192011

As we mentioned then, it’s been possible to watch videos with friends since the beginning of Google+, through a more complicated manual process that must be initiated in Google+. But this new button allowing you to initiate hangouts from YouTube with a couple of clicks makes it considerably easier.

via Google+ Hangouts Can Now Be Initiated From YouTube.

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