James

Mashable conducted a nice poll amongst its users to see if they thought the future of the web had ties to flash or HTML5. They mention specifically the comments Steve Jobs made recently trashing Adobe for being lazy with flash and the decision to leave it off the iPad. Want to know the results of the poll, read them yourself over at mashable.com, you may be surprised….. Continue Reading

Looks like March 1 is doomsday for application notifications according to Mashable and the official facebook developers blog. For users, no more ugly notifications all the time, particularly those that get abused heavily, which is a good thing. For the developers, no more pinging the users on a regular basis using this method. Applications changes and other similar notifications have to go through other channels, all in all this will definitely hurt applications ability to retain and remarket to users, but it’s a better user experience for facebook overall, so I think it’s a win for the platform as a whole... Continue Reading

Mashable.com, which offers social media news and commentary, has a great article about how companies can go about dealing with negative feedback which is incredibly common in social media where it’s very easy for an individual to make a seemingly big impact in open forums such as facebook fan page discussions and wall posts. They outline the need for companies to both identify the type of feedback their receiving and then find an appropriate means to respond.

There are actually significant opportunities present when you take a look at some of the types of feedback that are given to companies to turn a negative into a clear win for the company.
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Jono at Mozilla Labs has been blogging about his escapades with Google Buzz, he’s been looking into specifically all of the privacy concerns and user experience related issues with Google buzz over a number of very informative posts that describe his personal encounters with Buzz. We’ve been following the issues with Google buzz for the past week or so and have found a significant amount of chatter out there regarding complaints with the usability of the system. In this series you really get to see all of the problems and auto opt-in settings that Google appears to be displaying deep within the settings for Buzz. All together, Buzz has been met with mixed reviews, but it would appear that there are more issues that need to be refined in the coming weeks.
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Online news sources are reporting that Microsoft and Yahoo! have finally reached an agreement where Yahoo! organic and paid search results will be powered by Bing, Microsofts search platform. Advertisers will now have a united platform but the organic results user interface will remain largely unchanged for Yahoo! users. The transition has already begun but recently passed the final stages of regulatory checks from the European Commission and the Department of Justice. Will this have a huge impact on traffic driven from these platforms?
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According to Compete.com’s new January data, the biggest news is that Facebook.com has just surpassed Yahoo! as the second biggest online destination in the world in terms of monthly unique visitors. What will be really interesting is to see how this shakes out over the course of the coming months. Compete is one of the best resources out there in terms of verifying traffic levels for particular websites. I recommend it for anyone who’s not been exposed to the web analytics world.
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TechCrunch recently asked Gigya to survey the power of sharing widgets accross a massive network of content sites. According to the results, about 40-45% of the traffic generated from sharing is coming from facebook shares, with the remainder largely going to Twitter and some additional traffic coming from ancillary services like Yahoo! and Myspace. One of the reasons that Google has pushed so hard recently to enter the social networking world with Buzz is because of the amount of traffic that social sharing is generating. For many content driven sites the amount of traffic driven from search engines is vastly lower than the amount of traffic driven from social bookmarking and social sharing through widgets.
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PC Mag blogger Lance Ulanoff has some excellent coverage of his experiences with Google Buzz so far. He’s got some great points about how overwhelming Google Buzz probably is for the millions of new users who’ve not been engaged in Social Media but were thrown head first into the world of Google Buzz. We’ve been covering Google Buzz alot lately but I think it’s good to step back and get some perspective. Most casual visitors use social media tools like twitter because they’re extremely simple, and that’s something that Google may have messed up on here.
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