Cube9.NET

Twitter’s ’suggested users’ get mammoth boost from new feature

Hezron — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 15:50:04 +0000

Some high-profile Twitter accounts have been seeing astronomical jumps in the number of users subscribing to their profile updates — tens of thousands of new followers, in some cases.

A feature launched last month, called “suggested users,” contributed to the spike, explained Evan Williams, Twitter’s co-founder and chief executive.

As part of the sign-up process, new users are now shown a sort-of featured personalities list that includes a wide variety of popular people and companies. Included are U.K. newspaper The Guardian’s technology page, Web personality Felicia Day, TechCrunch, actor Rainn Wilson, computer maker Dell, grocer Whole Foods, the New York Times and CNN.

Since Twitter began endorsing a handful of personalities in mid-January, The Guardian was among several entities to reap a subscriber windfall. Its account jumped from about 4,000 followers to 66,000 in about a month, according to stat-tracking service Twitter Counter. And within the last two weeks, @GuardianTech added new users at a pace about 300% faster than the previous two weeks.

Day, an Internet video maven, experienced similar results. She has jumped from 20,000 to 83,000 since mid-January. TechCrunch went …

… from 41,000 to 111,000 in the same period. The New York Times’ Twitter account increased its subscriber base by a factor of six — to 145,000.

Williams said Twitter added the feature because many users fall off from the service quickly after singing up, likely because they’re not sure what to do next.

“The reason we created this feature is because lots of people sign up to Twitter but aren’t following anyone, so we’re trying to help get them started,” Williams wrote in a comment on a blog post about the follower phenomenon.

Some bloggers and Twitter micro-bloggers took issue with the approach. Since the service began, they said, many Twitter users have invested time and energy into building their user bases into a valuable resource. They complained that the changes interfere with that kind of organic growth.

“People who see the importance of Twitter start asking these kinds of questions,” said Leo Laporte, who runs the TWIT podcasting network and until recently was one of Twitter’s top five users. He is now the 27th-most popular user, according to Twitterholic.com. “Sometimes it’s a little bit concerning. Because Twitter has a lot of power to, with simple changes like that, change the ecology of the system.”

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone acknowledged that offering “suggested users” wasn’t the ideal solution and suggested that the service might evolve to cater to particular users’ interests. “Right now it’s sort of like staff picks at your local bookstore,” he wrote in an e-mail. “Later, we hope to make this smarter.”

But a more dynamic — and less subjective — recommendation system may not be coming any time soon. “It’s not super-high on the priority list,” Stone said.

Fair enough. But your staff picks include two New York Times accounts and not a single one of the LA Times’ 80 Twitter feeds? That’s a slap in the face, Twitter.

Just kidding. We’re still cool.

Updated 11 p.m.: An earlier version of this post said the LA Times has nearly three dozen Twitter feeds. There are actually 80.

– Mark Milian

[ via latimes ]

The Twitter Fantasy

Hezron — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 15:28:03 +0000

It seems everywhere you turn these days there’s an excitable story about Twitter, the microblogging tool that is a mystery to some people, a miracle to others, and a service some are noisily evangelizing in hope of self publicity.

As Twitter scales up in user numbers, the level of hysteria seems to be going through the roof. Along with a huge army of self proclaimed social media experts, most of whom appear never to have actually worked on or been around a grown up marketing campaign in their lives, we also have the bullhorn aggregator brigade – the folks that busily hoover up information and then breathlessly and sometimes bossily rebroadcast to anyone listening.

Old enough to remember when ‘desktop publishing‘ started to put the early crude digital graphic design tools into the hands of enthusiastic people with no design ability? That’s where the social media circus is in its development curve, with honorable exceptions.

Long form blogging went through a ‘trough of disillusionment’ to use analyst Gartner’s bizarre term, after the initial flurry of excitement a few years ago. After the initial burst of innovators we had great hordes of people who thought regurgitating other peoples ideas and thoughts was ‘blogging’. These people are still busily cutting and pasting and writing en masse and nobody is reading their stuff because they have nothing to say.

The same thing is increasingly happening, in a shorter format, with micro blogging. Just as the craze for RSS feed evidence that your long form blog must be interesting because of the number of ‘readers’, proudly displayed on the blog front page, we now have the ‘follower’ phenomenon – if thousands of folks are following you on Twitter that must mean you carry some weight in the universe.

There seems to be an odd momentum where the more Twitter followers you accumulate, the more folks follow you on the basis of your following. We’ve already had the Twitterank fiasco, where people signed up for a service which generated a meaningless number that supposedly gave you a ‘rank’ of importance, and there are various other free online ‘metrics’ services that massage your ego with evidence of your popularity.

I smell Beanie Babies, Housing Bubbles and Dutch Tulip Manias – there’s a frenzy around followers that will boom and bust. Few people know why these various followers are of value apart from to try and sell to them, often in a way that would be very at home on the home shopping channel, ideas, services and stuff.

Apart from the folks who are flipping ideas – strip mining the web and in some cases their work experience for stuff they can repackage and rebroadcast, often within a very short time frame – there are the crowd sourcers.

Some of this crowdsourcing is innocuous timewasting – “what’s your favorite #westernfilm, friends? TGIF!” – and some questionable requests for information that will presumably be used for personal gain. There is even a strain of Twitter ‘Chuggers‘ (a UK term combining ‘charity’ and ‘mugger’ for people who accost you in the street and try to get you to sign up for the cause they represent, or at least donate to it).

In a business team environment any sort of collaboration device is usually preferable to telephone calls, emails with attached MS Office files and all the other time eating one to one conversations that slow projects down.

There’s no denying microblogging is a useful, if largely insecure, collaboration tool: where instant messenging is basically a one to one communication tool, Twitter is a one to many device as I’m sure you’re sick of hearing by now.

Twitter, and an ever increasing number of business oriented clones, do have great utility if there’s a clear team use model.

On a public level however Twitter is all about who you’re listening to. Ever been to an overcrowded party? There’s often tons of complicated social hierarchy and hustle, some of which you don’t understand, and you probably wind up talking to the people who seem the sanest and most interesting in a corner where you can hear yourself speak.

There’s an egomaniac making a lot of noise over there, a drama queen behind you, someone boasting about business to a large group of people they just met and someone else having a noisy emotional meltdown in the doorway. That’s what Twitter can be like.

Anyone who has managed people will know how the above party scenario applies to work as well – just add the shy and the poor communicators…

The above may seem hard on Twitter and those inside the tech bubble, but we are now approaching a point where this embarrassingly named service is increasingly going mainstream. Just as the ‘poking’ feature in Facebook hasn’t appeared in enterprise social network products, there are poking style aspects of Twitter which are confusing users who think it is merely an immature adolescent plaything.

Learning to filter out background noise and give and receive useful contextual information with people you value is the art of making Twitter useful. Like being at a party, just showing up doesn’t mean you’re going to have a good time. Quality not quantity is what builds reputation…

[ via zdnet.com ]

Using Visualization to Optimize Adwords: Time Series Visuals vs the Pivot Table

Hezron — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 14:59:08 +0000

This is a guest post from Elad Israeli and Roni Floman of SiSense, which specializes in easy-to-use business intelligence.

Pundits joke that Google Adwords is driving Microsoft Excel sales. Two rivals are vying for domination; yet one’s desktop software is used to optimize keywords sold by the other. The reason is very simple: the Google AdWords interface doesn’t support the rigorous analysis of multiple AdWords keywords and their optimization. Importing the Google AdWords data into Excel lets you do just that… albeit within the constraints of Excel.

Let’s try to explain this by looking at the visualization and business intelligence assumptions behind the Google use case and the Microsoft use case.

The Good News

The Google Analytics and AdWords interfaces have gone a long way towards democratizing the de-facto use of business intelligence practices and good visualization analysis approaches (we’ll ignore the occasional pie chart). Not only does the small business have access to millions of eye-balls through Internet Advertising; it also gets a good lesson in business intelligence, succinctly visualized.

Every non-beginner Google AdWords or Analytics user knows what a dimension and a measure are. These two concepts, key to multidimensional analysis, will soon become household names, courtesy of Google (well, almost). Custom reporting in Google Analytics assumes that once you’ve become acquainted with these terms you can now use them for better reporting, using the custom reporting feature. With the addition of motion charts every user now has access to the visual expression of very complex (time-based) relationships.

The visual that drives the Google universe (although the goal conversions funnels are pretty cool) is the Time Series Chart. Anyone who wants as much traffic as possible into their site is bound to be mesmerized by the Time Series Chart. This includes the author of this article, the publisher of the article, everyone with an online presence. “Hey – look at the spike last Monday, at lunchtime! People must have had their lunch while looking at my site…” Time series charts are what helps you look for trends and see beyond seasonal fluctuations. Time series, together with unstructured data, can be even more helpful, since you can tie the unstructured events (thanksgiving, a press release) to the data and see whether the data may explain some of the seasonality. Google is beginning to hint at this with the notes feature. Posting the unstructured data (press release, new ad campaign) can help you correlate that event to pattern changes in the clicks, visits or any other measure you’re tracking.

The Bad News

So now we know why there’s always that scraggly time series chart indicating traffic, clicks or conversions at the top strip. It is a great solution visually, but it is not good enough to do the continuous improvement work you need to do to optimize your web site traffic or adwords campaigns.
The reason is really simple if you think about it: optimizing web site traffic or ad campaigns can’t be assisted at all by the time series view. It needs a drill down. And a good drill down can be defined as follows: compare as many items across as many measures and dimensions that you can. And this is exactly why you’ll find yourself migrating to excel….

Google did a formidable job of delivering valuable reports. But the ability to drill into pivot-type views (which are best for optimization work) just takes too many steps. And, as we’re going to argue in this article, pivot type views are best when optimizing your AdWords campaigns.

Typically, data is flat, meaning that it consists of columns and rows. A pivot table can help you quickly summarize the flat data, giving it depth, and get the information you want. It does this by offering another level of analysis, across rows and columns. The usage of a pivot table is extremely broad and depends on the situation. To get the right depth, you need to know what you’re looking for, and in an AdWords context, the question you’d like to answer is “which of my keywords/campaigns is most valuable to me?” or, in other words, “how can I rank my keywords, campaigns or traffic sources against each other and compare across the broadest metrics”.

Even with the recent Google release of custom reporting, you can see how certain measures behave over a dimension but not how several dimensions or measures interact. So Google’s new custom reporting feature gives you a very basic pivot. All the defined segments still retain the rigidity of the underlying Google Analytics structure. You can define a segment as an and/or or and+or but not a measured new dimension (a brand new x divided by y), even a simple one such as cost/conversion.

Below you can see the Google Analytics custom report interface – it lets you define what you want in the report (I’m using it instead of directly referring to adwords interfaces).
You can define dimensions and get to see measures that apply to them. Yet, you still need to do quite a lot of drill down and sorting to effectively compare campaigns. The reason is that you cannot compare dimensions side by side – you can’t compare the keywords within each campaign, for instance. In Google you cannot see the top keywords (a fliter) per each campaign. You need to always drill down and sort.

This is the custom report. Comparing campaigns still requires drill downs, not all the information (such as filters) appears. Also, without any measured values we cannot see what a measured value (x/y) for each campaign is, although it is an important measure. So we cannot look at a good KPI, such as looking at the average cost of the worst keywords, which can be an important piece of information when you want to whittle out the bad ones. You can measure yourself by requiring a lower average cost of bottom twenty keywords for every week that goes by.

So you drill down in Google, and define analytics, and use all the reports AdWords gives you, and end up exporting to excel, and using the good old pivot.

[ via flowingdata.com ]

Tracking your Footprints on the Web

Hezron — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 03:32:40 +0000

Execute your browser to one of your favorite search engine. And input your name and click search button. You can see your information(including same names) on the web.

But, what about Blogosphere or not indexed pages? Do you know how your search engine works in detail? Also what about your brand/company info/discussion/complaints which is critical in business field?

Maybe there’ll be no perfect tool for that(if it’s, plz let me know by comments), but I found some recommendations.

Web 2.0 is coming and it consists of many different things with compared to what you know about web. At least, I think we have to know happenings about you in new sphere with new tools.

Plz, refer to the below and I hope it helps. Below links are provided from here.

1. BlogPulse: Trends in the Blogosphere

Part of Nielsen-Online, BlogPulse highlights the top trends in the blogosphere and is mostly used to determine the hottest topics on the Web and how they got to be that way. But, its value as a personal monitoring tool can not be disregarded. Search for your name then grab the RSS feed to see who is talking about you and what they’re saying.

2. Pipl: Searching the Invisible Web

Pipl claims to search the deep or invisible Web to find documents, blog entries, photos, publicly available information that other search engines don’t serve up. It’s a great, fast search engine that we like; the only disadvantage is it offers no RSS feed.

3. Spy: Watching what Happens on the Web

According to the site, Spy can “listen in on the social media conversations you’re interested in.” This clean visualization search tool watches Twitter, FriendFeed, blog posts, Google reader shares and Flickr for any term you want. An RSS feed is available.

4. Serph: The Social Web Right Now

A brilliant tool for searching the social Web, Serph shows you what is being said about you “right now.” Serph gathers results from blog search engines, social media sites, social news sites and social bookmarking sites and offers an RSS feed for the results.

5. Social Mention: Mentions of your Name on the Social Web

Another great tool for searching the social Web, Social Mention offers a quick glance at mentions of your name on the Web. Just enter your name and switch between blogs, microblogs, bookmarks, comments, events, images, news or all of them at once. Slower than Serph, but occasionally offers different results. An RSS feed is available.

6. Monitter: Tracking Twitter

Monitter is one of the coolest looking monitoring tools for Twitter and one of the most useful. We’ve written about it before and although most people are using Twitter’s own search tool for search and alerts on Twitter, Monitter offers a little bit more. Giving you the option to search for three different keywords at once, Monitter is great if you want to keep your eye out for mentions of your name, your username and your company all at the same time. It also offers an RSS feed.

7. BoardTracker 2.0: The Ultimate Search Tool for Forums

BoardTracker is a forum search engine, message tracking and instant alert system that offers relevant results quickly. One of our favorite search tools for forums and message boards, BoardTracker currently tracks in excess of 1.2 billion posts.

8. Google Alerts: The big G

We couldn’t end this post without mentioning Google Alerts, although likely most of you are familiar with it. Although Microsoft and Yahoo have alert tools, Google’s offering beats them hands down. It offers e-mail and RSS alerts for any set of keywords including your name.

JW FLV Media Player

Hezron — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 05:53:11 +0000

JW FLV Media Player | LongTail Video

As u know, flv or other flash based video requires media player because it’s not supported by basic media player like Windows Media Player.

There’re many flv players, which installation is required, but the problem is when u need to play flv file on the web. For that, I recommend JW FLV media player.
It is one of the most famous FLV player, also it’s open source based so you can use it for free. Check details on above URL.

For overview, u need to upload its main java script file on your web account and basic script description for meta-data is required for online playing. And of course, some space for flv file is mandatory. But if I were you, I would link FLV file on other server to avoid traffic limitation.

So… what about your video streaming solution?

Palm Pre vs. iPhone vs. G1

Hezron — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 23:37:31 +0000

CES 2009 brought us a new player in the smartphone upper-echelon. Let’s drill down and see how the Palm Pre compares with the iPhone and Android’s G1.

1. Multitouch touchscreen/gesture control: All three are capacitive, only the Pre and iPhone have multitouch. The Pre’s glowy little “gesture area” has dropped the touchable real estate all the way down tto the bottom of the phone, which is great for being able to navigate with one hand and not interfere with the screen at all. The wavey dock you bring up from the bottom looks awesome, but can you use it out of the box without a second thought or page through the manual? That’s my question. Advantage: iPhone/Pre tossup.

2. Multitasking: One of the beefiest of our beefs with the iPhone SDK is its insistence on Apps running one at a time. The G1’s notifications drawer was definitely a step in the right direction, but the Pre’s interface is the first smartphone OS that was built with multitasking as a core design element. Resembling the Xbox’s old Blades, or a less-jarring OS X Expose even, the Pre’s “Cards” interface always places you in the context of every app running for fast switching, and notifications from other apps don’t pull you away completely from the task at hand. Multitasking is hugely important on a phone, and it’s a good sign that Palm recognizes. Advantage: Pre

3. Hardware: Adrian says:

While the hardware is definitely high quality, I’m not entirely blown away by the design. It looks really nice, and original, but it’s a little too cutesy in shape and kind of reminds me of an oversized pebble. A slightly larger screen could have definitely been put to good use, and I really don’t like the black space on the sides of the screen.

A phone with a built-in QWERTY still hasn’t touched the iPhone in terms of sleekness and pure sex. And it might still be a while. Advantage: iPhone

4. Development platform: The Pre’s “Web OS” sure sounds nice—all developers need to know is JavaScript, HTML and CSS? Sounds good in theory, but building a mobile app will never be as easy as cranking out a new theme for your Tumblr. Palm’s stressing ease of development, though, so it will be interesting to see how it stacks up against Apple’s solid, familiar-to-devs OS X-based SDK and Android’s fully open source approach. Advantage: Pre? If it’s straight-up JavaScript, that’s a lot of programmers ready to go. Note: we had iPhone here before, but we’ve switched with a qualification. Developer community still goes to iPhone for volume.

5. Web Integration: The Pre subtly integrates the internet into the phone at every opportunity, and it’s awesome. Contacts get pulled in from Facebook, Gmail, IM and and scanned for dupes; the messaging app shows your last several emails, IMs and SMS with that contact in a single window. Really, really smart stuff. Advantage: Pre

6. App Store/developer community: A smartphone is only as good as the software it runs. On the Pre, Palm is still keeping application delivery details like pricing behind the curtain, but they did say the app delivery will be entirely handled by the phone (without a desktop app), which is a shame. They’re saying that they’re not going to duplicate Apple’s Hobbesian app approval black box mistake, which Android has also hasn’t fallen for, but there will be an approval process based on “security and stability.” But as we know with Android, a dev community needs enough devices in the hands of consumers to reach critical mass, which the Pre will have to match. Advantage: iPhone, even with the black box, but Android and Pre’s more open stances are reassuring.

7. Wireless charger: We’ve seen wireless charger tech for years at CES, but it’s taken this long for a major consumer gadget to ~~come bundled with its own wireless charger in the box~~. Whoops, it’s not in the box, sold separately for unknown $$. But still: Bravo. Advantage: Pre

8. The Network: Dan Hesse, Sprint’s CEO, gave our coast-to-coast 3G test a shout out in his press conference. Of course he did: Sprint won (in download speeds). Sprint was the only major carrier without a powerful, hype-catching smartphone choice, and now they have one. The Pre is a data-centric phone with a network we’ve proven to be strong in a large swatch of the country—that’s a good combo. But would you switch to Sprint for the Pre? Ugh. Advantage: Not cut and dry for everyone, but we stand by our numbers: Sprint is the best 3G network in our tests.

9. Physical keyboard: It’s preference, but one held by a large swathe of the gadget buying public: physical QWERTY keypads are still the mainstream input of choice. Touch is getting better all the time, but a lot of people still want physical keyboards. But better yet is the ability to choose; unfortunately, the Pre doesn’t have a soft onscreen keyboard, and its slide-out is the same meh QWERTY from the Treo Pro. Advantage: It’s preference, but on me, the iPhone’s soft keyboard can’t be beat.

10. Camera: The Pre has an LED Flash for its 3MP camera, something both the iPhone and G1 lack. Flash cellphone photos are ugly, but for a lot of people, they’re good enough. So credit for throwing it in. Advantage: Pre

11. Battery: Apple’s still an outlier with their non-removable battery; like the G1’s, the Pre’s comes out for a spare swap too. We’ve heard Apple’s reasons for this a million times, we know the drill, but removable batteries will never stop being handy. Advantage: Pre

12. Copy & Paste: Yep, Pre’s got it. iPhone still doesn’t. Advantage: Pre/G1

13. Browser: All three use a browser based on WebKit, which has become the standard for the mobile web. We couldn’t put it through our Mobile Browser Battlemodo ringer obviously, but what we saw looked great, and it’s the only other mobile browser besides the iPhone that supports multitouch zooming. Advantage: iPhone/Pre

So there you have it. We’re excited. Are you?

@ http://i.gizmodo.com/5126870/in-a-nutshell-palm-pre-vs-iphone-vs-g1

Feeling: A glass and a half full of joy by Gorilla

Hezron — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 23:36:24 +0000

Wait until he starts…

Objectified

Hezron — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 23:25:33 +0000

Objectified is a feature-length independent documentary about industrial design. It’s a look at the creativity at work behind everything from toothbrushes to tech gadgets. It’s about the people who re-examine, re-evaluate and re-invent our manufactured environment on a daily basis. It’s about personal expression, identity, consumerism, and sustainability. It’s about our relationship to mass-produced objects and, by extension, the people who design them.

Through vérité footage and in-depth conversations, the film documents the creative processes of some of the world’s most influential designers, and looks at how the things they make impact our lives. What can we learn about who we are, and who we want to be, from the objects with which we surround ourselves?

Read director Gary Hustwit’s post about the film.

Objectified is currently in production and will have its world premiere in March 2009. Join our mailing list or subscribe to our RSS feed to stay informed of screening announcements.

Featuring
Paola Antonelli (Museum of Modern Art, New York)
Chris Bangle (BMW Group, Munich)
Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec (Paris)
Andrew Blauvelt (Walker Art Center, Minneapolis)
Tim Brown (IDEO)
Anthony Dunne (London)
Dan Formosa (Smart Design)
Naoto Fukasawa (Tokyo)
Jonathan Ive (Apple, California)
Hella Jongerius (Rotterdam)
David Kelley (IDEO)
Bill Moggridge (IDEO)
Marc Newson (London/Paris)
Fiona Raby (London)
Dieter Rams (Kronberg, Germany)
Karim Rashid (New York)
Alice Rawsthorn (International Herald Tribune)
Davin Stowell (Smart Design)
Jane Fulton Suri (IDEO)
Rob Walker (New York Times Magazine)
and more participants TBA

Credits

Produced and Directed by
Gary Hustwit

Editor
Joe Beshenkovsky

Director of Photography
Luke Geissbuhler

Additional Photography
Guillermo Cabrera
Kevin Fritz
Gary Hustwit
James Longley
Ben Wolf

Sound Recordists
Singeli Agnew
Valerio Cerini
Joelle Jaffe
Matty Nematollahi
Sam Pullen
Mike Urdaneta

Website Design
Jason Santa Maria

Contact Info

General inquiries: info (at) objectifiedfilm (dot) com
Screening inquiries: objectified (at) swissdots (dot) com
Filmmaker contact: gary (at) objectifiedfilm (dot) com

@ http://www.objectifiedfilm.com/about/