Our thoughts, rants and inside knowlege of web design & development!
Adam
I work part time at Areatrade, and I am in charge of developing the internal database to help the business run more efficiently. My blog posts will focus on social media and developments in the industry.
Homepage: http://www.areatrade.co.uk
Posts by Adam
Is Google+ the answer to social networking behemoth Facebook?
Jun 28th
Google have unveiled their latest attempt at cracking the world of social media, titled ‘Google+’. After previous attempts such as Google Buzz turned out disastrously (and even resulted in privacy scandals), it is particularly important for Google to get it right now before they lose an irreclaimable amount of ground to Facebook.
In fact, Google+ looks very promising. The tool will be baked in across the entire suite of Google products – search, maps, GMail, Reader, YouTube and many other successful services. A notification drop down similar to the red icon you see on Facebook will be accessible and omnipresent across all of these services, ensuring that take up and continued usage is high.
Circles
Google have presented some innovative ideas to the status quo of social networking. They noted that granular sharing is ‘tacked on’ in many current social services, like ‘Friend Lists’ on Facebook, to which you can restrict access to your posts. Google wants to slip this on its head and make their social network reflect reality – hence their ‘Circles’ feature. A fun interface will allow you to drag and drop you friends in and out of your different social ‘circles’ – like ‘University friends’ or ‘Colleagues’ or even More >
Tweeter accidentally live tweets Osama bin Laden’s death
May 2nd
In a surprising display of the power of our ever increasingly connected world, a user of the popular social networking service Twitter posted live updates on what later became clear was the raid resulting in the death of Osama bin Laden. Sohaib Athar, known to his followers as @ReallyVirtual, posted the following tweet at around 1am local time:
Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event).
Sohaib continued to post updates on the strange events, completely unaware that he was in fact reporting on the top-secret US military operation to capture Osama bin Laden, dead or alive.
The abbottabad helicopter/UFO was shot down near the Bilal Town area, and there’s report of a flash. People saying it could be a drone.
The most entertaining of his tweets from last night must be this tweet describing his moment of realisation that he had in fact unwittingly live blogged one of the most anticipated military operations in the last decade:
Uh oh, now I’m the guy who liveblogged the Osama raid without knowing it.
The startling tweets can be read on his twitter profile, and they clearly show how powerful the medium of social networking is and the startling speed at which information can spread across More >
Google takes social search a step further with ‘+1′
Mar 31st
Search engine giant Google has announced a new feature called ‘+1′. +1 is essentially the same as Facebook’s ‘Like’ button, which when clicked shares that page on the user’s Facebook Wall. Google +1 will do this as well, listing all links +1ed by a user on their Google Profile.
However, the integration will go deeper than this, as +1 buttons will also appear on search results, and the number of times a result has been +1ed will appear next to its link, potentially influencing which result a user will choose. This could end up being incorporated into the algorithm that Google uses to rank its listings. Also of note is that this does not just apply to the ‘organic’ listings- these +1 buttons will also be a feature of the ‘sponsored’ pay-per-click results that appear at the top and down the side of results pages.
The impact of this new feature on SEO is obvious, so we will be watching this development with great interest. The social aspect to this button highlights how important a social media strategy is when considering the online promotion of your website. If you’re interested in our online promotion services, contact Areatrade on 020 8366 2050 or email More >
Amazon pulls ahead of the pack; releases cloud-based streaming of your music collection
Mar 30th
Amazon unveiled their new Cloud Drive and Cloud Player products this week, which will allow users to store their files in Amazon’s ‘cloud’ – an online server which can be accessed from any computer. Whilst products like this are nothing new, the Cloud Player function is – it will allow users to stream their music through their web browser from any computer, or to their Android phone using Amazon’s MP3 app. They provide 5GB of storage space free – and only files and music not purchased from Amazon count towards this limit – a fantastic incentive for users to purchase music from the Amazon MP3 store, as they will essentially receive unlimited music storage.
Google and Apple have both been racing to release their own versions of these products but Amazon have seemingly appeared from nowhere with Cloud Player, baffling industry experts. Interestingly, Google and Apple have been having issues coming to licensing agreements with major record labels to ensure users are not on shaky legal ground when uploading their MP3 files to a remote storage location. It appears Amazon have failed to observe this obstacle, so it is possible that we could see litigation arising from this surprise release.
You can More >
Social networking giant Facebook starts rolling out new ‘Questions’ feature
Mar 27th
The massive social network Facebook have started to roll out their new Questions product to their users. The feature allows users and pages of businesses, brands and public figures to pose questions to friends or fans. You can give your two cents by selecting an previously offered answer or by adding a new one of your own. The question will then become visible to your friends, widening the net of people who can answer the original person’s question.
For businesses, this offers a great opportunity to improve engagement with Facebook users. For example, an ice cream parlour could ask the question ‘Which flavour should be Flavour of the Week?’. This would serve as an incentive for users to get involved with the decision making process, and also act as an incentive for the user to visit the business themselves. If one of your fans answers the question, they are also effectively widening the audience to all of their friends, which is fantastic free advertising for your company.
ICANN approves new ‘.xxx’ top level domain
Mar 20th
On Friday the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) approved a new ‘.xxx’ top level domain (TLD) that will be operated by the ICM Registry. The ‘.xxx’ TLD will join the ranks of other TLDs like ‘.com’, ‘.co.uk’, ‘.org’ and so on. The intended use for the ‘.xxx’ will be adult websites, but it will not be compulsory for sites containing pornographic content to use that TLD. At the time of writing over 284,000 domains have been pre-reserved.
The introduction of the new TLD has met a lot of opposition from a wide range of factions. Conservative groups have opposed the introduction of ‘.xxx’ as they believe it legitimises the production and publication of pornographic material, whilst figures in the adult industry have opposed the TLD as they believe it could lead to legislation enforcing ‘.xxx’ on pornographic websites, effectively ‘ghettoising’ adult websites on the internet and leading to censorship of all websites under that domain. They are also frustrated that they will have to pay out to protect their brand by reserving their website domain again under the new TLD.
Proponents of the new TLD have been keen to point out its advantages, namely the protection of minors from More >
Microsoft releases Internet Explorer 9 to the masses
Mar 15th
Microsoft have released the final build of their Internet Explorer 9 web browser in an attempt to stem its steady loss of users to alternative browsers like Firefox and Chrome. IE9 features an enhanced user interface with the removal of unnecessary toolbars and the amalgamation of the address and search boxes into one field and the alignment of the address/search bar and tabs into one row. The new browser also offers impressive speed improvements and also great leaps in support for web standards like HTML5. Web standards are a common set of guidelines offered by the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) that browser vendors and web developers are expected to adhere to to ensure a consistent experience across all software. Internet Explorer has been notoriously poor at this in the past, and Microsoft has sought to rectify their previous errors.
The improvement in web standards support will be welcomed with open arms by web designers such as us at Areatrade as it means less extra code is needed to ensure compatibility in all software. Microsoft has recently been calling for the small minority of users still stuck on version 6 of the software to upgrade to a newer version. Many IT departments have More >
The Japan Tsunami Appeal
Mar 13th
Most people will have heard by now about the horrific disaster which struck Japan over the weekend. We would like to urge our followers to donate to the British Red Cross appeal if they’ve got any spare change – people are desperately in need of rescue and shelter at this very moment.
It has been interesting to see the usage of social media in relief efforts. News of the disaster spread quickly across Facebook and Twitter and videos of the event appeared almost instantaneously on YouTube, Japan being such a well connected country. The phrase ‘Text REDCROSS to 90999′ was trending on Twitter worldwide to encourage users to make an instant $10 donation to the appeal (though this only functioned for American users.)
Google have also set up a version of their ‘Person Finder’ tool, the technology of which was used extensively as part of operations in Hurricane Katrina and the Christchurch earthquake. The tool allows users to search for information about someone they are trying to find or upload information about the whereabouts and state of someone to be found by others. The tool uses a standard, open format to allow different organisations to collate data in one place – reducing the More >
Facebook adds ‘in a civil partnership’ relationship setting
Feb 18th
Facebook has rolled out the capability to set the relationship status on your profile to ‘In a civil partnership’ after the feature was increasingly suggested by users. The Facebook communications manager Andrew Noyes stated that “This has been a highly requested feature from users … We [Facebook] want to provide options for people to genuinely and authentically reflect their relationships on Facebook.”
The changes have been rolled out today in the UK, North America, France and Australia, with the options available specific to the territory of the user.
Microsoft to launch final Internet Explorer 9 on March 14th
Feb 18th
Technology giant Microsoft is to release the latest update to their well-used web browser Internet Explorer on the 14th of March at the SXSW (‘South by South-West’) conference in Austin, Texas. The Release Candidate version of the browser has impressed many in the tech community with its superb speed and standards-compliance. This means that web developers will have an easier time creating websites that function as expected in all browsers.
You can try the Release Candidate preview yourself by downloading it at http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/, but be warned that as a non-final version it may be susceptible to a few remaining bugs and security issues.