Our thoughts, rants and inside knowlege of web design & development!
Industry News
Visiting Adtech London
Sep 23rd
Adtech is an exhibition and conference where the marketing and advertising community come together to discuss new ideas and changes in digital marketing. We went there to find out what’s new in the online world of business and how we can keep ahead in the ways we advertise.
Much of the time we spent there involved listening to seminars by some of the leading industry experts, including Yahoo & MediaCo. There was lots of talk on the changes in social media, especially with Facebook making significant changes to it’s networking site on the same day.
As more and more people use Facebook and other social media sites, the importance of social media to businesses increases.
If you are interested in setting up social media for your site and would like training on how to use it effectively, contact us.
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 >
Google Checkout Badges
Jun 24th
The Google checkout badges, which have formed part of the AdWords listings for over four years, have been dropped by Google.
According to eCommerceCircle, Google reportedly said, “We’re making this change to improve the user experience on Google search results pages.”
The move comes as Google looks to freshen up their operations with the new +1 badge. This new badge is designed as a way of endorsing a post, website or search result. It will act similarly to the Facebook “Like” button.
If you want to know more about the new +1 button and how it could affect the Search Engine Optimisation for your business, contact Areatrade.
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 >
Big iBrother – Steve Jobs’ response to the tracking controversy
Apr 26th
The recent discovery of a “location history database” built into iOS (the OS employed by the humble iPhone) – which effectively tracked users’ locations and activities – has finally been addressed by the Big Apple himself: CEO of the company, Steve Jobs.
According to the website MacRumors (macrumors.com), a concerned reader wrote directly to Jobs regarding a file built into iOS named “consolidated.db”, which keeps a record of precise locations via longitude and latitude co-ordinates. A visualisation of this data, which could be effectively used to pinpoint an iPhone user on a map, was created by enterprising researchers via a program for Mac OS X, sparking media attention and rather a large amount of paranoia in iPhone users. The anonymous reader who wrote to Jobs cited the idea as “unnerving” and threatened to switch to Android – an OS designed for smartphones which is becoming an increasingly popular rival to the iPhone and other competitors such as the BlackBerry – unless Jobs gave a response. “[Android] don’t track me,” claimed the reader.
Steve Jobs’ response was to call the idea that the information could be circulated “false”, saying verbatim that, “we [Apple] don’t track anyone.” While there is no evidence to suggest More >
B is for Bing! Microsoft’s bid to win the search war
Apr 12th
According to data released recently by eagle-eyed Experian Hitwise, Google’s grip on the search engine market – leading to the colloquial use of “to Google” as a verb – may be slipping, due to competition from the name that keeps cropping up when computers are concerned – Microsoft.
64.42% of searches in the US routed through Google in March, claim Experian Hitwise, and while that is still two-thirds of the market, a sizeable 30.01% can be claimed by Microsoft – 14.32% via their well-publicised search engine Bing, and 15.69% from Yahoo!, which is technically owned by the Microsoft corporation. In a smooth and virtually silent virtual coup, Yahoo! is now powered by Bing.
Bing, ridiculed by some as an acronym for “But It’s Not Google,” also appears to be doing well in terms of successful searches, 80.32% of its users clicking on a search result, whereas the idle Googler only has a 65.91% chance of finding an appropriate website via the search facility. As a result, Google appears to have flatlined somewhat, their market share down 10% since August 2010.
Bing, on the other hand, is up massively from 9.9% of searches as the last year ended, and although Google still controls the More >
Reformspring How the Q&A site just got cooler
Apr 6th
Formspring.me, a popular social website which works with a unique question-and-answer format, unveiled a new look for its site yesterday, which has sparked comments about its similarity to the new Twitter interface.
Designed seemingly with egotists in mind, the site’s primary system is a function which allows anyone – member or not – to ask a specific user a question about themselves, their opinions, or their lives, with the prompt “ask me anything”, which can (and often is) cross-posted to Twitter or Facebook, to gain more questions. A ‘follow’ function, not unlike the aforementioned rival social networking sites, allows you to ask, contact, or smile at the people you know. You can also answer their questions, too.
“One of the most significant design evolutions in Formspring’s history,” according to the company, adds a top-screen navigation bar, allowing for instant navigation back to your profile or questions – saving those precious two seconds one previously used up scrolling back to the top of the page – and shifts the site’s layout to 760 by 490 pixels by default. Formspring claims that the new layout is suitable for all sizes of computers – desktops, laptops, netbooks and even tablets, like the new iPad 2, 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 >
Mind The &nspb! – London Underground’s 2012 Wi-Fi Goal
Mar 29th
Commuters wanting to send the inevitable text message telling their office that their tube is held once again at a red signal will have the chance to finally do so by 2012 – if the plan to roll out widespread Wi-Fi throughout the London Underground is successful.
London Mayor Boris Johnson’s boast of May 2010 that “every every lamp post [and] every bus stop will, one day very soon, be Wi-Fi enabled” preceded October’s attempt to match what has already been established in Berlin, Tokyo and Singapore: BT’s Wi-Fi hotspots for London Underground users were tested at Charing Cross, and in a strangely serviceable event, users of the Bakerloo and Northern platforms, as well as those in the main ticket hall, were able to connect to open-access Wi-Fi.
Deemed “successful” by Transport for London, telecom companies are now being invited to place a bid for a contract to supply a widespread area of Wi-Fi hotspots to a number of Underground stations – 120, to be exact. The winner, to be announced in the closing months of 2011, will be awarded with the task of establishing these hotspots before a set date. The date itself? June 2012 – to coincide with the opening More >