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6 Reasons Why Twitter is the Future of Search - Google Beware

This past week the tech world was abuzz with news of Twitter incorporating search functionality into its site. What this means is that you can now easily obtain trending data for popular keywords, take a deeper look at the topics people are talking about in real time, and find answers to pressing questions that others have already written about. So is this really significant? It depends on who you ask. Some think that Twitter is a Google killer while others argue that Twitter isn’t even a search engine at all. Regardless of which side of the fence you stand, there’s no doubt that Twitter has a bright future with its eyes set on the search market. In fact, Twitter continues to receive millions in funding and recently turned down a $500 million offer from Facebook because of its planned business model of Q&A features and search ads. Who knew status updates could be so valuable? Meanwhile, Facebook has been adding Twitter-like features to try and keep up… So really, what’s the big deal about Twitter? Isn’t it just a social media site used to socialize with friends? Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, goes as far as to call it the “poor man’s email system”. But the people who really get it understand the huge potential that lies within Twitter. Not only is it a way to connect and interact with others, but it also represent a huge pool of information based on everyday human life that’s ready to be mined to extract real value. Adding search functionality is just the first step in this process. Not to mention that Twitter already has an impressive track record with various uses. For example, it helped President Barack Obama with his presidential campaign, got a student out of an Egyptian jail, documented plane crashes in real time, and made Dell a million dollars. Twitter has a huge cultish following and is promoted through a grassroots movement that we haven’t seen since…well, the beginning of Google. Despite all of the hype, Twitter is still in its infancy and it’ll be years, maybe even a decade, before it develops the technology to accurately display search results and put a dent in Google’s market share. But regardless of all that, the point I want to make in this article is that Twitter has what it takes to get there. In other words, Twitter represents the future of search. Still not convinced? Let me explain… 6 Reasons Why Twitter is the Future of Search 1. Takes social to a whole new level Twitter is essentially a continuous conversation that takes place online between millions of people. Imagine the insights you could gain if you were able to record and search through everyone’s conversations. Of course, it’s a lot less creepy than that but that’s the kind of tool Twitter is becoming as more and more people take part and share parts of their lives. Twitter search is the ultimate social media platform and will enable people to get the opinions of others and add context to relevant information. Searchers don’t just want facts. They want to learn more about the experiences of real people they can relate to. For example, rather than doing a search in Google for “best restaurants in new york” and getting a bunch of review sites, you can do a search on Twitter to see which restaurants people are talking about in New York. If you don’t like the results, you can easily ask your network and get personalized answers in real time - which will then show up in future searches on the same topic. Compare that to Google. They’ve been unsuccessful thus far in implementing social factors into the search results via Search Wiki. If you do a search in Google and can’t find what you’re looking for, what are you going to do? Probably ask around on Twitter. 2. Combats information overload With millions of new web pages springing up every day on the Internet, who has the time or attention span to read through it all? We need filters, and that’s what Twitter provides in 140 characters or less. Twitter is great for searching for quick information and even if you’re looking for long articles, there are plenty of people who post links to relevant pages they like. 3. Real-time content In this day and age, nobody wants to wait for anything. We live in a society where we get everything fast and can’t stand for anything else. The same applies to information and news. Until recently, we had to wait for journalists to write up reports and publish them online. Google would then index the pages and show them in the search results, but not after at least a couple of hours. Good, but not good enough. Twitter displays real time streams of news and information. There’s no need to wait, and short of actually being there to experience the events, it’s the next best thing. Twitter has been a great tool for people to broadcast news live from their laptops and mobile phones (e.g. plane crash rescue in the Hudson River). 4. Represents the masses Twitter levels the playing field and gives everyone a voice online. In the “Twitterverse”, information is a lot more representative of the masses rather than of big corporations and personalities who manipulate people with their ideas. Power is transferred from the controllers of the web (e.g. Google, big news companies, powerful Wikipedia editors, online publishers) to millions of everyday social media users. We’d be able to rely less on big news sources and drill down to the micro level (i.e. experiences of individuals rather than just in aggregate). 5. More trustworthy results A big advantage Twitter has over Google is that it has the potential to be both a social media platform and a search engine. Users have the option of getting answers from their network of people who they actually trust. On the other hand, Google gives you a page of links compiled by their quality algorithm. Sure, Google returns pretty good search results most of the time, but they’re impersonal and sometimes irrelevant to what you really want. Getting in touch with your network via Twitter is the best way to get reliable information you can trust. For example, if you had a question about life in the NBA, would you rather ask Shaquille O’Neal on Twitter or type a question in Google? 6. Better targeted for location How does Google know whether or not a page is relevant to a local geographic region? Unless the page is labeled correctly, Google has no idea. Twitter, on the other hand, can easily tie content to a location by using user profile settings or GPS (as technology advances on mobile phones). This in turn means more relevant information and ads in Twitter search.

Questions Questions Questions

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Questions, questions, questions. I have sent you here because you have been asking questions. No sin in that. We grow wise by asking questions. The right questions.

Twitter is defined by the tweet, a word used to describe the up to 140 character postings of its users. Tweets answer the famous questions that Kipling maintained should be answered by any piece of journalism (and micro-blogging of the Twitter kind is no exception): who, why, how, what and where? Tweets tell us who the tweeter is, why they are tweeting, how they are tweeting, what they are tweeting about and where they are tweeting from.

Take the following tweet sent by @squalid_but_goodhearted_student which you spotted on the Public Timeline.

I feel so stupid. My cat got more questions right on Millionaire than I did. Always feel dumb the night before an exam. Help, I’m drowning. Sent five minutes ago via Tweetdeck

We know why that was sent – @squalid_but_goodhearted_student feels stupid and nervous and wants to share the fact in a silly, faintly amusing, studenty cri de coeur. We know who sent it – @s_but_gh_s. We know when – five minutes ago. We know how – via Tweetdeck. We know where (if we choose to check out @ s_but_gh_s’s user profile) Bottleby College, Sillyshire. And of course we know what the body of the tweet was and we can interpret it as a silly message sent by a drunkard, an act of showing off, a genuine message to friends, a piece of introspective meandering … the possibilities are many and various.

Naturally Twitter has other applications: plenty of people use tweets to sell some ghastly life-coach ‘tool’, ‘technique’ or ‘philosophy’ (why do ninety percent of people use the word ‘philosophy’ when what they really mean is ‘self-delusion’, ‘con’ or ‘laughable piece of drivel that’s so self-evident it makes your nose bleed? Well that’s for another day). Good luck to them and those others who regard Twitter as a kind of sales opportunity. It’s not for me to tell anyone how Twitter should or should not be used. The founders of the service will tell you a tweet is there to answer the question “What are you doing?” – the other Kipling questions are incidentally answered by the technology and the ‘why’ will always be subject to interpretation.

For most of us Twitter is a fun (almost to the point of addiction) new, ever-changing wave that it is a bewildering and exhilarating pleasure to ride.

I am aware that I am something of a special case. Because of the number of followers I have and because I am someone who pops up on screen and in print there has been a tendency for a lot of new followers to arrive and start asking me questions. It’s fine to ask questions. But this is the digital age and Twitter is a digital instrument. Before you charge in and ask me what I’m doing, where I am, why my avatar is blacked out, when I’m coming back to Britain and a hundred other questions of that kind, stop, ponder, ask yourself one or two questions. Firstly whether I might have already answered your question in my timeline – that is the list of tweets I have already posted, found by accessing http://twitter.com/stephenfry. You can use the search facility at the bottom of the twitter webpage too. If you use a Twitter client for your mobile, smartphone or computer it too will have ways of allowing you to search. Or if I have in a post used a title, phrase, name, reference or word unfamiliar to you, can it not be looked it up using a search engine, online encyclopaedia or other resource? In other words: use your initiative: don’t ask me questions for the sake of it, or just as a way of getting a reply or direct message from me. If you are on the road with a mobile only and no access to the full range of internet search instruments then ask yourself this: is your question really so urgent that it can’t wait till the next time you’ve jacked into the matrix and can find out its answer yourself?

Why does any of this matter? Well, I’m happiest if my Twittering is reciprocal, as it should be. I tweet what I’m doing, thinking, feeling, wondering, hoping etc and you do the same. Twitter should make us equal. I know I lead what appears to be a blessed life of travel and excitement, and I’m happy to share my experiences, thoughts and adventures with you, but I’m also honestly and genuinely interested in you and who you are, how you’re thinking and what you have to say. I’m uncomfortable feeling as if all I’m supposed to do is sit in an audience chamber being endlessly petitioned and questioned while getting nothing back.

I know that asking me a question looks like the most obvious way of getting me to respond to you, but if that is the only reason you’re tweeting and the answer could easily be found out by other means, don’t you feel a bit silly asking it? A good question will delight me, but I think it’s only human to be frustrated by endless lazy ones. It’s not your fault. It’s scale. If I got only one question a day asking me why I was in Mexico, when I had already posted extensively the reason why, well fine. But fifty an hour all asking that question rather sours the whole experience…

I am not trying to humiliate you or make you feel guilty. You are probably new to Twitter and are still feeling your way forward. Every driver was a learner once. My first few tweets were three hundred characters long. I didn’t know how to follow people. I didn’t know how to send pictures or update my profile. We all learn and with such a rapidly growing service, we are all still learning all the time. I offer this blog to you to help you consider better and more enjoyable ways of using Twitter. Please don’t take offence or worry that I think less of you. I’m just trying to help us all. After all I could simply have ignored your tweet entirely.

So next time you want to post a question – stop, think: search the timeline or look it up.

Having said all that, don’t run away with the idea that I am insisting all Twitters ending with a question mark are invalid. There are plenty of questions that will amuse and stimulate me and all those following my timeline. A bit of thought is all….

Thanks for dropping by. See you in twitterland…

x

Stephen

© Stephen Fry 2009

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Find Out the Most Influential Users on Twitter with the ReTweetability Index

March 3rd, 2009 | by Jennifer Van Grove5 Comments

Dan Zarrella, Mashable contributor and self-proclaimed viral marketing scientist, is applying his science of retweets to a newly launched site, the ReTweetability Index.

The ReTweetability Index isn’t just a list showing the top Twitterers or the ones with the most retweets, but a formula carefully researched to better get at the most retweetable and influential users.

The formula measures and ranks Twitter users based on the power of their tweets, which takes into account retweets per day, average tweets per day, and total followers. The final output is a ReTweetability index number, with higher numbers indicating that a user has a higher percentage of being retweeted.

Using the site, you’ll quickly be able to pinpoint any users’ retweetable rank (including your own), and you can search for the most retweetable users by topic.

For example, my ReTweetability score is 2403.94 (current rank 5,556) which is calculated using the formula above and multiplying that number by 10,000.

When doing a search on social media as topic, you’ll find that the Mashable Twitter account ranks the highest (overall ranked 3) with an index of 790,870 (nicely done, Pete!). The numbers may seem a little complicated, but once you start playing around with the site you’ll start to get a feel for individuals with the most overall and subject matter influence.

Zarrella explains a little more of the science behind the ReTweetability metric in his own blog post on the site launch, saying “The ReTweetability metric I’m using for the index right now is based on the natural logarithm of both the follower and tweets-per-day numbers. This is done to compress the range of variation in those two variables while acounting for the power law shaped graph displayed by the distributions of both.”

Social Media for Business: The Dos & Don’ts of Sharing

Sarah Evans is the director of communications at Elgin Community College (ECC) in Elgin, Illinois. She also authors a PR and social media blog and is the founder of #journchat.

It doesn’t matter if you’re on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr; your online personality is not only part of your overall brand, it becomes an interactive experience for you and your business. So, who is the face or voice of your brand and what do they share? It’s a very important decision in and of itself.

Just as you create branding guidelines and key messaging guides, so too should you dedicate time to creating your social media personality. There are multiple combinations that you can use to increase your brand visibility and converse with your customers.

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Be transparent and authentic. Be human.

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Don’t want the worst day of your life to be played over and over again like Groundhog Day? Then don’t talk, share, Tweet or write about it via social media. That said, no one is happy, or perfect all of the time. It’s okay to let people into the “real” events which happen in your life. Social media for business is about return on engagement. Connect with people, build opportunities through dialogue which would not have otherwise occurred, then connect them with your business.

Think in terms of “bad driver just cut me off” instead of “just got served papers for a lawsuit.” The first example connects people and encourages dialogue. Who hasn’t been cut off by a bad driver? The second example has the potential to make people uncomfortable or turn them “off” to your brand.

A great example of “what not to do” is posted on Peter Shankman’s blog, How an “accomplished communicator” communicates. The sender of this email has now publicly shared a not-so-nice side of his personality in a VERY public setting.

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A profile pic is worth a thousand tweets

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A major part of your social media personality is your avatar and your profile bio. The first rule for avatars and bios is to stay consistent across social platforms. If you’re sharing information from your business account, decide whether you want your avatar to be your company logo or the face of the president. Each sends a completely different message and requires a different messaging and branding approach. 

Who is doing it well? Here are a few of my favorite business and/or personal branded avatars and profiles on various social media platforms:

Facebook

Businesses have many options when it comes to creating a Facebook personality. There are options for “group” or “fan” pages versus a personal account.

· Benjamin Leis and his pet project’s group page, The Campus Buzz for College Media: Ben uses The Campus Buzz as his avatar to reinforce the importance of his project and brand. He is becoming one with this identity.

· Carrie Kerpen and her company’s fan page, the Kbuzz: Carrie’s profile is on par with her personality—smart and helpful, a loving wife and mother.

YouTube

· Blendtec’s Will It Blend? - The company offers a full library of “Will It Blend?” videos on its YouTube account with a profile perfectly suited to match.

Twitter

· @VeronicaDLcruz - Tweeting from the CNN newsroom in New York City.
· @jasonfalls - Social media explorer for a brand building agency.
· @PRnewswire - Vicky Tweets on behalf of PR Newswire.

An inviting avatar may include one of the following attributes (along with great content): a smiling face, a full color photo (as opposed to black and white), or a familiar logo.

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Leaving a legacy

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Your social media personality becomes part of your brand’s legacy. Don’t brand your personality for the day, the month or the year. This is serious stuff. What you post stays around for a pretty long time and the information (good and bad) isn’t too hard to find. Your social media posts offer vast archives of information about you.

This means, what you share, post or tweet today should reinforce your brand tomorrow. Think about each message you share via social media as an email which has gone public to your entire organization and all of your stakeholders. Now, imagine if they are reading this email and RESPONDING to it. That’s part of the power of your social media brand.

Who is leaving a legacy aligned with their brand on Twitter?

· @BreakingNewsOn - Why? All breaking news, all the time. I’m not confused about what I’m getting from them.

· @dannybrown - Why? He walks the talk on business with a strong emphasis on philanthropy.

· @barefoot_exec - Why? Her messages completely align with her goals—to empower women, celebrate success and encourage greatness.

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Don’t be a social schizo

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Multiple personality disorders do not work well in social media. If you confuse, you lose. If you are a business expert one day, a media maven the next and live news feed after that, people will ultimately stop connecting.

A very simple approach is to make a short list of what you WILL talk about via social media. Stick with it. The pay off? When someone thinks about an expert in interior design, they will think of you because you will have BRANDED yourself as one. (DISCLAIMER: This is not an opportunity to “play a doctor on T.V.” You should actually be an expert in the areas you claim to be.)

The same concept applies for joining multiple networks. Keep the same personality for each. 

Ever heard the compliment about a truly admired person, “he or she is the same in public as he or she is behind closed doors?” This is what I believe to be the golden rule of your social media personality. Live your brand across all networks (including offline).

The following people blog or vlog about specific topics and continue the dialogue via other social media platforms consistently:

· Aronado Placencia: (@Aronado) This man lives to promote entrepreneurs and new startups. With a goofy sense of humor and an ability to connect quickly, he is ultimately all about promotion (in a good way).

· Jeff Pulver: (@JeffPulver) Usually looking for social media speakers, getting ready for the next social media summit, or just talking about social media – he really does live “in” social media.

· Melanie Notkin: (@SavvyAuntie) She has branded the new, hip way to be an aunt. Her blog and online personality co-exist harmoniously.

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Social climbing not the best approach

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Social climbers beware. As you build your social media personality, don’t only connect with people who have a lot of “followers,” “friends,” “connections,” etc. It makes sense to engage the “big dogs” of social media, but it’s even better to connect with other quality audiences. Spending too much time looking for the big fish may take away from an entire school passing you by. Go grassroots and begin to build your personality one social media platform at a time.

A relatively easy approach on Twitter:

Use the search function and type in keywords associated with your brand. Reach out to everyone talking about these items with a personally crafted “Tweet.” Do not resend the same thing over and over. People you interact with will read your Twitter stream and want to see what useful information you provide.

Check out networks, groups, or fan pages on Facebook:

Creating a group or fan page for people to become a member of both gives you a new to interact with current customers and offers the opportunity to grow your reach exponentially. The Creative Commons fan page is a great example of a fan page doing it well. Their fan page has several discussion board posts (similar to a blog) and many wall posts – which demonstrates that people are engaged. They also have “REAL LIVE” employees who participate on the fan page.

Start a conversation on Seesmic, a video blogging community:

Post a 30 second video blog on Seesmic, asking for feedback and you’ll get it. There is a small, but mighty network of users on this video platform. If you’re looking for a way to jump on the video bandwagon this is a great way to get started. Todd Jordan (@tojosan) is an engaged member of the Seesmic community and offers “tell it like it is” advice. He gets that it’s not all about the numbers, and follows people who enjoy frequent video conversations with him.

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It’s not a one-stop shop

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There is no one-size fits all personality for your brand. In fact, think you know your brand? Explore social media and see how people really experience what it is you’re selling. You may need to adjust or reflect on your brand.

What is your brand offline? Social media isn’t an opportunity to reinvent a new brand, but to widen your brand’s reach. It’s all about the experience, right? People should get the same (or similar) experience with you online that they get offline. For example, a business owner talks up an impressive customer service experience at his or her business online without ensuring his or her staff truly delivers this service. Making a promise you can’t keep is worse than never having engaged your audience at all.

Remember Motrin Moms? Sharing information via social media without someone there to interact is a giant NO NO! A “must have” when branding on social media is being available to your public.

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Return on engagement

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It’s all about ROE - return on engagement. Is your social media personality working? You’ll know when opportunities arise that never would have been possible otherwise. A few ways to “quantify” engagement:

• Track incoming traffic from links

• Number of people subscribed to RSS feeds

• Number of people in social media groups, fan pages, etc

• Trackbacks or linkbacks to posts

• Conversation tracking tools like Twitter Search (Mashable guest writer Dan Schawbel previously discussed free and fee-based brand monitoring tools)

• Comments on blog posts

• Increased sales and general inquiries

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Best advice? Don’t take anyone else’s advice

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You know your brand better than anyone. Learn some of the social media fundamentals, then apply and find what works best for you.

Tell Facebook How You Really Feel

After announcing sweeping changes to the way it plans to shape its terms of service going forward, Facebook is today making another big move towards transparency: opening up its official corporate blog to comments. And, users are having a field day with it so far, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s post from yesterday about the company’s new “governing principles” attracting more than 1,000 comments.

Facebook says that “they won’t be responding to comments directly” on the blog, but it appears someone is at least monitoring it, as some of the more profane comments I saw earlier today seem to have been removed (see below). Nonetheless, there are hundreds of candid messages, both addressing the current Facebook turmoil over the ToS and additional features and changes that users would like to see.

The move to open up its blog to comments puts Facebook’s in rarified air amongst other top Internet companies. Google’s dozens of blogs have comments turned off, as does Digg (though you can of course comment on the stories once they get Dugg). Twitter used to have comments turned on, but appears to have disabled the option. Yahoo actually leaves comments turned on, with yesterday’s post from new CEO Carol Bartz attracting nearly 100 of them.

I think Facebook is smart to open up in this way. While comments are likely to be negative a lot of the time, especially when it concerns issues like privacy and community management, it also gives the company an opportunity to see smaller issues that might be bugging people, like numerous users who have suggested things along the lines of, “on people’s status boxes, there should be a “don’t like” and “don’t care option.”

Of course, the overriding goal of opening up blog comments in addition to yesterday’s announcements are to convince users that Facebook listens and responds to users’ concerns, which, will largely remain unclear until the company is once again tested on privacy issues.

Microsoft's Ballmer Doesn't Believe The (iPhone) Hype

Posted 02/25/2009 at 5:58:27pm | by Lisa Weddle

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Following a recent spate of layoffs, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer assured analysts that Microsoft would endure the economic downturn by following such models as RCA during the Great Depression, preferring to spend money now on research and development with an eye to dominate the market once the economy rebounds.

Part of the plan is a January 2010 release for Windows 7.  A heavy advertising blitz will promote the new operating system as well as the release of Office 14.  We may soon be seeing Microsoft stores across the mall from Apple stores as the Windows company plans to open retail establishments of its own.

In his address, Ballmer acknowleged Apple's one percent gain in market share over the last year and the rising open-source alternatives.

"We're very focused on both plle as a competitor and Linux as a competitor," Ballmer said, accordng to CNET.  "I think the dynamics with Linux is changing somwhat. I assume we'll see Android-based, Linux-based laptops, in addition to phones, and we'll see Google more and more as a competitor in the desktop operating system buisness than we ever have before... the seams between what is a phone operating system and a PC operating system will change, so we have ramped our investment in the client operating system."

Yet, Ballmer claims to be not very impressed with the iPhone, which harnesses 51% of mobile web traffic, nor Research In Motion's BlackBerry platform, stating, "The real market momentm with operators and the real market momentum with device manufacturers seems to primarily be with Windows Mobile and Android."

Despite his dismissive stance, Ballmer still couldn't deny the growing competition in mobile software sales, such as Apple's iPhone App Store and the growth of ecosystems with software, hardware, and services bundled together - which Microsoft has not been interested in, instead partnering with existing device makers.

A major focus of Windows 7 is making it work well on the mini-laptops known as netbooks.  Microsoft will offer a Windows 7 Starter Edition optimized for netbooks while at the same time making efforts to convince netbook customers to pay more for full-featured versions of Windows 7.  Microsoft says that the Starter Edition will run just three apps at a time and lack the Aero Glass user interface that defines both Vista and Windows 7.

Microsoft will also continue its battle against Google for web search and advertising market revenues, despite the fact that previous attempts to takeover these markets have failed.

Safari 4: better for netbooks?

Until Apple makes a netbook, I'm resigned to using an (admittedly very lovely) Dell Inspiron Mini 9, and I was really hoping the new Windows-native interface and tab system in Safari 4 would give me a little more real estate for the actual content of web pages. Alas, it was not to be; on the Dell's 1024x600 screen, I actually get a couple of pixels less space for content when I switch from Safari 3 to Safari 4. Which is disappointing.

Safari 3:

Safari 4:

Disappointing, that is, until you realise that it's all down to that damned Windows font smoothing. Switch it to proper (read: Mac) font smoothing, and you get another handful of pixels more height. Still, basically: it's not quite as good at getting out of your way as Chrome, though the content zooming is pretty good.

Paul Thurrott: Safari is From Apple, Therefore I Hate It

Paul Thurrott has weighed in with his opinion of the new Safari 4 update, and he’s not impressed. While no surprise, it’s the manner in which he blasts the product (and, of course, Apple’s users) that was especially interesting.

I was wondering how Thurrott was going to counter the incredible speed of the browser engine. Apple’s own marketing aside, others have tested it and confirmed it to be the fastest web browser available. I assumed he’d blast the test methodology, or claim that IE 8 would be better (though IE 8 was in the tests), etc. But no, he took a different tack altogether. He simply acknowledged the browser engine is good, and then blasted the UI because he’s apparently a manly man who doesn’t need no steenking graphics.

I Don’t Like Apple’s Products, They Shouldn’t Either

So let’s see what pearls of wisdom we get from Mr. Thurrott:

Of course, Apple being Apple, they are promoting Safari 4 as if it were the second coming. It’s “the world’s fastest, most efficient, and most innovative” browser, according to the humble folks in Cupertino

Good point. Why can’t Apple’s marketing department just say their stuff sucks and be done with it? One question, though: Why is it when Microsoft lies (the CEO, no less) Thurrott doesn’t care? Odd that he has a lie detector on everyone at Apple, but seems to ignore Microsoft’s own CEO.

Tabs on Top, Thinking on Bottom

Apple’s worst decision in this browser is the way it handles tabs… in Safari, tabs are integrated into the title bar area.

Apple claims that moving the tabs to the title bar saves space. But it only saves space because Safari now uses a native-like title bar: In previous versions of the browser, there was no true title bar, so the tab row didn’t really add to the height of the UI.

Huh?

Apple also claims that the new Tabs on Top reduces clutter, but the truth is, on Vista and 7, it looks horrible and cluttered.

Lot’s of people have opinions on this, Mac and PC. I see no reason for a window’s title bar to be sacrosanct. In my opinion, using it for tabs means the title bar is, in fact, showing the title of the currently displayed window (tab). I could make a valid case that putting tabs there lets the title bar do what it’s supposed to do.

Top Sites (and Top Shots at Apple’s Users)

Now let’s see what Thurrott has to say about Top Sites:

Apple fanatics–you know, those idiots who would buy anything with an Apple logo on it–will get all giddy and clap like little girls at a Hannah Montana concert when they see Top Sites, the new default Safari 4 home page. But these people are missing the point (what else is new?)

Hmm, that isn’t really about Top Sites at all, is it? Of course, no Thurrott opinion piece is complete without blasting Apple’s user base. Odd that he does so while still claiming that Mac users are the smug ones, isn’t it?

Top Sites’ curved, TV-like display would look wonderful on, well, a TV. But it’s pointlessly visual in a tool that, by nature, is used to find information online.

Fifty bucks to anyone who can honestly decipher that statement. What the heck is “pointlessly visual” supposed to mean? Hey, maybe Thurrott’s whole post is “pointlessly textual!” And what the heck does finding information online have to do with whether it should be visual or not? Geez, most of us don’t use Lynx any more.

It’s unclear why a simple grid of Web site previews wouldn’t be just as useful, and more in keeping with the Web browser aesthetic. Oh, right: Microsoft did it first, in IE 7, over two years ago

No they didn’t, but I don’t expect the Windows SuperSite to know the difference. The IE feature shows a visual grid of the tabs currently running. This is hardly the same as showing a visual grid of the sites you visit most often. But, as long as Thurrott brought it up, why isn’t IE’s feature “pointlessly visual?” Because IE’s grid is not curved? Really? So I guess the problem with Apple’s display is that it just looks too good for simple, hardworking Windows folk.

The nicest thing about Top Sites is that you can turn it off:

No, the nicest thing about Top Sites is that it’s customizable in terms of what, where, and how many items it shows. Unfortunately, it’s just too visual for poor Thurrott! If only Apple had made it uglier.

As for me, my “top sites” have always been in my Bookmarks Bar so I can access them via keyboard, but I’m going to use Top Sites for the visual history search that, as we’ll see presently, Thurrott also doesn’t believe in.

Cover Flow (Or, More Visuals? Ahhhhh!!!)

And speaking of pointless visual effects, allow me to point out the most recent and most egregious use of Apple’s Cover Flow display… it makes absolutely no sense at all in a browser. Naturally, Apple added it to Safari… it’s hard to even know where to start, and of course we’ll have to discuss it over the giddy clapping of those easily-impressed Apple geeks in the corner.

From some of the articles and comments I’ve read elsewhere, Thurrott is not alone in this thinking, but people need to give it a rest. When it comes to Cover Flow, it appears there are only two kinds of people:

• Those that recognize it can be useful sometimes, and use it for those occasions.
• Those that have no idea how to grab a handle and drag it to the top.

Well, here’s my view of it, and I better speak up lest Thurrott not hear me over my “giddy clapping” (quick question: is clapping “pointlessly audible?”). Below is what my Safari Collections look like.

As you’ll see, there’s nothing there but the search box (which, being text-based, I’m sure Thurrott approves of). I do this because for my bookmarks I don’t normally need a preview. I generally know them pretty well. And I’d rather have the real estate for dragging bookmarks around or deleting them, which are the primary reasons I visit this page.

On the other hand, when searching through History, I find the page preview tremendously helpful. These are pages I haven’t bookmarked and don’t know as well. To access this I go to the Top Sites page and hit the search box.

As just one example, I wanted to go back to a specific Lynx page I had stumbled across after finding the link above. No way I’d remember the URL, but the page preview made it easy to find the page amongst all those in search for Lynx.

Another example was last night when I had done some comparison shopping for a new digital camera. The pages really add up, and then I wanted to get back to one I’d seen earlier. A visual search made it a snap to find the page I wanted.

So, for me, Cover Flow is less useful for sites I know (bookmarks), but in only 24 hours it has already been extremely valuable for searching history. But, alas, it’s just so…visual. Thurrott’s eyes!

Look, I’m no Luddite. … This stuff is pointless.

The last sentence above negates the first.

In Conclusion (Or, How I Explain That Internet Explorer Is Just Fine)

So, how does Thurrott wrap this all up? Exactly in the manner you’d expect:

I still feel that Internet Explorer (7 or and Firefox 3 are better Windows Web browsers than their WebKit-based competitors, and that has nothing to do with the underlying Web rendering technologies involved and everything to do with functionality. Both browsers are simply better in day to day usage.

Hmm, yes, who wouldn’t prefer this dazzling interface:

to this one:

I suspect most people who excitedly try Safari 4 will very quickly move back to the more comfortable confines of IE or Firefox. I already have.

Amazing. In less than 24 hours Thurrott gleaned that Safari is too visual. He also learned that IE is confining, and that he prefers those confines. Good for him.

Twitter Fail Whale Tattoo is Awesome, Kinda

If you must ink some kind of web 2.0-related geekery on your body, there’s a whole lot of awful choices and only a couple of good ones. Within that scope, Twitter’s fail whale doesn’t fare too bad; in fact, “normal” people might think it’s just a cool looking thingamabob and won’t even notice how big of a geek you are. Twitter people, of course, will frolic endlessly.

This tattoo was not done without a cause, though (as was the case with the recent Wordpress tattoo): Ryanatmghwom promised he’ll get the tattoo if baltimoremd got 3000 followers (funny, it was probably up to that number, but some people unfollowed, and it’s now at 2,992. What are you gonna do now, Ryanatmghwom, remove the tattoo? HAHAHA.)

In any case, you can see more pictures of the tattoo here. And, a piece of advice for the tattoo receiver: next time you need 3000 followers, just ask Pete Cashmore, he’ll hook you up.

First Look: iWeb ‘09

Written on January 29, 2009 by Liam Cassidy 

It’s been a heady few months. The updates to iWork ’09 and iLife ’09 have, for the most part, been as impressive and inspiring as we’ve come to expect from Apple. I upgraded both suites the very second I could. I can’t tell you how much I love these products.

Except…iWeb ’09. (Liam looks to the ceiling, gathers his thoughts…tries not to get agitated.)

If you didn’t already know, iWeb is a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) website authoring tool. It’s an end-to-end solution that makes it supremely easy to create a complete, sort-of-professional-looking website from scratch. Only, I have some issues with it. Where to begin…

I should begin by explaining something: I’m not a “lite” user. I’ve been developing websites and web applications for over a decade, and I’ve become accustomed to the power and flexibility offered by the like of Adobe Dreamweaver and (yes) Microsoft Expression Web. (Although, given the choice, I’d rather use Visual Studio 2008.) So I understand — I really do understand — that iWeb is not supposed to be competition for those other solutions. iWeb isn’t really for me. Nor does it try to be. It’s supposed to be something very simple, very easy to use. It’s supposed to be intuitive and accessible. It’s supposed to provide a seamless experience for anyone with even the tiniest bit of creative vision. And you know what — it does all the things it’s supposed to do. It just doesn’t do enough.

So, before I get agitated again, let’s take a look at the new release and feel thankful for what it does do.

The interface hasn’t change much, save for the introduction of a vertical panel along the right-hand side of the window, called the Media Browser. This gives easy one-click access to Audio, Photos and Movies on your Mac. Nothing the Media Inspector didn’t do before, except for the final tab - Widgets.

Widgets

Widgets make it quick and easy to add rich-media to web pages.

MobileMe Gallery

While the Gallery pages iWeb creates always have allowed users to hook-in to their .Mac or MobileMe galleries, this widget makes it possible to add a single, self-contained gallery-link to a page without the need to use iWeb’s more cumbersome “My Albums” section to your site. What you get is similar to the Events view in iPhoto; a square panel that shows thumbnails of photos in your chosen MobileMe Gallery. When you pass your mouse over the panel, you get different thumbnails of the photos that lie within. Clicking will open a new page that loads the original MobileMe gallery.

YouTube

Exactly what you’d expect. You paste a link to a chosen YouTube video into a popup dialogue box. It embeds the video on your page.

Google Maps

I really like this Widget. It doesn’t move the earth, it does precisely what you’d expect, but it takes the hassle out of coding these things by hand. Drag this Widget onto your page and you are presented with a sheet asking for the address you want to display. You can set zoom level, and choose which user-controls are available (such as zoom controls or the Google Maps search bar).

Google AdSense

Precisely what proportion of typical home-users are Google AdSense customers is an interesting question. I would hazard a guess it’s really not so many. In which case, this seems like a tip of the hat at providing something useful to more advanced users. Except I cannot see iWeb being used as a tool-of-choice by sufficiently advanced users (and by that, I’m referring to anyone who wants to create a truly decent, individual website — but more on that later).

iSight Photo

You could have done this before using PhotoBooth. Only now it’s built-in to iWeb. This widget starts you iSight camera and allows you to take a photo for instant-inclusion in your web page.

iSight Movie

Precisely the same as the iSight Photo option above. Only with movies.

Countdown

I could see this being popular with websites announcing upcoming weddings and birthdays. In short — completely pointless and not exactly something the websphere was crying-out for. Still, it’s something new. Enjoy selecting your birthdate for next year and watching it automagically work out the number of seconds between now and then. And count them down. (meh)

RSS Feed

Finally! A truly useful widget that was not previously easily-done. Except there is a catch — it doesn’t create an RSS feed from content in your page; it imports a feed from outside your site. If that’s what you want to do, this is a nice and simple way of making that happen.

HTML Snippet

Ironically, this is the most powerful widget of the lot. It allows you to construct your own HTML and generate pretty much anything you want. Of course, Apple expects you to be doing nothing more advanced than adding someone else’s banner, visitor tracking button or analytics script. If you want to embed anything more fancy than that - why on earth are you using iWeb?

Nothing to See Here…Move Along…

After the initial excitement with Widgets fades, you’ll realize there’s nothing else of any real added-value in this version of iWeb. There are only two new themes — “Leaf Print” and “Fine Line” — that would have been impressive in 1997. Today they look rubbish. Oh sure, they’re tidy and simple. But they’re not particularly exciting or fresh. Apple must know this — after all, they’re never gonna publish websites using those themes, so I don’t know why they imagine it’s alright to foist them upon the rest of us.

There I go being a power user again. I’m sure Aunty Mavis would just love Leaf Print (rolls eyes).

Going to Press

The publishing options have been expanded somewhat. As well as the option to publish to MobileMe, you can also publish directly to a third party hosting service of your choice using the FTP connectivity new to iWeb ’09. The process is simple.

Once you’ve entered and successfully tested your FTP login details, it’s business as usual.

I Do Facebook, Too!

Since iPhoto ’09 so nicely integrates with Facebook, it seems the iWeb developers felt they had to do something — anything — to get in on the action. Sounds interesting…what could they possibly do, though?

Imagine it — by hooking-in iWeb to a Facebook account, the possibilities are endless! You could scrape your Facebook Wall updates into your personal website, link your Facebook/iPhoto galleries with your iWeb site so changes in one propagate automagically to the others, synchronize your iWeb blog with Facebook’s Notes, synchronize your Applications to publish their updates to your iWeb site, synchronize your Facebook Status Updates with your iWeb home page…actually, the more you think about it, the more exciting it becomes! The possibilities just go on and on.

Unfortunately, it seems iWeb’s developers weren’t thinking about any of these possibilities, because the Facebook integration we get in this upgrade amounts to nothing more than the following line, published to your Facebook Wall, whenever you make changes to your website.

And here start the problems I find in iWeb ’09…

Crazy URLs

A perennial complaint (really — Google it — you’ll find a lot of people complaining about this for years now). Whether you publish to MobileMe or your own web server, iWeb still insists on creating bonkers-crazy long URLs. And there’s just no excuse for this, there really isn’t. For example, my personal website is http://www.liamcassidy.co.uk and my iWeb website was originally named “liamcassidy.co.uk”.

The effect this had on the final published site was a URL to a home page that looked like this:
http://www.liamcassidy.co.uk/liamcassidy.co.uk/home.html

I’ve since changed the site name to something shorter, but it’s still utterly ridiculous that iWeb doesn’t provide the option — just the option — to override this crazy URL structure/naming convention. Apple, I have a humble suggestion for you — not everyone wants to publish to MobileMe. Let your customers decide what’s best for them, and don’t make them suffer this laziness! A simple toggle in the Preferences ought to disable this kind of silliness so anyone more competent than Aunty Mavis will feel less embarrassed by the addresses iWeb spits out. This sort of thing is entirely avoidable. It’s simply shocking Apple hasn’t done anything about it.

Obsolete Themes

No one with any kind of appreciation for contemporary design, or accessibility concerns, is going to use the pre-built Themes that ship with iWeb. A very tiny select few look beautiful — but they’re still lacking. iWeb ’08 shipped with some nice new themes but, unfortunately, they dated quickly. The stingy two new additions in iWeb ’09 are laughable.

Nasty Markup

OK, this is something only more experienced web developers will care about so I won’t bang-on about it too much. It’s worth mentioning because 1) other WYSIWYG editors manage far cleaner code, and 2) there’s nothing semantic about this markup. There aren’t even any helpful comments to guide the curious. The CSS markup is packed-to-bursting with redundant markup (example: “border-top: 0px”, “border-right: 0px”, “border-bottom: 0px”…you get the idea.)

Painful Publishing

It takes forever to publish pages. Whether you use MobileMe or your own FTP address, publishing a simple 6-page site can take five or more minutes. This is ridiculous, given that any other (free) FTP software can get your files published in much, much less time. Not the “…within moments…” promised by the happy voiceover in the iWeb tour video. Oh no.

The fastest way to publish your site is to not publish it at all — by selecting the confusingly-titled “Publish to Local Folder” option. This dumps all the relevant web pages and assets into a folder of your choosing on your hard drive. This takes seconds, but then it’s up to you to get those files to a server somewhere.

As a sidenote, this may be the best way to overcome the problem with the crazy long-URL’s. Publish the site to a local folder, then use another FTP solution to upload the files to your own web server. You’ll have to mess around with links here and there to make sure the whole site works as planned, but at least you won’t have to deal with six-mile-long web addresses.

Punishing Publishing

Oh yes, and just a final word on publishing. If you don’t use MobileMe as your hosting platform, you can forget about your blog’s comments working properly. And kiss goodbye to your blog’s Search functionality. That’s gonna go, too. Seems Apple really wants you to use MobileMe.

Tough Love

It might sound like I’m bashing iWeb, but if I am, it’s only in the way a pushy parent might berate an under-achieving child for not doing as well as they could. iWeb could be, and should be, a far more powerful and impressive tool than it is today. I was expecting some interesting and exciting things with this upgrade — as it turns out, what I got wasn’t worth the wait.

I know Apple is not trying to compete with other more professional web authoring solutions, but that doesn’t excuse sheer laziness when it comes to upgrading this software. iWeb has the potential to be a killer-application. Seriously — plenty of professional web developers would be happy to use it if only it didn’t suck so bad. And, in truth, there aren’t so many fixes required, either.

Obviously, the Themes are a joke. Where Apple could shine here is build an iWeb Themes gallery, much the same as the Web Apps gallery that countless iPhone owners (myself included) practically lived-in until native applications could be installed on that device. Apple already features third-party developer software on its own website — why not showcase the best iWeb themes, too? Or, better still — why not create some really breathtaking themes worthy of that lugubrious (and indelible) credit, “Made on a Mac”?

As well as vastly-improved themes, add a long-needed fix to the crazy URL issue, CSS editing and the ability to fine-tune the (cleaner, semantic) HTML markup, and you have a web creation tool that is still simple and intuitive, yet doesn’t try to compete with the big-kids already dominating the playground. If that means releasing a standalone “iWeb Pro” package that does for my websites what iWorks does for my documents, I’d gladly pony-up the cash.

In the end, “simple and easy” doesn’t have to mean “crude and clunky.” Apple proved that with Pages and Numbers in iWork. The updates to iPhoto and iMovie (evolutionary and revolutionary, respectively) are nothing short of breathtaking. In this company of Kings, though, iWeb is an embarrassing, backward cousin.