Joe Cincotta: Thoughts and such…

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Nerdism for the masses.

November 17, 2011 • 10:09 am 0

Pixolut launch Lite Engine 2.2

We’ve just pushed Lite Engine 2.2 live, with some great updates that will allow you to further customize your campaigns.

 

With the changes we’re implementing we’re improving the user experience, expanding the features and now giving you the opportunity to track the performance of your campaign better.

 

Lite Engine is our platform that lets you create branded content and interactive campaigns for Facebook. From exclusive fan content to promotions to custom applications – Lite Engine gives you the tools to create a custom experience suited to your exact needs. If you do want more info on the platform, please contact us

 

So on top of all the cool stuff you’re already used to, we’ve added a few nifty things:

  1. Customizing your newsfeed: Lite Engine generates a newsfeed once an entry has been successfully submitted, and in this 2.2 version you now have to opportunity to customize all levels of the newsfeed (so the title, caption, copy and visual). Absolutely tailored and therefore more engaging messaging and images.
  2. Custom Tracking: in addition to the standard reports that are already part of the Lite Engine platform (Hits to the tab, Completed form, Shared in newsfeed and Referred entry), we’ve now created the opportunity for Custom Tracking. This means you can define and track your own interactions in the applications. Great to be able to track certain actions that users take in competitions and/ games.
  3. Referral entries is another functionality we added, allowing you to reward participants in your campaigns with an extra entry in the competition if their friends enter. This mechanic is a great incentive for participants to share the competition with their friends, and will increase your participation rates. Of course this mechanic is only suitable for games of chance (ie sweepstakes) and not games of skill (ie 25 words)
  4. Email confirmations; you can now send email confirmation when entries are submitted which is a great way to follow up with extra, more detailed marketing content.
  5. Gallery options; this option can now be turned off (if desired), so that the gallery in a photo upload campaign is no longer visible.

 

Lite Engine 2.2 features are available today to customers that have beta access or have requested Pixolut to develop the skins. The SDK will be available for all subscribers to download on Monday, November 21.

 

If you want to know more about Lite Engine, this 2.2 update or what we’ve been up to, please get in touch:

Facebook: facebook.com/pixolut

Twitter: @Pixolut

Phone +61 2 8517 5080

 

Filed under: Facebook, pixolut

July 4, 2011 • 11:22 am 0

Pixolut Update: The not-so-Twitter Edition

Twitter Reaches 200 Million Tweets A Day, But How Many Come From Bots?
Lies, damned lies and statistics… Twitter talks about “tweets” as a measurement but who’s actually doing all this tweeting?
I find this to be part of the inherent problem with Twitter – the API has been let ‘run wild’ with spammy usage since the beginning. As much as developers bemoan Facebook for changing the platform and messaging rules, there may be some method in the madness!

How Amtrak doubled their Twitter followers with Promoted Accounts
This article from Lauren Fisher (one of my favourite bloggers) really cuts to the chase with Twitter – a chase for followers using a ‘paid for’ model leaves an engagement vacuum. The same thing happens on Facebook with those nasty ‘pay per like’ campaigns. It’s positioned as a ‘safe approach’ to marketing on social as you can see an obvious performance indicator of ‘likes’ increase directly with every dollar spent.
The problem is that this approach to growing a fan base is kind of like printing your own university degree after you bought it. You just haven’t earned it yet (baby)! There is not any real use of the social platform here, it’s simply a hollow KPI – a ghost-town waiting to happen.
Why? As the thousands of fake fans post their spam to your page, real customers with real points of view are being drowned out or ignored.
oh, one more piece of Twitter love this week…
Biz Stone’s Departure Leaves No Full-time Founder at Twitter
Could this be Twitter’s MySpace moment? I’m guessing yes.
MOBILE:

Native Applications are Dead, Long Live Native Applications
We have been talking about in browser mobile app development for a while and this is a great article that opens up the conversation further looking at what other developers doing with tools like PhoneGap. Very interesting reading to understand the space.

Apple’s iPad contributes 89% of global tablet traffic
If you were thinking of optimizing your mobile web experience for any other tablets… well, don’t.

SOCIAL:
Social Media Statistics Australia for June 2011
Blogs are still big – but the crazy thing is that they measure such a fragmented platform as a single unit – both for Blogspot and WordPress! If you take those out of the equation, there is a big jump from LinkedIn to YouTube.

Linked-in finally launch their API – has potential to be interesting…
The API itself looks a heck of a lot like Facebook… plugins, javascript and all.
LinkedIn To Leverage User Follows And Recommendations In New Social Ad Formats
More interesting LikedIn news.
Calculating the ROI of Social Media

News Corp. Bails Out on MySpace, Sells to Specific Media for $35 Million
One hell of a lesson for ‘bubble’ investors…
INNOVATION:
Why Brands We Know Partner With Startups That We Don’t
The case study of FourSquare and Pepsi.

Filed under: Industry Opinion, pixolut

June 17, 2011 • 3:44 pm 0

On Platforms, Rules, Developers and Advertising… how did this happen?

It has been a huge month (or so) since my last post. Pixolüt have had a few of its most challenging and ambitious projects come to life throughout Australia and Asia Pacific and this has shown us some trends that we want to share with you later in this post – before I do, I want to go through some thinking that expands a previous post about ‘artificial indicators and social relevance’. Since it has been a while since I sent the last post, I have attached the link to the original article at  for reference here…http://blog.pixolut.com/2011/03/23/weekly-update-artificial-indicators-and-social-relevance/

 

In that last post I spoke about this concept of ‘artificial indicators’ - in summary – an artificial indicator is something designed by the developers of a platform to help you make sense of the huge amount of information in their platform (or a third party platform for that matter) since our brains are not designed to comprehend the vast amounts of data that humanity creating.

 

Examples of these platforms are:

Google, Facebook, Apple App Store, Twitter

 

Examples of Artificial Indicators:

Some examples of artificial indicators are: Page Rank, Most Popular, Number of Likes and the less obvious ‘Edge Rank’, Followers, Trending Topics, etc.

 

How did these platforms come to be?

One of the big transitions of the last decade was a fundamental movement from the web as ‘the wild west’ where every company had to have a website to the blog where every individual had to have a website and finally to growth of privatised platforms that sit on top of the web and use it as a ‘transport layer’ – where the human ‘context gaps’ can be filled.

 

Many search companies started this trend of ‘artificial indicators’ with the idea of search indexing. The artificial indicator was not the act of indexing the content per-se, but rather the way in which the algorithm for aligning the search text with the results. Google was the most famous of these with it’s Page Rank. This was also the beginning of ‘gaming the system’ with the idea of Search Engine Optimisation becoming an industry unto itself over the period of the first dot-com boom.

 

A paradigm shift occurred over the last decade as we saw the prevalence and acceptance of the web move the idea of ‘purpose based’ communication tools to ‘platform’ communication tools. This is like the hybrid of the blog with the bulletin board – this idea of a generic platform started hitting critical mass with MySpace and then Facebook. At the same time as this person to person communication on the web came to the fore the idea of filtering content based on behaviour was also emerging as a powerful trend with the super retailers like eBay and amazon.

 

So today we find an interesting predicament – because we have moved to ‘platform’ rather than ‘purpose’ – the platforms have boomed, yet-  it has created a kind of ‘context monopoly’ where there can only be a single incumbent for the platform to be attractive. The alternative is to re-introduce purpose and marginalise an element of your audience (example in point: MySpace vs Facebook where MySpace has had to focus on its relationship to music in order to attract a following)

 

Similar outcomes afoot in the space of mobile – in the era of ‘the wild west’ the operators desperately tried to introduce and control a  ’walled garden’ operator driven experience as soon as the internet was becoming available for GPRS and the first generation of 3G handsets. This was rejected by users as the operators simply could not provide the content, experiences or connectedness that consumers were demanding – the web and email was a miserable experience on these devices, but it was there – and this was a point in time when RIM was a shining light and the Blackberry revolutionised the experience.

 

Then in 2007, the doors were blown off when Apple released the iPhone. Operators were supplanted by an operating system that facilitated the growth of the mobile web as we see it today. Within 24 months  Google’s Android simply added another nail in the coffin for operators making their ‘value added services’ pointless and turning their network in to a commodity. This ‘operating system’ model on the mobile devices leveraged the learning of the ‘wild west’ web of years previous and added the tools to provide a simple experience for users through ‘app store’  and ‘itunes’ – and thus another set of privatised platforms was built on top of the commodity of the mobile internet.

 

Where are we now?

What we see is a desire to simplify the experience. To not have to think about the details. Packaging up the experience in a digestible form is precisely why this prevalence of ‘context monopolies’ thrive. It’s actually a function of human nature – the more people use technology, the less they care about the technology and more about the objective.

 

Because of the inherent lack of ubiquity bound up with the ‘wild west’ web and mobile experiences, this generation of proprietary ‘platforms’ answer the people’s craving for consistency, reliability and simplicity. A set of common denominators that we all know. That are easy to learn and come with implied trust and an ‘understood’ set of artificial indicators. All of the platforms I have described in this article share these same attributes.

 

The byproduct of these privatised platforms having lots of users is that they are compelled to monetize these platforms as commercial entities. The other is that they will generally want to open them up to continue to grow and evolve the platforms with a developer community and . With these platforms comes arbitrary rule sets. Rules for users, third party developers and advertisers on how they can interact with the platform. This in turn can have unforeseen flow on effects and affect other users, developers or advertisers. Sometimes for better and sometimes for worse.

 

This is not a new problem,  the rules of taxation have had this effect for time eternal… The fine line between evasion and avoidance follows a similar guise as ‘gaming’ a platform versus ‘exploiting’ it. Marketers, developers and advertisers are painfully aware that they need to move with the flow of the platform and it’s developers to stay on the cutting edge of that platforms capabilities – not for the sake of technology but to know how best to execute real strategies on these platforms within the rules and regulations.

 

Some examples highlighting the kinds of arbitrary rules and the impact that changes to those rules have to developers and advertisers.

 

Apple

http://toucharcade.com/2011/04/18/has-apple-adjusted-the-app-store-charting-algorithms/

http://toucharcade.com/2011/04/19/apple-throws-down-the-gauntlet/

 

Facebook

http://www.insidefacebook.com/2011/04/19/facebook-makes-badoo-change-its-viral-mechanics-leading-to-a-75-drop-in-dau/

http://www.insidefacebook.com/2011/04/20/ad-ly-removed-monetizing-news-feed/

 

Twitter

http://thenextweb.com/twitter/2011/03/11/twitter-tells-developers-to-stop-developing-new-twitter-clients/

 

Google

http://www.smartcompany.com.au/internet/20110228-google-changes-search-algorithm-to-block-content-farms-promises-higher-quality-results.html

 

 

Some great reading from the last few weeks:

 

Share Buttons on Third-Party Sites and Facebook Now Provide Micro-Sharing Options

http://www.insidefacebook.com/2011/05/09/share-buttons-micro-sharing-groups-wall/

 

Facebook Partners with Web of Trust to Protect Users From Malicious Outbound Links

http://www.insidefacebook.com/2011/05/12/web-of-trust/

 

Facebook Sponsored Stories Ads Have 46% Higher CTR, 18% Lower Cost Per Fan Says TBG Digital Test

http://www.insidefacebook.com/2011/05/03/sponsored-stories-ctr-cost-per-fa/

 

Facebook Launches Three New Sponsored Stories Types for Pages, Apps, and Websites

http://www.insidefacebook.com/2011/04/26/sponsored-stories-pages-apps-websites

 

Facebook Canvas Apps vs Facebook Connect for Websites: A Quick Guide to What’s Best for You

http://www.insidefacebook.com/2011/04/22/canvas-connect-websites-best/

 

AdMob Survey Shows What the iPad is Good For

http://gigaom.com/apple/admob-survey-shows-what-the-ipad-is-good-for/

 

Snoozing And Losing: A Blockbuster Failure

http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/06/make-it-a-blockbuster-night

 

 

 

Some links to recent campaigns we have launched

 

Infamous 2 launch app

http://www.facebook.com/PlayStationAU?sk=app_197545966947399

 

Sony Playstation Escalation Pack (using Lite Engine) – designed by the team at Sony Playstation, and it looks fantastic!

http://www.facebook.com/PlayStationAU?sk=app_181234068597471

 

Gillette Champions – just because your a local team doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be treated like professionals…

http://www.facebook.com/GilletteAustralia?sk=app_131282930276526

 

Intel Win an Island

http://www.facebook.com/IntelSG?sk=app_207152969312540

a truly integrated Facebook and mobile campaign – also available on iPhone/Android at http://m.intel-island.com

available in multiple languages across APAC

 

ARU Qantas Wallabies – Rugby Rewards

http://www.facebook.com/Wallabies?sk=app_219950488023951

 

Hong Kong Tourism

http://www.facebook.com/HongKongTourismAustralia?sk=app_165523130173396

 

American Tourister for South East Asia

http://www.facebook.com/theamericantourist?sk=app_199003023471699

Filed under: Industry Opinion, pixolut

March 25, 2011 • 2:39 pm 0

Facebook Platform Updates Q&A for iFrame Tabs

After a few conversations recently I thought it may be a good idea to post this little snip from the Facebook team and point out a few true/false kind of comments that we have seen lately.

New policies for custom apps on Pages
Two new policies for custom apps have been added to the Facebook Platform Policies. To summarize the changes: apps on Pages cannot auto-play without people interacting with the app, and users must grant explicit permission for you to use analytics beyond those of your individual Page in order to customize their experience. See sections 1.7.a and 1.7.b for the full language of the new policies.

Question: “So we can now auto play YouTube videos on our tab!”
Answer: Technically you can – but it is against the Facebook Platform Policies. This also means, auto running Javascript etc. I would expect that this is going to be difficult to police, however there will invariably be some kinds of monitoring solution from the Facebook developers on its way.

Question: “Can we add page tracking to tabs?”
Answer: Hmm…actually, it would seem yes – as long as you don’t alter the experience for the end user based on the tracking. This would mean that you should be able to start using DoubleClick, Google Analytics and other tracking tags in your iFrames that appear on tabs without any problem. I am currently seeking clarification on this point with the Facebook folks in the US, however at present it would seem that 3rd party tracking is fine as long as it does not affect the user experience in any way.

Question: “Can we use our website functionality in the tab and detect our own customers?”
Answer: Not until the user has provided permissions to the application. If you are altering the experience for a user based on Cookies in the domain of the iFrame itself like this (ie: knowing if the user was YOUR customer from YOUR website) then it is against the FBPP’s

Question: “So, we are not allowed to fan gate content anymore since there is no FBML?”
Answer: Hell no! You can – but the way it is done is completely different. With the removal of the FBML tabs, there is now changes to the way iFrames work. Canvas and Tab iFrames are now very similar and use a common ‘POST’ mechanism to deliver context to the iFrame application. This means that your developers need to understand the new mechanism to fan gate the content. And, NO, it does not require permissions now to fan gate content either!

Filed under: Facebook, Industry Opinion, pixolut

March 23, 2011 • 11:39 pm 0

Weekly Update: Artificial Indicators and Social Relevance

On Artificial Indicators and Social Relevance

My sister and her family live in Tokyo. Last week was scary – and to be honest it still is with all of the after effects of this disaster. Thankfully, she is safe. She is still coming to terms with the impact – the enormity of the situation. She is not the only one. Many people around the globe are looking for ways to ‘get it’ – to try and comprehend the magnitude of this disaster. Not long after this grave event, the New York Times posted a page that let people see the before and after of satellite views depicting different areas affected by the quake or the subsequent tsunami: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/03/13/world/asia/satellite-photos-japan-before-and-after-tsunami.html – I used this tool and started to comprehend a few things about the dire situation this part of the country is now in.

These tools for ‘visualisation’ are becoming the norm – ways of seeing the world of data around us that we cannot otherwise comprehend. It might sound strange, but it seems that in a way we have become obsolete. Our minds are fed the complexity and enormity of world events, technology, huge numbers of people’s points of view – yet we are not capable of processing it. Information overload is the catch cry of the new millennium – and it’s true. We have created an ecosystem of media and information platforms we are not naturally capable of comprehending.

The problem with this is that we lose track. We rely heavily on artificial indicators to help us find our way around this unrelenting tide of information that is simply beyond our comprehension.

Take the example of Angry Birds in the App Store… It became a self fulfilling prophecy – it was very popular, because it was a great game – however – because it came early to the app store and the App Store’s minimal number of artificial indicators (Most Popular) created a ‘feedback cycle’ that propelled it to stratospheric heights. Bob Warfield has nailed it several times with his article here:

http://smoothspan.wordpress.com/2011/03/09/efficient-marketing-means-doing-something-different/

Now – if you took a moment to digress and read Bob’s article, you will start to understand where I am going with this:

If you don’t fall in to a category on the platform you have chosen to market on – You Are Lost.

As an advertiser then, there must be a few ways to deal with this issue of being Lost:

1. Game the system – timing to market and optimisation on the system itself – be it Twitter followers, Google page rank, Facebook Likes.

2. Increased relevance – stand out as a beacon in the tide of noise with clarity and depth. Relevant, meaningful content can never be ignored as a robust tool.

3. On-platform optimised and targeted media – this is a form of ‘artificial indicator’ that the platform provides to target your message directly.

When all three are used in synergy – something special happens! You start to get found – and the more you get found, the more you get found – simply due to the nature of the feedback loop style of artificial indicators. Look at Page Rank, Edge Rank, Popularity, Followers, Likes – all of these are artificial indicators we rely on to guide our decisions en-masse when using our digital platforms of choice.

Anyway, I hope you subscribe to Bob’s blog – absolutely worth reading regularly.

In other news since our last update… well – feels like the whole universe has changed since the introduction of iFrames on tabs.

An interesting article from the Facebook Developer Blog on using OpenGraph to find what movies your friends like

http://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/481

A great eBook for non-profits is available here called “The Goodness Engine” for some ideas around digital strategy with NFPs

http://www.deepfocus.net/hackathon/#ebook

“In an experiment, 41% of Facebook users were willing to divulge highly personal information to a complete stranger. This according to IT security firm Sophos, which invited 200 randomly selected Facebookers to befriend a bogus Facebook user named ‘Freddi Staur’ (an anagram of ‘ID Fraudster’). Of those queried, 87 responded to the invitation, among them 82 people whose profiles included personal information such as their email address, date of birth, address or phone number.”

http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20070814/facebook-privacy/

Finally, a GREAT piece on the emerging landscape of social commerce

http://www.simplyzesty.com/brands/emerging-trends-in-social-commerce

Filed under: Facebook, Industry Opinion, pixolut

March 4, 2011 • 1:35 pm 0

Week in Review

Short one from last week – sorry for late posting to the blog… This week we have seen another uptick in demand for mobile solutions to complement social applications and I can only expect this trend to continue throughout the year so we see that the social experience becomes less about using a single platform and more about engaging with brands across your day-to-day technology touch points.

 

 

Some things to think about with this idea in mind are:

* What are the perceived subtleties of different modes of communication? SMS, MMS, Email, App, Ad Units, Microsites etc.

* How do these subtleties affect perception of the message?

* How are different groups of people going to perceive those subtleties based on age, gender and culture?

* How do we bring different modes of communication together to create a cohesive experience for a person that makes a difference?

 

 

Big questions. Big challenges. No easy answers…

News in Brief:

Kotagent introduce a realtime app monitoring system. Interesting to see app monitoring become a stand alone service! This is a lead indicator to show that the app market – specifically social gaming – is vast and growing! (if you had not figured that out already!)
The new and improved social plugins – the power of the Like Button increases in the newsfeed. If you had not started optimising your sites to be social before – you definitely should be now! Like buttons on your websites now publish full feeds!
These guys just never pull punches. I love reading what these guys do! Absolutely worthwhile reading! Strand Consulting report on the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

http://www.strandreports.com/sw4395.asp

Also some youtube links to the keynotes from MWC:
HTC channel with 15 part (!) coverage of the HTC keynote
Stephen Elop from Nokia
Masayoshi Son from Softbank in Japan
Danny Chu and Masayoshi Son
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJSMNuK-qBc 

Mardi-Gras Sponsorship Update
Finally, Pixolüt launched the Mardi-Gras donation app today – this is a great tool for non-profits wanting to drive donations. The Mardi-Gras donation app simply has a link to a PayPal donation page on a sweepstake entry form. Simple mechanism but effective outcome. And a two day turnaround from getting the brief!
The Mardi Gras event will be held tomorrow night with coverage on Fox and non-exclusive highlight coverage on commercial channels. It has been a pleasure working with the NMG team and we wish them a hugely successful event.

Filed under: pixolut

February 25, 2011 • 9:26 am 1

Week In Review: New tools for Brands sharing on Facebook

Wow, it’s been another week already! Well, here is the weekly update from the peeps here at Pixolüt -

NEW TOOLS FOR BRANDS SHARING ON FACEBOOK

The Facebook Developer Blog has posted some great information this week on ways to better and more effectively communicate with your audience using Facebook platform.
In summary, you can publish updates to people who like your pages that have social pliug-ins on them just like you can with a Facebook Brand Page. 

There are two ways to get to the publishing interface:

 

 

 

  • From your Web page, click Admin Page next to the Like button.
  • From Facebook, click “Use Facebook as a Page” under the Account tab or click here.

 

The best news is that apps can now publish on your behalf to all of the ‘pages’ you manage – this means that if you have inventory on your website and each item has a ‘Like’ button next to it, you can communicate with your fans based on your own database segmentation.

For example:

You have a website that sells hundreds of shoes – and you have made them ‘social’ so each shoe has a like button on it.

Now, even though you have hundreds of shoes – there are basically two kinds of shoe you sell – basketball shoes and running shoes.

You want to tell people that like basketball shoes that there is a new Adidas boot that will blow their minds… so you can use a special kind of Facebook App that understands the categorisation of the inventory of your store to send a Facebook Wall Post to all the people that LIKE your basketball shoes, but not to those that LIKE running shoes!

There are many other clever ways you can harness this new crossover between ‘social plug-ins’, ‘Brand Pages’ and Apps. Talk to us to find out more.



From Barcelona: OPEN NETWORK ENABLER API (OneAPI)

Strand Consulting in the Netherlands have released a new report on the OneAPI

I recommend watching the video on the following page to understand more about what this means for mobile app developers.

In summary, this initiative is going to light a rocket under all mobility solutions like the app store did for Apple. Realistically, it will take all mobile solutions to a new level – not just one manufacturer or telco. It is designed to unlock a lot of the ‘operator and network’ that were the domain of telcos for the last 20 years.

It brings the ability to do what used to be only the domain of ‘carrier’ applications on phones locked to a specific network to all developers. And the best thing is that the ‘developer’ does not need to worry what device they are targeting – since the API is built completely around web services – so essentially, any web or web-enabled application can harness the capabilities of this new solution.

Some of the services that are worth getting excited about with this API are:
  • being able to check on the quality of network service
  • send and receive SMS and MMS messages
  • manage voice calls
  • payment processing through operator billing (see: App Store killer)
  • location based services.
There is currently a pilot of this platform running in Canada. Worth keeping an eye on.




UPDATES TO FACEBOOK MESSAGING
Facebook has been rolling out updates to platform messaging to provide a unified view of messages for all users.

SOME GREAT STATS

Some other interesting news from Inside Facebook weekly roundup thanks to some interesting stats from ChompOn.

Sharing on Facebook Most Lucrative for E-Commerce – ChompOn released data comparing Twitter and Facebook actions. Turns out Facebook Shares are worth more than Likes, which are worth more than tweets, which are worth more than follows on Twitter.

JAVASCRIPT PERFORMANCE

Great news for next generation browser-based game developers with new Javascript optimisation engines premiering in Chrome improving speed by 64%.

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9210299/Google_ups_speed_of_Chrome_10


HILARIOUS HACK FOR NERDS

Check out this guy’s license plate – absolutely hysterical if you understand some simple hacking skills.

http://bullshit.tumblr.com/post/3208223711/jacobjoaquin-r03-urban-sql-injection

Filed under: pixolut

January 26, 2011 • 10:38 am 1

Facebook focus on Mobile and what that means for Social App developers

By Joe Cincotta

San Francisco is hosting the 2011 Inside Social Apps conference and the CTO of Facebook, Bret Taylor sat down and spoke about what the year holds in store for the Facebook platform.

Inside Facebook have great in-depth coverage of the interview here

The key takeaway from the interview is that “Mobile is the primary focus for [the Facebook] platform this year.” – This means that the many disparate platforms that currently exist for using Facebook on PC browsers and mobile devices and browsers will start to be aligned in functionality and capabilities.

I have been saying that this would happen for the past year… The impact of this focus on mobile will see changes to the way mobile devices deliver the Facebook experience to allow the use of Facebook Social Apps on these devices as well as Newsfeed and Notification integration with Facebook apps.

“One way Facebook will be tackling the problem is HTML5, which will make it easier for engineers to quickly iterate and release features to a broad set of users without having to go through an approval process.”

The most interesting thing about this conversation with Taylor was his point about HTML5; it is becoming the de-facto standard for developing applications that ties together the next generation of computing platform (Tablets and Phones) with the last (Desktop).

As we have all seen the proliferation of ‘smart’ mobile devices in both phone and tablet form factors appear over the last 12 months – we find the common thread between them all is the web; more specifically Webkit and it’s support for the emerging HTML5 standards.

This common thread of HTML5 connecting all the desktop operating systems and the mobile operating systems (and form factors as well as input models like touch versus mouse) allows developers to move from writing code for completely different platforms to simply creating front-end variants of their code using one technology and one service delivery mechanism.

With regards to Facebook, my expectation is that this will mean changes to the way we make apps – possibly adding the idea of a “mobile canvas” on top of the current “tab” and “canvas” app contexts to allow Facebook to continue to control the environment developers work within.

Also, expect to see the Facebook advertising formats extend on to these new platforms – again, most likely to appear on the “mobile app canvas” space. Consider the fact that there is no advertising in any of the many Facebook mobile platforms at the moment – which means a huge lost revenue opportunity for Facebook every second they are not owning that space.

Filed under: Facebook, Industry Opinion, pixolut , , ,

January 2, 2011 • 6:17 pm 0

2010 in review

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

Healthy blog!

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads This blog is doing awesome!.

Crunchy numbers

Featured image

A helper monkey made this abstract painting, inspired by your stats.

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 3,500 times in 2010. That’s about 8 full 747s.

In 2010, there were 7 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 230 posts. There was 1 picture uploaded, taking a total of 4kb.

The busiest day of the year was August 30th with 56 views. The most popular post that day was About Joe Cincotta.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were theweb.dk, pixolut.com, forums.37signals.com, forum.37signals.com, and docs.cksource.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for joe cincotta, pixolut, basecamp agile, basecamp and agile, and jquery ajaxform example.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

1

About Joe Cincotta March 2007
1 comment

2

Getting Agile with BaseCamp August 2007
5 comments

3

jQuery AJAX form serialization example May 2009
1 comment

4

The difference between Vista 64 bit and 32 bit February 2007
5 comments

5

Kick Assembler October 2006
2 comments

Filed under: pixolut

December 25, 2010 • 7:09 am 0

Its been a long time…

Well. It’s Christmas. I had a look and it has been six months since anything got put in this blog.

Why?

Well – a few reasons.

I think Facebook has displaced a lot of what used to go in to a blog like this – the day to day commentary. For that Facebook is a more intuitive platform because it has the social graph associated with it.

The bigger thinking, articles and updates have stopped for a different reason; I stopped programming. I miss it and I still work with my development team every day – but really, now that Pixolüt is the size it is, I just can’t.

Every minute of the day counts when it comes to running a growing business and sharing the big ideas or thoughts from the days discoveries with the universe is the last thing on my mind.

So why keep the blog?

It’s time to hand the blog over to the guys at Pixolüt to continue the tradition. I think that as we share some of our thinking and projects together then this blog will see a lot more action and be a lot more use to the guys that used to read it again!

So, Merry Christmas… enjoy the break.

Filed under: pearls of wisdom, pixolut

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