Ways of interaction: locomotion, conversation and manipulation
Meaningful shouting – make messages stand out where they make sense.
Might be cheap to get a web app done and hosted, but marketing it to a point where you want to succeed isn’t.
yahoo in-context step by step guide – nice!
Make the ‘unpacking experience’ great. Don’t wack them with a form before they can even do anything. Let them become part of the expereince right away. Jump cut was given as a good example.
Incontext editing = good.
Bill scott has compiled a lot of interaction methods
Sites are going away from highly hierarchal to ‘content objects’.
It’s a ‘search world’ – high % of people get to content via a search engine
chicago tribune = lots of site overhead – new york times = concentrates on the content
Renkoo.com – invite system – Strong ‘call to action’ when you recieve an invite
Building Awesome Web Sites & Services Using the Power of Happy Users – Ted Rheingold, Stewart Butterfield, Joshua Schachter, Biz Stone http://cal.web2expo.com/talk/view/83
Areas your customers/users/fans can input:
Quality assurance
design
Submitting content
Market research
Customer support
talent pool – you can hire from your ‘fans’
word of mouth
guardians – eg, speaking out in public places where you might have some trolls or upset people.
Other notes:
If you have an API, that is the best way to get external help
Fans help a company/service not to increase your company value, but for the social aspect of recognition for their contributions. “if you help someone, it makes you feel better” – Stuart Butterfield
This kind of help is free due to these social aspects
Very risky to listen too much to people who really love a product. You will get really deep requests that take a lot to develop and miss fixing usability issues for new users. These deep features are likely to positively impact less people in the end.
del.icio.us do about 3 feature/bug releases a week
a common thing flickr hears is “i had a fucked up childhood, i don’t cope well with change, please change back!” – In relation to rolling out updates/new features.
Direct interaction with customers with the makers/founder of a product/service worked well for flickr – They would be activly looking and commenting on photos and generally welcoming users.
with webapps, it’s a constant battle of features VS performance (mostly scaling the servers/database).
over half of del.icio.us traffic is over RSS now
for hiring – try having them ‘consult for a month’ to see how it works out for both sides.
‘churn rate’ drops when a customer has more services from a company – (Me: ahhh, “churn reduction” – thats what they call making it annoying to get out of a service..)
The ‘mass market’ want a ‘trusted brand’ to guide them due to worries of security, no phone support, multi billing and complicated experience
Service providers commonly ask ‘want fries with that’ – figuratively
Service providers typically choose one partner per product category
Fulfillment of services is a big issue for adoption. if it’s hard to get something, people get unhappy and don’t buy/download/get. Has to almost be funneled to them. (Me: I’d then think, if it does have to be funneled, do they really want/need it?)
“Nice experience” preemptive message saying – “you look like you are having problems, contact us”(Me: you would run a fine line between helpful and clippy-hell)
Watched a great demo by Carlos from scrapblog as part of web2open. Slick web app!
Afterwards, I went and had dinner with some lovely aussies from Minti and Tangler, then off to the party plasq co-sponsored @ Varnish.
redirects – 301 – permanent redirect – full authority
- if content times out, 301 up a level or custom 404
85% of SEO is accessibility
amazing – some sites have multiple versions of a page. they watch how different versions of sites work on search engines – even have different pages for different search engines – ebay has a whole dif site.. 20mil+ pages cataloged.
PPC - Pills, Porn and Casinos
don’t use contextual option for google ads
yahoo search submit pro
domain park services with yahoo/google
‘competitive research’
h1 ?
generic phrases / keyword performance
googlebase
id= bad
don’t use file extensions.. ie, php
webguerrilla.com
webmasterradio.fm
touchgraph.com
SEO title tag?
this guy was in the audience – was partly their inspiration for their talk: stephanspencer.com/
Avi Bryant – Dabble DB – Loved what they did with auto removal of backgrounds of a logo to match a site background + pulling color themes to apply to the site where an image (usually logos) are place.
Update: Just after I posted this, Justin from justin.tv came over to where I was standing. Had a quick chat, showed him Skitch and took some photos. This is a shot of me taking a skitch of me on justin.tv:
People must be pitching stuff to this guy left right and center!
A Skitch beta tester, Kent Bye, has made an awesome video about the social aspect of the web and more specifically, vidcasting/video blogging. Check it out:
I found that Skitch can be easily used to spice up screencasts to great effect. It allowed me to quickly take a screenshot, and then seamlessly line up the photo over the web browser so that I could record the animated effects of circling, pointing to and highlighting various aspects on the webpage. I could also zoom into certain parts, and edit out the cruft to create slick animated effects. So you’ve saved me hours of animation and keyframe headaches with Skitch!
It’s so great when you create a tool and it gets used to create terrific work – even uses you didn’t even think of. This was also the case for Comic Life and I imagine, any software.
