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Riccardo La Rosa

Posts written by Riccardo La Rosa

May 2

How much are widgets worth?

A couple weeks ago I went to a MITX event called “Building Social Applications & Widgets for Top Platforms”. The panelists have real life experience building widgets (gadgets, badge, snippet, etc) for social networks.

Matthew Adkisson, co-founder of FreeCause.com talked a bit about building the Pink Ribbon application for Facebook. It’s a great success story, they were able to have 3M users in the first 2 months and it grew further after that. Most importantly there were able to raise money for a good cause: a rare example of widget monetization. Interestingly he said that the Facebook crowd will contribute to causes like this but they will NEVER use their credit card. They would rather donate using affiliate programs.

But not all Facebook applications are that successful. There are very few success stories on Facebook actually, but the idea of being able to reach millions of young (and a bit older) consumers is a marketer’s dream.

Some of the other panelists shared (more…)

posted to: Digital Marketing, Industry Trends, Technology, Web 2.0 & Social Media | No Comments »

April 28

SEO made simple

by Riccardo La Rosa

Whenever we talk to clients and prospects the topic of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) always comes up. This is great because it means that people are thinking about SEO and it’s not an after thought anymore. The reality though is that it means different things to different people (i.e.: a marketer vs a developer).

Here is an easy break down of how I think about SEO:

content: no matter what you promote on your site, shoes, articles, mortages, etc., does you content use the right keywords for its audience? does it have the right industry keywords? If you are selling table, does it explain what is good and interesting about your table and not just the dimensions?
how to reach your content: this is where your developers worry about building a page that is accessible to search engines, so the product name is in the title tag, you have appropriate description and keywords in the meta tag, if you are using flash, you provide an alternate content to the search engine, your urls look more humanly readable and don’t contain just random numbers, etc.
SEM (Search Engine Marketing): some people just want to buy Google/Yahoo/MSN/etc keywords, so they don’t worry about organic search, all they care is paid search.

There is a whole industry developed (more…)

posted to: Digital Marketing, Industry Trends, Technology | 1 Comment »

March 21

A million dollar question: which RIA technology do we recommend?

by Riccardo La Rosa

It could be at the end of one of our presentations at a conference, or in the middle of an RFP from a prospect or at the beginning of an email from an analyst, but the question is always the same: “Which RIA technology do we recommend?”.

Don’t worry we have an answer, actually a million dollar answer.

money

This reminds me of course of a similar question that the same people asked 10 years ago: “Should I use Java or Microsoft technology?”. And of course every developer, architect, project manager, CIO had the right answer and could probably list 5 reasons why Java or MS was better than the other. Of course there were also a few souls that would evangelize the idea of building their enterprise on PERL but we haven’t heard from them in a while.

So the RIA question came up this past week again and a few brave souls at Molecular decided to put ink on paper and let the riot begin. Here is a summary of what they had to say [barely edited]:

Flash/Flex tends to run more consistently when your users are on multiple platforms
Flash is superior for smooth animations and transitions that involve more than just a few elements on the screen
With Flash you get a lot more freedom to use odd shapes as clickable/interactive objects. Need an amoeba shaped button that is not clickable outside the confines of the general rectangle? You’re going to need flash for that one…
Flash can be annoying for managing text, since its fixed-size elements often force designers to create scrolling regions of text within pages where normally the region would simply expand to accommodate however much text there is. Not sure if that made sense, but it drives me crazy.
You may wish to use Flash to _present_ navigation links, but do not use it to IMPLEMENT navigation – you are opening the door to SEO hell / dual-site maintenance.
AJAX is best suited for applications where page content needs to be updated dynamically with simple animations
Do NOT use flash to handle things that can be done perfectly well with traditional technologies – such as the footer links. I don’t care what they say about font kerning, it’s all BS that you will pay for with cost and time overruns.
Flash/Flex are the sole choice in situations involving multimedia, video and audio
in reply to the one above: Absolutely not. See: the site we just launched for E&Y or the new YouTube API. You most certainly can do solid video integration with a simple embedded player (if they’re using FLV, like they should) that exposes methods with ExternalInterface. That goes both ways: your player can trigger JavaScript and vice versa.
if you want to have a page be updatable by a server without user interaction (remember “push” technology?), you may want to use flash for this
in reply to the one above: This is possible without flash by using a technology stack many call Comet (just another soap brand, eh? :). Meebo and Mibbit (not related, surprisingly) have excellent implementations of this. Though– I’ll concede that it’s likely much easier to develop in Flash.
Running multivariate testing could be easier with ajax, unless you were testing swf vs swf.
Web analytics seems to be generally equal, flash apps typically reach out using ExternalInterface.

One more that I’d like to add:

3D animations: Flash Papervisio3D

Finally, as consultants we don’t always get to make the ~~right~~ final decision, sometimes we are handed the technology and we are told: go build it. It may not always be our preferred choice, but …we’ll try.

Disclaimers:

I used the word Ajax loosely, in certain cases I should have said dhtml, but you get the point
We didn’t consider other RIA technologies like Java applets (!), laszlo, you-name-it, because that’s not what we use, but if you do, let us know

posted to: Industry Trends, Molecular News, Technology, Web 2.0 & Social Media | 3 Comments »

October 4

Wish List for 2008

by Riccardo La Rosa

We just started the last quarter of the year and I’ve been thinking about what I’d like to see in 2008. My criteria are simple, I only have one: spend less time in front of a computer. So here we go:

Give me one network of friends and let me manage it. I don’t want to spend days recreating all my linkedin connections on facebook (and viceversa). I just want the <add_your_favorite_social_network> to tell me “Hey Riccardo, you have 25 friends on this network, do you want to connect with them?”. And when I come back a week later “Hey Riccardo, 3 friends of yours have joined this network since you last visited, do you want to connect with them?”. 2007 has been the year of Facebook but I don’t particularly care nor want to put all my information on FB. I want to do my movie reviews on Netflix, I want to update my professional profile on linkedin and talk about my motorcycle trips on AdventureRider. A few people are putting some thoughts on this social graph, and I’m really looking forward to see Google enter this race. While we are at it, please also consider instant messaging as just another node of this graph and enable me to email my IM connections, after all we live in a connected world don’t we?
Google, show me my search! Yes, I use google to search for anything on the web and I’m usually pretty happy (Feeling lucky anybody?) with the search results. But when I search for “serialization of generics in c#” and the search result page is a pretty long page of text it would be wonderful if the words I searched for would be highlighted. Pretty simple. And I don’t have to read the whole page to just find the information I need.
Cell phone carriers, open your networks. Dear cell phone carriers (ATT, Verizon, T-Mobile, etc.), it’s time to listen to your customers and stop overwhelming them with plans that don’t make any sense. We want to be connected and use our mobile phones to connect to the internet (if we so choose) but you are scaring us with all these data plan overcharges. We want just one flat fee, no matter where we are, or when, just one.
Apple, I want a 16GB iPod nano. I’ve been waiting 2 years hoping that you would upgrade your 8GB nano to a 16GB nano. All I got was the same 8GB nano where I can watch videos… No I am not going to watch a video on a nano, (nice try … but useless) I just want to listen to all my music and 8GB are not enough. Finally since we are talking about Apple, should I even mention the ability to write applications for the iPhone? uhmm… that’s dreaming!

What’s in your wish list?

posted to: Industry Trends, Web 2.0 & Social Media | 1 Comment »

September 10

Is Facebook really web 3.0?

by Riccardo La Rosa

One of the most interesting events of this year has been the explosion of registered users with Facebook after they opened their site beyond schools and universities. Most importantly we have seen a lot of young (and not so young) professionals flooding the pages of Facebook at the expense of other social networking sites like Linkedin.
Could it be a coincidence that my Linkedin connections dropped dramatically in the last 6 months whereas my Facebook friend requests went through the roof? Probably, but I believe there is something interesting to all this.

First, networking is important, especial for professionals, and should be fun too. Linkedin only goes so far. I can update my profile on Linkedin every time I get a promotion or change job but that doesn’t happen everyday (or multiple times a day).
Facebook instead tells all my “friends” every time I change my status, add a new friend or interact with an application (more on applications later). This feature, also known as News feed is what made a few people mad at the beginning (they just didn’t like that their friends knew how they were spending time on Facebook) but also created a lot of returning users, multiple times a day. It’s a bit like web mail, we go back multiple times a day to see what is up with our friends.

Interestingly enough we now know a lot more about our “friends”, we not only know where they work but we also know that they are “having lunch with analysts”, “bracing themselves for a crazy week”, “en route to civilization”, “loving Randy Moss”, “curiously fulfilled by a weekend of making flatpack furniture”. Facebook really adds a new dimension to our friends universe and it’s what I call the “everyday dimension”. A lot of my Facebook friends are people that I met through my job and that I don’t usually spend a lot of time with outside work. But through Facebook I can see what their mood is and what they like every day, I can get to know them better without necessarily spending time socializing with them directly. It’s more like socialization without interaction.

I never really understood (and liked) MySpace because every page I visited looked completely different from the previous one and things didn’t make sense. I couldn’t understand if “Chicken Little” was the name of a person, a pet, a band, a group… It’s the name of a girl in Nevada in case you are wondering.

The big debate going on today is if Facebook is better than MySpace or not. I don’t care, I know that I won’t be hanging out in MySpace and probably most of the people that I want to network with are not either (and if they are I’d rather not know). In Facebook people use their own identity for the most part and that’s a big step forward in creating a more real relationship.

Another important event for Facebook this year was opening their platform for other developers to build applications on top of it. There are a few success stories out there of web sites that didn’t really have a lot of traffic and after they decided to offer a Facebook applications they saw their traffic skyrocket. A lot of digital companies have their Facebook app, you can find the usual suspects like Amazon, Flickr, Digg, Del.icio.us and many more followed by a lot of simple (and sometimes silly) apps built in a day buy a PHP developer mostly for fun.
The idea of providing open APIs for developers to do this is very cool, the execution has a lot of room for improvements. A lot of time I try to use some of the applications that are installed and the only thing I get back is an error.

The state of where we are with social network sites reminds of what we had many years ago with instant messaging. We used the one where most of our friends were. Some of us started with AOL and then moved to MSN and Yahoo!. Finally Trillian came along and we didn’t have to worry about which IM client to use anymore. Soon somebody (please Google?) will come up with a nice way to integrate all these social networks and we will all sleep better once again.

Not all is great in Facebook today but for people in the industry like us is definitely a good start. As stated buy Scoble:

Because there isn’t anything better. It’s like why we are so gaga over the iPhone. The iPhone is locked up tight and doesn’t let us play. But it is so superior to the alternatives that we’ll put up with all the walls. I’ve seen this play out before, though. Remember in 1989? Apple had the Macintosh II and was way ahead of any other platform. They ended up with, what, five percent market share because a more open platform steamrolled over them.

posted to: Industry Trends, Molecular News, Web 2.0 & Social Media | 2 Comments »