Thomas Koeppen Blog » 2008 » January

social web sites don’t meet performance

thomas — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 19:24:43 +0000

You know the 404 from flickr, the 500er from MySpace, the search errors or delays from facebook, the timeouts from twitter and so on …

We all note the often poorly developed and slow web applications of social webites.

Now it is official:

WatchMouse research shows Facebook performance poorest of all

* Social Networking Sites Slow and Inaccessible

Popular social networking sites are frustrating users, according to WatchMouse â€“ by making them wait. Research from the leading website monitoring company has shown that Web 2.0 sites often lag behind other commercial sites in performance – they are often slow to open or fail to load properly. WatchMouse monitored the time it took the social networking sites listed on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_websites), to load.

Other well-known culprits included Twitter, last.fm, Windows Live Spaces, Friendster and del.icio.us. Of the 104 sites monitored, nearly half – 51 earned a Site Performance Index (SPI) of 1000 or more, which indicates very slow load time. This was an unexpected outcome, considering most of these sites rely heavily on Ajax, which generally delivers quicker load times because the dynamics of the site do not load immediately. While first generation websites generally required a webpage to fully load each time a user clicked, the use of Ajax helps websites improve interactivity, speed, functionality and usability by instead exchanging small amounts of data with the server upon user action.

What can we learn from this ?

Performance requirements and response times < 1 second does not give you business success automatically.

Website success is today most driven by user acceptance, not by simple technological facts.

see also:

http://www.watchmouse.com/en/SPI/2008/performance_social_networking_sites.php

A Social Media Marketing Playbook

thomas — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 22:09:47 +0000

During my holiday additionally to my other readings and stumbling through the web bought and just finished reading

‘Getting to First Base, A Social Media Marketing Playbook’ by Darren Barefoot and Julie Szabo.
Watched nearly zero TV during my vacation, so was enough time juggling through the web and reading this book.

It is a view on next steps in online and social networking. Often this is called as hype, but the book give a great social media summary with some fantastic conservative views combined with proven industry experience of the authors.

Learning to speak their dialect, and how to communicate with them respectfully and honestly, is a big part of social media marketing and great demonstrated in this book.

Just an example to begin responding to blog posts:

1. Get the right person in your company to respond. In most cases, marketing folks are the worst commenters and bloggers. Sorry, that means you. We’re trained in the art of spin, and it’s hard to break old habits. The blogosphere values authenticity, so it’s wise to match the right blog post with the right person inside the company. For example, say you find a blog post written by a software professional criticizing a particular feature of your product.
Ideally, a product manager or senior developer should respond.

2. Always identify yourself. Don’t pretend you’re a happy customer who just loves the feature getting panned online.

3. Exercise good manners. Your reply should be professional, friendly and courteous, just like any staff-customer interaction.

It was a wonderful reading, If you don’t want losing the train, it’s worth to get this book:

http://www.socialmediaready.com/

â€“

Posted by The Thomas Koeppen Blog 2008.

Simplicity

thomas — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 22:09:18 +0000

Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.

Confucius

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

Leonardo da Vinci

And back to business – a simple method of simplifying:

Collect – Choose – Eliminate – Organize.

â€“-
Posted by The Thomas Koeppen Blog 2008.

Seth Godin – Sliced bread and other marketing delights

thomas — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 11:14:04 +0000

In a world of too many options and too little time, our obvious choice is to ignore the ordinary stuff. Marketing guru Seth Godin spells out why, when it comes getting our attention, bad or bizarre ideas are more successful than boring ones. And early adopters, not the mainstream’s bell curve, are the new sweet spot of the market.

Feb. 2003 – Monterey California – and it’s real today:

http://www.futureofrealestatemarketing.com/
http://www.damniwish.com/ (Unusually useful ideas for smart marketers)
http://www.sethgodin.com/

Posted by The Thomas Koeppen Blog, 2007.

Social Media Report – Online Video at Risk of Private Censorship

thomas — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 13:33:53 +0000

The Center for Social Media at American University recently released a report on fair use and internet media titled: Recut, Reframe, Recycle.

The co-authors, Professors Pat Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi, shows that many uses of copyrighted material in today’s online videos are eligible for fair use consideration.

The study points to a wide variety of practicesâ€”satire, parody, negative and positive commentary, discussion-triggers, illustration, diaries, archiving and of course, pastiche or collage (remixes and mashups)â€”all of which could be legal in some circumstances.

The report looks at a variety of examples of online media that are all eligible for fair use, which is the section of US copyright law that allows creators to freely use copyrighted work, under specific circumstances. While the authors note copyright as a generally positive thing for creators, they fear automated copyright protection is a threat to legal (fair) uses of these materials.

Published by The Thomas Koeppen Blog 2008.

Open Social for your executives by Jeremiah Owyang

thomas — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 13:33:26 +0000

Jeremiah Owyang (a web strategist, one of the leading experts on social media) explains Open Social for executives:

Using mini-applications, companies can now efficiently extend their website experience to existing communities on popular social networks

In parallel it is worth reading a ebook by Daren Barefoot and Julie Szabo:

“Become a Social Media Marketing Maestro”

Published by The Thomas Koeppen Blog 2008.

Miro 1.0 – Turn your computer into an internet TV.

thomas — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 13:32:09 +0000

Miro is a great application to watch free internet video channels and play any video file.
The greates news is, that miro runs nearly without issues under Linux (tested with Ubuntu).

Compare Miro vs. Joost

	Miro	Joost
VIEWER ACCESS	Access to any publisher with video RSS feeds, including anyone on YouTube, Revver, Blip, and many, many more.	Access only to Joost-distributed content.
CREATOR ACCESS	Open to any creator or publisher via RSS, direct download, or free hosting.	Must be selected by Joost, must sign contract.
DRM	No DRM.	All content has DRM.
SEARCH	Search YouTube, Daily Motion, Blip.tv, Google Video, and other major video hosts.	Only search Joost content.
PRIVACY	No tracking of what is downloaded or watched.	All users are required to register and sign in. Every video a user watches is tracked and recorded.
VIDEO QUALITY	Hundreds of channels in HD.	No HD available. Streaming video resolution only.
TECHNOLOGY SOURCE CODE	Free, open-source (GPL).	Uses open-source code, but does not open its own code.
CONTENT DELIVERY	Open standards: RSS, HTML, BitTorrent.	Proprietary system.
PEER-TO-PEER	Open-source BitTorrent protocol.	Proprietary protocol.

From the LeWeb3 2007 – Internet pollution and how to stop it

thomas — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 12:54:00 +0000

Wow, great videos from the leweb3 December 2007…

Some thoughts about affiliate spam and Murphy’s law:

How can you help?

Consider building curation into your service
Police your service
Reduce anonymity without reducing
Punish bad people

Example in Social Networks:

Myspace: many fake people
Facebook: less fake people
LinkedIn: no fake people

Maintain the core principles we founded the internet on:

free access
free information
and a level playing field …

… while taking responsibility for the pollution of the systems we create…

Watch more: