Thursday, March 27, 2014
Friday, September 10, 2010
Google Instant: because they can
Google Instant has caused a wave of news this week, from people raving about the impact, to those that are worried it will change online marketing forever (for the worse) by further increasing the demand to be the top search result.
One aspect that struck me as very interesting is that this move significantly increases the number of search results Google will have to handle. Is this truely a feature to save people time, or is it also a push to leverage their size to create distance from the competition by doing something that isn’t feasible unless you have the engineering and server resources of Google?
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/09/google-instant-behind-scenes.html covers some of the work that went into the effort – handling about 7 times more search queries without having to have 7 times more infrastructure.
Competitors take heed: Google feels the pressure building and isn’t ready to give up any search share anytime soon. Competitors will need to let Google take the lead on this one and see if it will move the needle on search share before trying to follow suit as this will take a large investment and the value to users seems to be questionable.
For me Google Instant Search is irrelevant as 99% of the time I search from the Omnibar in Chrome or the search box in Firefox or IE, and until the feature comes to those search boxes I won’t see it unless I go looking for it.
Tuesday, September 07, 2010
Updated: Embeding Flash in Facebook Dialog box
Previously I wrote about embedding flash in a facebook dialog box. However the technique used doesn't work anymore - the fb:js-string tags aren't working reliably, and when they do their is some new "features" to the dialog box that is preventing my previous code from working in all browsers.
I've whipped up a new approach, and tested it in IE8, IE8 in Compatibility View, Chrome 6, and Firefox 3.6.6. This should work in other browsers as well, though its important to note that Facebook has announced that FBML is going away; at the end of this year no new FBML apps can be created.
This version starts with going back to the fb:dialog tag in FBML instead of using the FBJS new Dialog(). The most important part of using this is creating an id in the body of the dialog we can find via javascript once the dialog is open.
This is triggered by the typical clicktoshowdialog="mydialog" attribute on a link, however at the same time we also put a onclick event on the same link. This fires and we leverage javascript to find the placeholder in the dialog, create a swf object and inject it into the dialog, then back track and change the dialog title. Only one fb:dialog is used for however many dialogs you actually want.
Here's the code:Sunday, May 09, 2010
Embeding an iFrame in a Facebook Tab
The following example embeds an iframe in a facebook tab. This example will work in a StaticFBML tab, or in a custom application tab.
<style> #myFrame { width: 760px; height: 680px; border: none; } img { border: none; } </style> <div id="contentzone" > <a href="#" onclick="loadContent(); return false;"> <img src="http://url_of_item_to_click_on" alt="Click here to see the iframe"> </a><br> </div> <script language=" javascript"> var myiframevar = "<iframe id='myFrame' src='http://google.com'></iframe>"; function loadContent() { document.getElementById('contentzone'). setInnerXHTML(myiframevar); } </script>
A few things here that are not obvious:
- iframe width and height must be set via CSS, attributes on the iframe tag do not work
- formerly fb:js-string could be used (with some side effects) but it appears to no longer work (see this bug)
- getElementById does work, despite FB prefixing the id’s with the app identifier.
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
Facebook News - the follow up post
I posted a collection of links to a number of pieces that seemed worth reading yesterday. Here's is my analysis.
Facebook v. Twitter
Facebook Borrows Another Feature From Twitter: The Hovercard
Feature wise there is a lot of "borrowing" going on. But the primary reason for this is actual UI Richness and dealing with information density. Users are gaining sophistication and ease of use is critical for keeping users engaged. But how to accommodate lots of data without going for clutter? One answer is layering information via on screen pop ups and overlays, which apparently Facebook is going to be doing a lot more of.
Facebook to Twitter: Back Off, We Own People’s Interest
Facebook and Twitter are both trying to understand what their users are interested in and capitalizing on that information in the form of targeted advertising. Facebook is expanding capabilities and data richness around interests that people explicitly declare, taking advantage of existing profile data. Twitter is doing so via analysis of tweet and retweet activity. Twitter is a more technically advanced, algorithmic approach, while Facebook capitalizes on their size with more of a brute force method. In the end, advertisers win, more choices to advertise to highly specific audiences.
Community Pages:
In Big New Product Push, Facebook Set to Launch 6.5 Million New Community Pages
Facebook Launches Community Pages and Basis of Open Graph API
Facebook to Link Profiles and Pages
Community Pages lead to making facebook profiles more dynamic, and in someways is more Wikipedia like than anything else. Community pages pull in info from Wikipedia even! The additionally pull in status updates algorithmically matched to the page but don't feed into the news feed. This enriches experiences for users and gives Facebook great data, but opens up a lot more security considerations.
Security/Privacy
If You Link Your Facebook Profile Data to Pages, the You Make that Information Public by Default
Facebook Launches New Privacy Section That May Make Your Head Hurt
Privacy just got even harder. "Liking" and therefore contributing to community pages is public by default.
“Like”
Facebook’s New Like Button Will Power A Behavioral Ad Network
Facebook’s “Become A Fan” Officially Switches to “Like”
Facebook’s New “Like” Button and The Anonymized “Like” Stream
A transition marketers are going to have to help manage: users now will "Like" brands instead of "Become a Fan". "Like" is not like the share functionality of "Like" on someone's status update. (Confusing)
The assumption is clearly that the new behavioral data being collected is going to lead new advertizing capabilities, but that isn't being announced at this time.
Ads
AdParlor Introduces Facebook Ads API Service for CPI Advertisers
New product offering from existing facebook advertising service provider. Using Facebook Ads API, AdParolor's product is an optimization engine that adjusts bids across ads to bring in higher quality results at lower rates that other options. Not a self serve product.
Monday, April 19, 2010
Facebook News
Lots of news on the Facebook front today. Here’s a round up of the articles I’m still going through, I’ll be posting a summary tomorrow.
Facebook v. Twitter
Facebook Borrows Another Feature From Twitter: The Hovercard
Facebook to Twitter: Back Off, We Own People’s Interest
Community Pages:
In Big New Product Push, Facebook Set to Launch 6.5 Million New Community Pages
Facebook Launches Community Pages and Basis of Open Graph API
Facebook to Link Profiles and Pages
Security/Privacy
If You Link Your Facebook Profile Data to Pages, the You Make that Information Public by Default
Facebook Launches New Privacy Section That May Make Your Head Hurt
“Like”
Facebook’s New Like Button Will Power A Behavioral Ad Network
Facebook’s “Become A Fan” Officially Switches to “Like”
Facebook’s New “Like” Button and The Anonymized “Like” Stream
Ads
AdParlor Introduces Facebook Ads API Service for CPI Advertisers
Thursday, April 15, 2010
Managing failure as a manager
Managing it is part political, part customer service. Looking ahead to predict the needs and laying groundwork to optimize how it comes to your team. Working with the client to meet their needs while keeping it feasible.
The goal: drive the business without burning out your team. And every now and then you fail.
It happens quick, but you better not be surprised. If you didn't see it coming you need to work on your skills. It usually happens inch by inch, day by day.
You see, smell and feel the stress building. You make hundreds of small adjustments to alleviate the pressure. You try to find the leaver in your arsenal that will stop the pressure from building.
But then it happens. The pressure takes its toll. Hopefully it manifests itself in a small way - a inappropriate blow up, and shouting match, something minor and internal. At least you can do damage control. But it happened, and its your fault, you failed.
Other times it’s a bigger issue - a staff member resigns or a major client deliverable is blown. Its your fault, you failed.
Either situation is devastating as it adds fuel to the flame - situations that extend the pressure further into your team increasing the pressure and will lead to more.
As much as the failure is your fault, and you failed, and it is your job to prevent it, the truth is also that failure IS the default state. Achievements are work to accomplish, an outright war against failing. Delivering for your clients is hard work. Failure is the default state.
So you failed, you let the default state occur - how do you cope? You can't ride this one out, you need to act fast.
You have to push hard to get it back on track, and that’s going to cost you.
You saw this coming and were managing the message upwards in your organization, right?
Roll up you sleeves and burn some hours, you need to get deep in the details fast. Keep an eye on your other duties but its time to prioritize and let the less important things go unresolved for a week or three. Let everything else slide to the point people are about to escalate, you have to push the line to make some room to get the failure under control.
Dig in the details, specifically the things that are numerous or specifically hard. Then play the politician to try to remove the complexity or quantity, work on the client side to negotiate some breathing room.
Beg, borrow, or higher more resources. Adding more resources to a late project makes it later - don't forget it. But adding resources of very specific types to a high pressure situation will alleviate issues, it may not fix timelines but it will calm people down. It’s a clear message that you care about the team and the deliverable and doing everything in your power to deliver. If the new resources can deliver on specific tasks without full understanding of the system it will help - and since you dug into the details you know exactly where to apply them.
So you failed, but how you deal with it is a clear measure of your worth as a manager. How did you do?
Friday, March 26, 2010
YouTube "Source of Views" definitions
Recently was asked what the View's types in YouTube's Insights tool mean. Shows up in tables as "Source of Views". I did some searching and couldn't find any simple list or definitions.
Did some digging and here's the results of my analysis.
| Source Type | Definition |
Embedded Player | embedded player view on another site |
| YouTube Channel Page Player | player on channel page - featured video |
| Youtube Other | played on youtube directly from navigating to page |
| Advertising | played for advertisment on youtube |
| Related Video | Showed up as related video to another video and was played |
| Mobile Devices | played on mobile device player |
| External Links | external site linking directly to video player page |
| Viral/Other | No referrer - direct navigation to video |
| YouTube Search | found via youtube search |
| Google Search | found via google search |
| Google Video Search | found via google video search |
| Subscriber | played within my account/subscriptions module |
| Promoted | Featured video |
From the all videos' view you can drill down to a specific video, and from there go to the "Discovery" section for that video. Once looking at "Discovery" for a specific video these headings allow you to drill down and see the exact sites that were creating the traffic.
Update
Since this was originally posted, YouTube has updated Insight. Here's what you now see in YouTube:
Saturday, February 06, 2010
Embeding Flash in Facebook Dialog box
Ran into more work than I expected on this, and didn't find much in the way of resources out there to help.
Here's the scenario: on a Facebook page tab (profile tab) want to have links that open a dialog box with a youtube video. In my case its a nice image map (css driven) of images that open the video the image represents.
Primary challenges:
fb:swf fbml must be used. Actually there is now a createFBMLObject() in FBJS and the only object it will create is fb:swf but its in beta and there isn't much documentation yet.
Attempt #1:
After much research and trial and error I got this as a workable solution:
use fb:dialog with the fb:swf as the content block
<a title="Pop up video" href="#" clicktoshowdialog="tubeIt1"></a> <fb:dialog id="tubeIt1" cancel-button="true"> <fb:dialog-title>Luxury</fb:dialog-title> <fb:dialog-content> <fb:swf swfsrc='http://www.youtube.com/v/PQHPYelqr0E&hl=en_US&fs=1&' imgsrc='http://www.someurl.com/static/images/PorkAndBeans.jpg' width='430' height='295' /> <span>Pork and beans!</span> </fb:dialog-content> <fb:dialog-button type="button" value="close" close_dialog="true" /> </fb:dialog>
This solution works well enough and is easy, however it introduces a problem - if a user opens the dialog, then closes it, then opens it again the video can no longer be played (the static image is not clickable).
Final solution:
Final solution I landed on was to have fbjs create the dialog and just store the fb:swf in a fb:js-string. This removes the need to click through the static image to play the flash in the dialog box.
However it didn't work the second time the dialog was opened as the flash had already been injected. The workaround to that turned out to be replacing a marker in the dialog with the fb:js-string variable.
Here it is:
<script language="javascript">
var dialogCounter = 0;
var dialogActive;
function showVideo(title, video) {
if(dialogCounter > 0) return false; //don't allow more than one instance of this dialog
else {
dialogCounter += 1;
dialogActive = new Dialog();
dialogActive.showMessage(title + dialogCounter, dialogText);
dialogActive.onconfirm = function() { dialogCounter = 0; }
document.getElementById('dialog_content').setInnerFBML(video);
return false;
}
}
</script>
<fb:js-string var="dialogText">
<div id="dialog_content">
Marker to be replaced
</div>
</fb:js-string>
<a title="Pork and Beans" href="#" onclick="return showVideo('Pork and Beans', tubeIt1)"></a>
<fb:js-string var="tubeIt1">
<fb:swf
swfsrc='http://www.youtube.com/v/PQHPYelqr0E&hl=en_US&fs=1&'
imgsrc='http://www.someurl.com/static/images/PorkandBeans.jpg'
width='430' height='295' />
<span>Pork and Beans!</span>
</fb:js-string>
The other annoyance was that the dialogs stack on each other causing the user to have to "ok" each one individually if they open more than one. Introducing the dialogCounter variable prevents any new dialogs from being opened if one is already open.
Hope this saves someone else some time!
Thursday, July 30, 2009
404 2 error - ASP pages result in Page Not Found
Checked the path to the asp.dll and the permissions (scripts enabled, IIS user has access) to no avail.
Finally dug into the IIS log and found out the 402 error had a substatus of 2.
Turns out that this error means the web service extension is locked down. (Thanks to Manish Pansiniya's post).
Here's what to look for in IIS:
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Automatically determine if there is any data loss when navigating away from a page.
This isn't normally that difficult, except in this case we didn't control much of the page content (dynamically pulling content).
I came up with this approach in jQuery I thought it would be worth sharing. The approach is:
- bind all ":input" items with a onchange event (this will catch all form elements)
- onchange of an input add a marker css class to flag that it was modified
- bind to the form submit event, remove all markers on the form when submitted
- onbeforeunload look see if there are any markers on the page, if there is warn the user the data will be lost
This approach works with multiple forms on the page. Note the traditional javascript event use onbeforeunload - jQuery's beforeunload event will now allow the user to cancel unloading the page.
Next iteration of this type of approach will extend it to throw up an overlay with a listing of what form elements have data changes, and allow the user to post submits via ajax.
Here's the code:
<script type="text/javascript">
$(document).ready(function() {
$(':input').change(function() { $(this).addClass('elementHasChanged'); });
$("form").submit(function() {
//if the eventing item is part of a form, remove all the change flags from
$(this).children('.elementHasChanged:input').removeClass('elementHasChanged');
});
});
window.onbeforeunload = function() {
var changedCount = $('.elementHasChanged:input').length;
if (changedCount > 0) { return "Any changes you have made will be lost"; }
}
</script>
Update: Here's a working sample
Sunday, July 12, 2009
YouTube Channel on a Facebook profile page .NET
To do this either as an iframe based app, or FBML driven profile tab isn't to difficult and doesn't require the Facebook API. I did leverage the Google .NET Client API though.
Here's the steps in overview:
- Identify the Channel name you want: ex FlightOfThConchords
- Build the URL for the YouTube call (reference)
- Make the request to YouTube
- Iterate the results into a data object you want to work with
- Iterate relevate sub objects off the return set from YouTube (MediaThumbnails and MediaContents in my case)
- Thrown the results to the page for turning into elements
- If doing an IFRAME app, then use the object tag, if doing FBML do FB:SWF (see previous post)
I'm using ASP.NET MVC so here's my solution:
First I enjoy light weight model objects - so I define my objects I'll pass around:
public class YouTubeVideosCollection : System.Collections.Generic.List<YouTubeVideo>
{
}
public class YouTubeVideo
{
public string Blob;
public string Title;
public string Status;
public string Content;
public System.Collections.Generic.List<YouTubeVideoThumbnail> ThumbNailList = new System.Collections.Generic.List<YouTubeVideoThumbnail>();
public System.Collections.Generic.List<YouTubeVideoMediaType> MediaList = new System.Collections.Generic.List<YouTubeVideoMediaType>();
}
public class YouTubeVideoMediaType
{
public string Url;
public string Format;
public string Duration;
}
public class YouTubeVideoThumbnail
{
public string Url;
public string Width;
public string Height;
}There's no logic or api in those so no special includes needed.
I then build out a provider class that will do the heavy lifting and return my YouTubeVideosCollection object. I head over to Google to register for an application id (app_key, app_name).
public static class YouTubeAppProvider
{
public static YouTubeVideosCollection RetrieveYouTubeChannelVideos() {
//I didn't implement paging yet, but this worker class is ready for it
//this default call requests the first 11 videos starting at index 1
return RetrieveYouTubeChannelVideos("1","11");
}
public static YouTubeVideosCollection RetrieveYouTubeChannelVideos(string indexStartAt, string maxResults)
{
//more info on query string params at: http://code.google.com/apis/youtube/2.0/developers_guide_protocol_api_query_parameters.html#qsp
//get app_id and app_key from google API Parter dashboard
Google.YouTube.YouTubeRequestSettings settings = new Google.YouTube.YouTubeRequestSettings("My App Name", app_id, app_key);
Google.YouTube.YouTubeRequest request = new Google.YouTube.YouTubeRequest(settings);
Uri youtubeChannel = new Uri("http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/FlightOfThConchords/uploads?start-index=" + indexStartAt + "&max-results=" + maxResults);
Google.GData.Client.Feed<google.youtube.video> feed = request.Get<google.youtube.video>(youtubeChannel);
YouTubeVideosCollection vids = new YouTubeVideosCollection();
foreach (Google.YouTube.Video entry in feed.Entries)
{
YouTubeVideo vid = new YouTubeVideo();
vid.Title = entry.Title ;
vid.Content = entry.Content;
foreach (Google.GData.Extensions.MediaRss.MediaThumbnail thumb in entry.Thumbnails) {
YouTubeVideoThumbnail thumbnail = new YouTubeVideoThumbnail();
thumbnail.Url = thumb.Url;
thumbnail.Width = thumb.Width;
thumbnail.Height = thumb.Height;
vid.ThumbNailList.Add(thumbnail);
}
foreach (Google.GData.YouTube.MediaContent mediaContent in entry.Contents ) {
//formats: http://code.google.com/apis/youtube/2.0/reference.html#formatsp
//I only want the Format 5 - which is the embedable version
if (mediaContent.Format.Equals("5"))
{
YouTubeVideoMediaType media = new YouTubeVideoMediaType();
media.Duration = mediaContent.Duration;
media.Format = mediaContent.Format;
media.Url = mediaContent.Url;
vid.MediaList.Add(media);
}
}
vids.Add(vid);
}
return vids;
}
}
This class will need the following:
- Google.GData.Client
- Google.GData.Extensions.MediaRss
- Google.YouTube
You get these from the Google .NET Client API
In my controller I define a method to invoke the worker.
public ActionResult Channel()
{
ViewData.Model = SampleBox.Models.YouTubeAppProvider.RetrieveYouTubeChannelVideos();
return View();
}
Lastly I define the view, which is able to be strongly typed off the YouTubeVideosCollection we defined earlier. This first set of code will run in as an independent page (or within an IFRAME as a Facebook App).
<%@ Page Title="" Language="C#" MasterPageFile="~/Views/Shared/Site.Master" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage<SampleBox.Models.YouTubeVideosCollection>" %>
<asp:Content ID="Content1" ContentPlaceHolderID="TitleContent" runat="server">
Channel
</asp:Content>
<asp:Content ID="Content2" ContentPlaceHolderID="MainContent" runat="server">
<h2>Channel</h2>
<div class="videoCollection">
<ul>
<%
SampleBox.Models.YouTubeVideosCollection videos = ViewData.Model;
bool first = true;
string width = "425";
string height = "350";
foreach (SampleBox.Models.YouTubeVideo vid in videos)
{
if (first)
{%>
<li class="first">
<% } else { %>
<li>
<% } %>
<% foreach (SampleBox.Models.YouTubeVideoMediaType media in vid.MediaList)
{ %>
<%= vid.Title %><br />
<object width="<%=width%>" height="<%=height %>">
<embed src="<%= media.Url %>"
type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent"
width="<%=width %>" height="<%=height %>">
</embed>
</object>
<% } %>
</li>
<%
first = false;
width = "215";
height = "175";
} %>
</ul>
</div>
</asp:Content>This second example will work within the context of a facebook profile tab - note there is no master page to inherit from and no html/body tags, and the style has been defined inline intentionally.
<%@ Page Title="" Language="C#" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage<SampleBox.Models.YouTubeVideosCollection>" %>
<h2>Channel</h2>
<style type="text/css">
.videoCollection ul
{
border-bottom: 1px #5C87B2 solid;
padding: 0 0 2px;
position: relative;
margin: 0;
width: inherit;
text-align: center;
}
.videoCollection ul li
{
list-style: none;
display:inline-block;
width: 340px;
height: 215px;
border: solid 1px black;
overflow: hidden;
position: static;
}
.videoCollection ul li.first
{
width: 690px;
height: 375px;
display: block;
clear: both;
vertical-align: middle;
}
.videoCollection {
width:690px;
border: solid 1px black;
}
</style>
<div class="videoCollection">
<ul>
<%
SampleBox.Models.YouTubeVideosCollection videos = ViewData.Model;
bool first = true;
string width = "425";
string height = "350";
foreach (SampleBox.Models.YouTubeVideo vid in videos)
{
if (first)
{%>
<li class="first">
<% } else { %>
<li>
<% } %>
<% foreach (SampleBox.Models.YouTubeVideoMediaType media in vid.MediaList)
{ %>
<%= vid.Title %><br />
<fb:swf
imgsrc="<%= vid.ThumbNailList[0].Url %>"
swfsrc="<%= media.Url %>"
height="<%=height%>"
width="<%=width%>"
/>
<% } %>
</li>
<%
first = false;
width = "215";
height = "175";
} %>
</ul>
</div>There's lots of refactoring and error handling yet to do, but this is a solid reference point to share - hope its useful for you.
Facebook Profile Page (Tab on a Business Page)
- Tabs on business pages are called "Profile Tabs" in Facebook parlance.
- Tabs are actually a setting off of an application (so you'll need a very simple application)
- The URL to the tab content must be relative to the main URL (Canvas) of the simple application
- Tabs are limited in functionality - they are markup only (no iframes) and a subset of FBML.
- Inline CSS and Javascript only.
- Flash can be used, but cannot be viewed until a user clicks the element (fb:swf)
- Make sure you specify an image src on the fb:swf tag - otherwise there is nothing for the user to click on to start the flash
- For some reason .htm/.html files wouldn't work for me, though .aspx was fine.
- Images will be cached by Facebook (so throw a query string on if you want to force them to change).
Friday, March 20, 2009
Mix09
Checking out some of the new technologies coming out at Mix this year – as always very exciting stuff.
ASP.NET MVC 1.0
Super Preview – view web pages you are building in multiple browsers (via the cloud) – built into Expression Web 3.0
Web Platform Installer – make it easy to get the latest “bits”
I’m really interested and excited on all of these.Saturday, November 08, 2008
Blogger's horrendous user experience
Try to sign in.
1) Requires Google Account, give it my google account and password, submit.
2) Says I need to give it my Google password, I do so (again), submit.
3) Says my password is weak, and I need to change it. I try my existing password and the indicator says its "strong", but when I try to save it, tells me I must use a different password.
4) Finally make a new password, but what did I just change? My google account or my blogger account? Guess I'll find out next time I try to access Gmail.
Man thats an awful lot of work to sign into an account you didn't forget....
Monday, September 22, 2008
Huge List of Programmer cartoons
Click Here for computer geek amusement.
Thursday, August 07, 2008
Hell freezing over? Microsoft Sponsors Apache Software Foundation
Sunday, May 18, 2008
snazzy bookmarklet for css
Slick!
Friday, May 16, 2008
DeepZoom meets Death and Taxes
Monday, November 26, 2007
Website SEO grader
Check out http://feeds.downloadsquad.com/~r/weblogsinc/downloadsquad/~3/189293946/ for a link to WebSite Grader.
Website Grader reviews your site, taking into account traffic, social sites, Google Page Rank, Alexa rankings, inbound links etc... and comes up with a score out of 100.This is a nice report to let you know how you are doing and makes some solid suggestions on how to improve.