Global Nerdy

A still from Chris Messina’s video, given a little LOLcat treatment.

It’s been getting some buzz in “The Swarm” (a Skype chat where the TorCamp crowd hang out to talk about anything and everything — sometimes even tech!): Chris “Factory City” Messina has posted a 50-minute video polemic about the state of Mozilla, Firefox and the future of the Open Web in light of the challenges being presented by offerings such as Adobe’s Apollo, Microsoft’s Silverlight and the most newly-announced platform for web apps on the desktop, Sun’s JavaFX.

I’ve only managed to catch the first 15 minutes of the video (it’s been a busy day), but TorCamp regular Mark Kuznicki and Web Worker Daily editor Anne Zelenka have already thrown in their two cents. I’ll throw in mine, but I need to carve out some time first.

CSS coding, like most UI coding, is at least part voodoo, what with browser incompatibilities and the fact that a good number of developers have avoided it until every became Ajax-ified.

If you’re looking to learn CSS or refine your CSS chops, make sure you check out Smashing Magazine’s 70 Expert Ideas for CSS Coding. It provides tips of all kinds, from the general (such as workflow) to the esoteric (such as dealing with Internet Explorer).

Outsourcing, in the sense of shipping off high-tech jobs from tech support to software development, doesn’t seem to get as much mention in the news these days. Perhaps it’s because it isn’t perceived as being as big a threat as it used to be. NoJobsForIndia.com looks as though it hasn’t been updated in some time, and typing YourJobIsGoingToIndia.com into your browser’s address bar will take you to a discussion forum on speed bag training.

(There’s a carpetbagger-to-speedbagger joke in there somewhere…)

It may turn out that the real outsourcing challenge that developers have to face isn’t coming from corporations looking to cut costs, but younger internet users, just doing what they’re doing. They’ve been steadily outsourcing desktop jobs to web apps.

Consider this blog entry by Rick “The Post Money Value” Segal. Most of the entry is about how the famous “Cancel or Allow?” Macintosh ad helped him figure out why the Vista-equipped laptop that he’d just bought for his daughter didn’t seem to work. That’s interesting, but what really got me thinking was his postscript:

[Bonus observation] I asked about back ups. Naah. I asked if she had anything on the old one I needed to recover. Naah, all online between Hotmail, writely, facebook, flickr, and myspace. 19 years of age, folks. In University and basically requires no software, no fancy applications. Worth thinking about.

This has got me thinking: What university student activities haven’t yet been converted into or augmented by an online application?

In an article with the tantalizing title Double your userbase with two lines of code and a box of Modafinil, Alex Krupp takes a look at Bob Kraut’s study on Usenet and how getting a reply affected the chance that a poster would return and post again:

For oldtimers who received no replies, 84% posted again. For oldtimers who did receive a reply, 86% posted again. For newcomers who received no replies, 16% posted again.

What’s startling though is the effect getting a reply had on newcomers posting their first time. When looking only at newcomers, getting a reply increased their likelihood of posting again from 16% to 26%. That’s a 62% increase!

Based on this observation, Krupp suggests that a good way to increase returning visits and user participation would be make a simple change to your site’s design:

Now, translating patterns in Usenet posts into practical design advice isn’t an exact science. But if I were launching a new website, here’s what I’d do. Instead of hiding the Feedback link in the upper right hand corner, I’d place a form right on the main page. A big form. And I’d bend over backwards to get people to use it.

Bugs, ideas, comments, observations, advice, etc. It doesn’t matter. Why? Simple.

Because by emailing you, your visitors are giving you permission to send a reply. A reply that, if crafted correctly, could dramatically increase that person’s chances of becoming a full-fledged member of the community.

Note that Krupp says that the reply must be crafted correctly. By this, he means that the reply should be personal and not a form letter with the user’s name pasted in. He suggests “a friendly personal letter from the CEO”, a task so time-consuming that it explains the use of Modafinil (an anti-narcolepsy drug that many geeks say gives you the ability to work non-stop for extended periods of time) in his article’s title.

Krupp’s theory is supported by Facebook’s success. Although nobody at Facebook sends you a friendly personal email, the site does something that yields a similar effect: it starts feeding you a constant stream of goings-on concerning your friends. This feedback is just as personal and even more relevant to you (and possibly less creepy) than some CEO you’ve never met trying to get chummy with you via email.

Krupp’s theory also suggests an experiment that you might want to try if you have a blog, mailing list or discussion forum: try replying to every  posting made by your readers or users and see what happens. I think I’ll try it with my blogs and see what happens.

A couple of notes on social networking:

Reports of Social Networking’s Death are Greatly Exaggerated

In a blog entry titled Is social networking dead? Nope. We’ve only just seen the beginning. Here’s why, Alex Krupp does some good thinking about social networks and how they currently lack credibility. One particularly good observation he makes is that social networks can connect people in three ways:

1. Strengthening existing relationships
2. Connecting friends-of-friends
3. Introducing complete strangers

He uses Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace as examples of sites that strengthen existing relationships through information sharing, but differentiate themselves by focus and the type of information shared — “For example, MySpace uses the musical tastes of others to facilitate the discovery of new music,” whereas LinkedIn is used primarily for career-type networking.

He has this advice for creators and investors hoping to create the Next Big Thing in social networking:

Each of these sites facilitates only a tiny fraction of possible human interaction. Which is why creating “Facebook but with emoticons!” or “MySpace but for for the Amish!” is so silly. Facebook and MySpace already do a great job in their respective niches, and it would be very difficult to unseat them. And since there is so much potential in the yet unexplored possibility space, it makes no sense to even try.

There is a lesson here for venture capitalists as well. Sure, the vast majority of pitches for new social networking sites may be terrible. But that doesn’t mean the possibilities for creating value have been exhausted. The next two guys to show up on your doorstep just might be a little less dumb than you think.

10% of Toronto is on Facebook

According to Ryan Feeley, the number of people on Facebook claiming Toronto as their home has crossed the half-million mark, or about ten percent of city’s metropolitan population. From the data below, you can see that Facebookers — of which I am one — make a much bigger portion of the population of Toronto than New York, L.A. or London.

Search Engine Land points a to a report stating that Google is now the world’s most powerful brand, as ranked by Millward Brown Optimor’s BRANDZ Top 100, with a brand value of $66.4 billion. Here are the top ten brands, listed along with their brand values:

1. Google ($66.4 billion)
2. General Electric ($61.9 billion)
3. Microsoft ($55 billion)
4. Coca-Cola ($44.1 billion)
5. China Mobile ($41.2 billion)
6. Marlboro ($39.2 billion)
7. Wal-Mart ($36.9 billion)
8. Citigroup ($33.7 billion)
9. IBM ($33.6 billion)
10. Toyota Motor ($33.4 billion)

Also worth mentioning: of the top 40, the three brands with the biggest increase in value over the past year pretty much make up George’s and my lifestyles:

1. Google (brand rank 1, up 77%)
2. Apple (brand rank 16, up 55%)
3. Starbucks (brand rank 35, up 45%)

Did I really need a brand research company to tell me that Google is the number one brand? I suppose you can’t be ceratin without doing research and number-crunching, but I decided that Google had simply and complete won, period, a couple of years back while reading a magazine while waiting to get my hair cut. I was reading an interview with supermodel Linda Evangelista (pictured above) in which she says “Oh wait, let me Google it.”