So, everybody now got hyped about Web 2.0 and plans started to take forms on what we want to do and how our new direction of services will look like.
Stop here for a second, the last thing we want to do now is to fall in the "application islands" vs. "the platforms mainland" trap, where we end up with several applications that are pretty much doing the same thing, can’t communicate together, and produce a different user's experience.
Our focus and time should be spent on building platforms to support our solid direction rather than building isolated islands of applications on the level of each product
The threat is that we are diversified and each product is on its own, while we need to unify simple procedures on treating certin element of the application to read/write from the core platforms, so we would have less work every time we "re-use" such services across the products.
Things like how we get and process the User's Generated Content (UGC) or how we display the usernames and the acompined communication tools, How we communicate with the extended features of the Single-Sign-On Service, or How we treat the high traffic content pieces and develop methods to drive it into more prime spots (featured areas, or top article of the homepage, also how we are going to collect the user's feedback, and we leverage the huge amount of usage and participation data of the same user across the products in order to deliver a unique and different experience, another area is how our mobile versions are released and how can it be found by the users of our web versions, and How all of our search-within service is extended into the platform and inherit intelligence and show smart suggestions and ranking based on user's profiles and business needs.
I can think of these few now, but I’m sure we can come up with more, and the early we set the blueprint, the less our problems in the future.
The traditional, classic Offline Media (Newspaper, Magazine, TV, etc..) has gone long way into developing its own standards when it comes to measuring their performances against each other, ranking, and their impact on the population, if we compared that to the Online Media (Websites) which is obviously relatively new, The amount and wealth of data gathered from the online users and reported to the people working on websites are extraordinary in value, breadth, and width.
Cretin characteristics differentiate between the two worlds:
Offline Characteristics
•Depend on Circulation and Distribution Figures
•Readers/Viewers Feedback by normal mail, surveys, phone.
Problems
•Data management (they depend on Agencies)
•Delay of Response and Actions (usually the response takes time to implement, not retroactive)
•Historical Image & perception (users may be judging based on historical experience and not current one)
Online Characteristics
•Web Statistics (the rough figures)
•Web Analysis (the manipulation of the rough figures to come up with actions and decisions)
•E-mail Communications (users can send emails or fill instant feedback forms)
•Clear Response Methods (no extra burden for the users to give feedback on current issues)
•Users Identification (we can identify who is the user, where from, age group, gender, etc..)
•Cross-Related Information (we can combine web analytics with our user's profiles, ordering database, payment database, transactions database, etc..)
Problems
•Somehow complicated (yes it needs some time to fully grasp)
•Need Focus and daily checks (lastminute.com check their stats on hourly bases and based on that they decide what travel packages and destination they should give exposure and space on their hompage)
•It may take no time to implement minor corrections but long time to implement major ones
A website is like a shop,
There are customers coming in and out
There are products that the shop has to sell in order to stay in business
There are the shop’s isles and shelves
And there is the shop manager, at his room, trying to figure out how he can keep his customers, increase sales, through looking at his monitors that broadcast what the shop’s security cameras can capture and come up with patterns, behaviors and gauges that he can use to develop strategies that can make him able to tell for each customer who enter the shop, if he is just passing time, or he would buy something at the end.
What I want to say that through the right analytics, a website owner can reach a point where he can segment the users as they visit the site, profile them, and be able to convert them into customers at the right place and time, whatever the goal of the website, as I believe every website is an e-commerce site in essence.
Web Analytics is very powerful thing, since the early days of the web in the 90s I started to like it, which is about 10 years of experience todayJ, I was trying to read between the lines, and find anything that can make my visitors happier, and my website better.
I remember the days when I wanted to take my knowledge of web analytics to the next level, by knowing what the other people are measuring, the process of finding such information was extremely difficult, because using a search engine used to bring 20 or 30 result, yes about that much, it was that new thing that doesn’t have much references published, also there used to be very few tools around in the market, but namely the market leader was the father of web analytics tools: WebTrends
Today, searching in Google for “Web Analytics” brings something like 133,000,000 results!!! Yes, 133 million page about web analytics, and hundreds of tools and softwares that specialize in web analytics, that makes me laugh about how the market has grown for such knowledge J
In this blog I’ll post my thoughts about web analytics, publishing my 10 years of experience, and the usable concentration of hundreds of books, documents, and studies that I have read and strategies that I have been using and implementing based on web analytics on many of our websites.
I’ll discuss the whole cycle, from the first visit to making your customers do your marketing
Will take every step in the cycle and put in details how can you measure it, analyze it, and optimize it
I will start from acquisition channels, and landing pages, to conversion, and site goal cycle completion.
So stay tuned if you are interested...
I heard that from Marissa Mayer, she leads the product management efforts on Google's search products while talking to her at the Web 2.0 Summit 2006, we were discussing what the user really want compared to what they ask for!!
At the end, she explained that slow service but steady and stable is not what people really want and may actually use, sometimes you have to choose to release an almost finished, almost stable service as long as its faster than being stable and 100% finished, ....Speed is everything !!!
We can apply that too on our development-cycle why should we complicate things in order to make a full-featured service online while could have release it feature by feature, better tuning, better testing, and instant reponses from the users regarding wither we should continue into that direction or not, i see that we can win our race that way
What is Web 2.0?
If that is your first time to hear this term and you don’t know the answer then you probably very focused on what you do today and not thinking what you should be doing tomorrow
And for those of you who know the answer, I can assure you that it’s not limited to the flying stuff, the instant responses, the light interface, and definitely it’s not the Ajax components alone.
Web 2.0 is a concept, not a particular language, technology, or a program. It’s a design patterns and business models for the next generation of software that will be running as a service.
To see the difference between what was Web 1.0 and what is now being called Web 2.0:
Web 1.0 is the first popular peak of the web, which was mostly about commerce. Many dotcoms got founded; it was about HTML; as a standard for presentation, dynamic sites powered by local databases, content sites with editors in the background, portal managers trying to fill their product with data that would make their portal *rich*.
While Web 2.0 refers to a new peak, current one, that leveraged the rise of networked applications. The idea is that you don't install applications on your local machine, but instead it is run via the web. Because web became the platform, not the OS, not the browser, such applications include:
wikis, weblogs, photo/video sharing sites, Live.com, gadgets, Gmail, Gmaps, social bookmark managers, social news networks, and more.
Because these applications are on the web, a dimension of community can be added:
An example is the bookmark manager del.icio.us that uses the community to tag and categorize websites for them.
Flickr uses the community to tag and rate photos.
Wikipedia uses the community to write an encyclopedia.
Digg uses the users to share and rank any kind of news
These are all web 2.0 examples of applications.
I just came back from the Web 2.0 conference that was held in San Francisco earlier this month, and I can see clearly that we have a great new opportunities to grow into that direction if we have the required focus and clear vision on what we want to do, what brought us here at the first place and where we want to be.
Web 2.0 sites and solutions are those that integrate all the things that were missing from Web 1.0. They include the different concepts and functionality:
- Better user participation including user generated content, user voting, user submission and sharing of content (i.e. community submitted and edited news sites like Digg.com).
- Syndication that allows information from a web site to be easily extracted and used on other web sites and in other programs (i.e. RSS and the Feedburner web site).
- Tagging data and media to make it easy to find (i.e Flickr, Youtube, and Technorati).
- Improved usability that enables the web to give users a similar experience to desktop programs.(this is the AJAX, ATLAS part)
- Open technology standards that allow information to be easily shared across web sites (i.e. XML, RSS, API, etc)
Web 2.0 is about making Internet technology seem less like technology and more like an intuitive human interface available anywhere, anytime, and with very little latency.
So let’s put the Ajax part in context and clear the confusion that Ajax is web 2.0: white it is just a mix of programming languages and styles that implies that parts of the web page will update automatically without reloading the entire page. Technically, this means that the page typically has JavaScript that rewrites part of the DOM (document object model) to cause the browser to update a part of the page.
So to sum it up, Web 2.0 is about:
- Collective intelligence or the User-Self-Services where the more the users using your service, the more the service becomes smarter
- User Generated Content: if your product is based on content generated by editors, you will not sustain and eventually your product will die or becomes expensive to operate and maintain, the user can produce more content than all the editors you can get (think of bloggers, videos, music, photos, etc..) all the types of content and media that the user can upload to your sites.
- Social networking, where everything is cross-linked, a user get his own homepage,
- Long tail: you build your product, you release the APIs and the web services for the public, the users start building their applications based on your APIs and webservices.
- Cross devices applications: build your application to support all devices from the beginning
- Open, use your users to grow your product (mass collaboration)
- All of that wrapped (tied together) with an intuitive, smart, lite interface (the Ajax interface), so Ajax is the how not the what!!
Web 2.0 is an attitude, culture, concepts, not a technology, not a technical term.
Examples of Web2.0 (think of concepts not interfaces) some of the sites you may already knew, but try to map the above with what you see there: