• Building a Social Media Team by Amber Naslund. If you’re considering deploying a team to tackle your social media efforts, this is a great read. It discusses why you might need a team, how to assemble one, roles and responsibilities, and more. It includes a look inside Humana’s social media “Chamber Of Commerce” and how their interdisciplinary team is driving social media efforts at their company.
• Content by Cory Doctorow. Doctorow, one of the voices behind the blog Boing-Boing, is well-known for his opinions on technology, DRM, and the future of content. His ebook is a collection of some of his best work and is an insightful read.
• Customer Service — The Art of Listening and Engagement Through Social Media by Brian Solis. Engaging with and empowering your customers as an extension of your marketing efforts isn’t new. However, in the era of social media, there are new tools and philosophies to more effectively listen and engage with customers and cultivate a more significant community, enhance your brand, build relationships, and hopefully create evangelists along the way.
• Fish Where the Fish Are – Mapping Social Media to the Buying Cycle by Chris Brogan. This ebook is meant to get you thinking about how social media ties to the more traditional buying cycle. It’s a quick read that can help introduce you and your team to social media.
• Getting a Foothold in Social Media by Amber Naslund. A rundown of some of the basic, fundamental elements of building a social media plan, especially directed at smaller and medium-sized businesses, but certainly consistent for companies of any size.
• Let’s Talk — Social Media for Small Business by John Jantsch. The latest version of Jantsch’s great book includes a lot more information about Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. He also offers some thoughts on managing the social media beast.
• Social Media and Network Starting Points by Chris Brogan. Organisations have a lot to consider once they decide they want to jump into social networks and social media. There are many opportunities to slide off the rails, or worse, to let the effort fall into disarray. Brogan offers some thoughts based on a question he received about guidelines, a toolbox, and how to grow a community.
• Social Media Time Management by Amber Naslund. If you’re struggling with information overload and how to sort your priorities in social media, this ebook will give you some practical, actionable ideas for managing the firehose. It includes some thoughts on resource allocation and time commitments for social media strategies inside a business, as well as 9 strategies for keeping the social media monster manageable.
• Social Media Tips — Sharing Lessons Learned to Help Your Business Grow by Jeff Hayzlett from Kodak. Hayzlett and his team put this book together to share some of their thoughts and firsthand experiences using social media for their business. Hayzlett takes the time to use social media like Twitter and Facebook because in today’s media landscape it’s vitally important to be where your customers are. Kodak has always embraced this marketing philosophy, and today that means being active in social media.
• The Art of Community by Jono Bacon. Bacon is the Community Manager for Ubuntu, one of the largest open source software projects. In this book he talks about the ins and outs of building, cultivating, and managing a community from the ground up. This is a must-read for anyone interested in community development.
• The Essential Guide to Social Media by Brian Solis. An executive outline of social media tools and resources needed to listen and participate, guiding PR, customer service, product development, and marketing.
• The New Rules of Viral Marketing by David Meerman Scott. The smart marketers profiled in this ebook tell you exactly how they used viral marketing and provide advice in their own words.
• The Simple Web — A Philosophy for Getting What You Want by Skelliewag. As bloggers and Webmasters, we want most or all of these things: more visitors, more subscribers, more comments, more money, more inbound links, and more people saying good things about us. Our wants aren’t in question. It’s the how that gets us. It’s the how that has us reading a dozen blogs a day, trying to find the answer (or at least a little piece of it).
• The Social Media Starter Kit by Amber Naslund. This great book covers some of the most popular social media tools and technologies, including Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and blogging, as well as some productivity and supporting tools to make social media task management easier and more fluid.
• What is Social Media? by Antony Mayfield. This book answers one simple question: What is social media? From iCrossing, this book runs down all the basics, from how social media is being used to providing definitions of the ever-changing jargon that personifies social media.

(via Pamorama)

Human beings are social creatures–not occasionally or by accident, but always. Sociability is one of our core capabilities, and it shows up in almost every aspect of our lives as both cause and effect. Society is not just the product of its individual members; it is also the product of its constituent groups. The aggregate relations among individuals and groups, among individuals within groups, and among groups forms a network of astonishing complexity.

Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody, 2008

Unlike real-world friendships, The Web has affected the number of relationships you can have and maintain and the intimacy of those relationships, enabling us to create different types or groups of friends. The astonishing complexity that Clay Shirky identifies is suddenly made infinitely more complex and abstract through digital media.

We now have communication tools that provide the flexibility to match our social needs and as a result are discovering new ways to make friends. These tools — better known as social media or social software — provide us the ability to share, cooperate with one another and indeed take collective action, all outside the traditional clubs and groups to which our parents would have been acustomed. These tools have had a profound affect on how we distinguish or describe friendship.

An online friendship is better described along a spectrum defined by the actions people take and how we feel about them.

Mike Arauz (permalink)

Mike Aruz identifies 7 stages of online friendship in the above visual. These are:

1. Passive Interest — This is the easiest level of engagement. It asks the least of your friends, and achieves the least commitment from us. But, it’s the crucial starting point. I follow my curiosity to you, I’m interested in what I find, and I choose to pay attention. This stage is epitomised by repeated visits to profiles, blog readers, and the so-called fans and followers.
2. Active Interest — This is when I care enough to let you know that I care. It’s a small step, but a big opportunity for you to identify key members of your audience who are candidates to move along the spectrum. We don’t yet expect a response, we’re just letting you know that we’re listening. This is commonly experienced on Twitter, where you can respond to my tweets, even if I’m not actively following you. I can then decide whether you’re worth looking up. It’s really the starting point of a conversation; Hey I’m interested in what you have to say, you may be interested in what I have to say.
3. Sharing — At this point the audience member starts to become a fan. You and your work become part of my identity as I use it to talk to my own friends about what interests me. I also have made myself more valuable, because I am now partly responsible for the spread of your ideas. This is typified by retweeting comments and links, using social bookmarks to save useful web pages and posting references and content to my own websites and social network profiles.
4. Public Dialogue — This is the first phase that requires action on your part. I have either demonstrated an Active Interest or have Shared your work with my own friends. You foster a relationship by responding to my interest in a public forum such as Twitter and to some extent Facebook. By doing so, you make the rest of your friends aware of my existence, and welcome me to the group. This is signalled by @replies in Twitter, referrals in a blog post, references posted on other [important] websites and profiles.
5. Private Dialogue — At this step, we begin to transform mutual interest into mutual trust. This really is the “major hurdle” that has to be overcome for a “digital friendship” to really mimic those found in the real world. We are willing to share thoughts, ideas, experiences with each other directly. We trust each other with direct access, which has increasing value in an increasingly always-on world. Direct messages on Twitter are just the beginning. At this stage we freely exchange private contact details such as mobile phone number and email address, which allows us to take the conversation beyond the social networks and into a more intimate realm.
6. Advocacy — At first glance, Advocacy looks a lot like Sharing. But, the crucial difference is that Advocacy means that I am making an explicit recommendation of you to my friends. I am in effect putting my reputation on the line for you; there is the implied understanding that with this recommendation comes the obligation not to let me down. It’s too easy now to simply share, all it takes is one click on your bookmark tool bar. Choosing to actually say, “This is important. It’s worth my friends’ time. And I’m willing to risk my own reputation to convince my friends to check it out.”
7. Investment — The pinnacle of online friendship. This is the most difficult achievement to recognise or quantify. But it’s the most important because it represents the willingness of your friends to take action on your behalf. Investment may not be entirely altruistic since your wins may become my wins. It’s a little like the self-propagating “old boys” or alumni network, which, while sometimes seen in a negative light, are successful in maintaining and extending relationships.

Some people have several hundred Facebook friends, thousands of blog readers and tens of thousands of Twitter followers; I’m thinking more @stephenfry than @whatterz here! Where these relationships were once considered merely an audience, they are developing into what people are now considering as friendships. I’m not so sure friendship is really the right choice of noun quite yet, since offline interactions are still important, but people who can cultivate meaningful relationships online have a lot to teach not only other people, but brands who are trying to figure out how they fit into the world of social media.

Details of the current seminar series can be found on Stanford HCI website, whilst the 2009 seminar series can be found on iTunes U. The topics of which are listed below:

Winter 2009

1. Pario: The Next Step Beyond Audio and Video
2. Sculpting Behaviour: Developing a Tangible Lnguage for Hands-on Play and Learning
3. Tap is the New Click
4. Social Annotation, Contextual Collaboration and Online Transparency
5. Enlightened Trial and Error – Gaining design Insight Through Prototyping Tools
6. Computer Graphics as a Telecommunication Medium
7. Not Invented Here: Online Mapping Revealed

Spring 2009

1. Firefox, Mozilla & Open Source: Software Design at Scale
2. Social Enterprise Software Design
3. The Interaction Design of APIs
4. Far Away Up Close
5. What Still Matters About Distance?
6. How We Use Data to Win the Presidential Election
7. Social Immersive Media
8. Launching Creative Communities: Lessons From the Spore Community
9. Designing Online Communities from Theory

Autumn/Fall 2009

1. Crowdsourcing Work
2. Backtracking Events as Indicators of Software Usability Problems
3. Programming by Sketching
4. Aesthetic Science of Colour: WAVEs of Colour, Culture, Music and Emotion

Previous talks are also available on iTunes U — with the notable speakers Bill Moggridge, Bill Buxton and Donald Norman featuring — or on YouTube: 2006-07, 2007-08, 2008-09

In January 2010, Apple announced to great fanfare that they had recently sold their 3 billionth iPhone application. Of course not all these applications are paid-for, but with a 30% levy taken on each and every paid-for application, Apple are taking a significant share of the revenue from the application pie. However, as a distribution channel, the AppStore is second to none, whilst the iPhone uptake is staggering, with a majority share of the smartphone market in many regions of the world. There is a significant opportunity for any developer to make a huge return on investment, assuming the idea is a winning one.

iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile, Blackberry, Nokia and now the larger form factor iPad and Kindle support the idea of applications, or will do in the near future. So what do you need to do to design and build your first application?

1. Familiarise yourself with the rules
   Whether you’re going to build applications for the iPhone OS, Android OS or any other of the mobile platforms, you will need to familiarise yourself with how each operating system does things. Smartphone development is different from the development we are accustomed with on the Web. Reading the user interface guidelines for each platform will go a long way to developing your first application. Smartphones are personal devices and know where you are almost all the time through GPS. They have rotation detectors, compasses and multitouch screens with gestural interfaces. Only once you know what is possible with each smartphone platform can you begin to design your application.
2. Brainstorm the issues
   This is the creative part of your application development process. You have a basic idea, but you need to take it forward into something that has features and benefits. Will the application be paid-for or free? Will it provide a service or be a marketing channel? Will it be standalone or link closely with other online presences and networks? Smartphone applications, unlike ordinary websites, invariably need to actually do something. There is an element of artificial intelligence at play, whereby the phone can actually know where it is in the world and it’s orientation, whilst the user interface is remarkably different from that of simply a mouse and keyboard. Smartphone applications can’t simply be flat catalogues, they need to do something and do it well. Whether this is booking and accessing a car as with StreetCar, buying something from eBay, paying with PayPal, creating music with RjDj, drawing pictures with Brushes, price comparison with RedLaser, reading the latest news from the Guardian, video casting with Qik or planning your journey with Tube Deluxe your app needs to be compelling.
3. Create a prototype
   You have your compelling idea; create a proof-of-concept prototype. This prototype is used to test some or many aspects of the intended design without attempting to exactly simulate the visual appearance, content or intended interactions. Such prototypes can be used to “prove” out a potential design approach such as range of motion, mechanics, sensors, architecture, etc. Making paper prototypes, for example, is a great way to test the application rather than creating low or high fidelity wireframes and hoping for the best. Doing this also provides a perfect opportunity for people around you — friends, colleagues and family members — to try out the prototype with little fuss. Only once you’re happy with the design should you begin any form of coding.
4. Submit early
   You have your application working. You have conducted a number of usability tests and all is looking great. It’s time to submit it to the appropriate application store. Apple has its AppStore, Android its Market Place, Nokia its Ovi Store and so on. Each store has its own nuiances, but if you’re considering an iPhone application, Apple has been know to drag its feet when approving applications for release. Apple has a much discussed approval process, with the possibility of rejection commonplace. Don’t make plans that depend on Apple. It is better to silently release the application, rather than creating a huge fanfare.
5. Iterate often
   Once your application has been launched your work is nowhere near over, indeed it has just begun! As you gain more and more users, improvements will suggest themselves not only from within your team, but more often, from your users. Here is where you go back to stage two and start brainstorming again. Version 2 may include bug fixes, but also major feature updates. For the latter, your brainstorming will decide what is most important for the next iteration. When your next iteration is complete, the AppStore, for example, makes upgrades far easier to achieve than for normal desktop software.

If you’re planning an application that could disrupt one of the smartphones capabilities, such as Google Voice for the iPhone, it may be worth considering whether building an application specifically for that particular operating system is worthwhile. Google Voice was neither approved nor rejected by Apple for the iPhone, but has now been replaced by a fully featured HTML5 web-based application; circumventing the Apple approval process. Of course this now means that the same web-based application can be used for not just the iPhone, but other smartphones.

Now go forth and build it!

Resources

Smartphone User Interface Guidelines:

• Apple iPhone Human Interface Guidelines (HIG)
• Apple iPhone Application Programming Guide
• Android User Interface Guidelines
• Android Human Interface Guidelines (adapted from Apple)
• Nokia User Interface Style and Visual Guidelines
• Palm User Interface Guidelines
• RIM Blackberry User Interface Guidelines

Application Development Frameworks:

• PhoneGap an open source development tool for building iPhone, Android, Blackberry and other mobile apps with JavaScript
• Appcelerator a mobile development platform for javascript developers

Mobile Web Application Frameworks:

• jQTouch a jQuery plugin for mobile development
• iUI an iPhone/iPod Touch user interface framework

Other:

• Wikipedia article on Mobile Development

Apache 2.x uses mod_deflate. Much like setting expires headers, this will save you bandwidth and server load, because it allows output from your server to be compressed before being sent to the client over the network.

The deflate module is not compiled by default and must be enabled in the Apache httpd.conf file. Make sure the following is present and uncommented (remove preceding the #):

LoadModule deflate_module modules/mod_deflate.so

To set GZip compression, simply add the following to the section of your Apache vhost configuration:

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml text/css text/javascript application/javascript application/x-javascript
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip
BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html

Alternatively you can add it to your htaccess file in an <ifModule mod_deflate.c></ifModule> block.

All you really need is the first line. The BrowserMatch lines are there to handle issues with older browsers such as Internet Explorer 5.

You can read all about GZip by reading Yahoo!’s Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site guide.

Alternatively, read the Apache mod_deflate documentation.

In Apache, mod_expires is a module that allows you to set a given period of time to live for web pages and other objects served from web pages. The idea is to inform web browsers how often they should reload objects from the server. This will save you bandwidth and server load, because clients who follow the header will reload objects less frequently.

The expires module is not compiled by default and must be enabled in the Apache httpd.conf file. Make sure the following is present and uncommented (remove preceding the #):

LoadModule expires_module modules/mod_expires.so

To set an expires header, simply add the following to the <virtualHost> section of your Apache vhost configuration:

ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 1 months"
ExpiresByType image/jpg "access plus 1 months"
ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 1 months"
ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 1 months"
ExpiresByType image/vnd.microsoft.icon "access plus 1 months"
ExpiresByType image/x-icon "access plus 1 months"
ExpiresByType image/ico "access plus 1 months"
ExpiresByType application/javascript “now plus 1 months”
ExpiresByType application/x-javascript “now plus 1 months”
ExpiresByType text/javascript “now plus 1 months”
ExpiresByType text/css “now plus 1 months”
ExpiresDefault "access plus 1 days"

Alternatively you can add it to your htaccess file in an <ifModule mod_expires.c></ifModule> block.

If you need to change the length of time a type expires, simply change access plus 1 months to the appropriate length of time, e.g. access plus 1 days, access plus 365 days etc. The time length is by default specified in seconds, but you may also use any of these keys: years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes and seconds.

You can read all about expires headers by reading Yahoo!’s Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site guide.

Alternatively, read the Apache mod_expires documentation.

Here are some tips to optimise your social media profile so that you get effective results:

• Increase your linkability: add a blog, create white papers, aggregate content via ping.fm.
• Make it easy: make tagging and bookmarking simple on your website.
• Reward inbound links: include permalinks, list recent linking blogs, promote linkers with a nofollow tag.
• Help content travel: PDFs, video files, podcasts, slideshows, articles.
• Encourage mash-ups: open your API; permit embeds; permit RSS.
• Add value: be a resource, even if it doesn’t seem like it will help you — provide freemium content.
• Reward helpfulness: notes of thanks, discounts, badges.
• Participation: create awareness, prolong buzz around your website.
• Know your audience: research, community mapping, targeting, metrics.
• Create content: videos, articles, podcasts, widgets, images, slides, plugins.
• Don’t forget your roots: be humble.
• Don’t be afraid to try new things: stay fresh, reinvent the wheel daily.
• Develop a social media optimisation strategy: define objectives, set goals, have a desired channel or channels, track reputation, find influence, create credibility, be a trailblazer.

(via .net magazine, December 2009.)

Ultimately, the important thing is to first research how to optimise each of your social networks. You have to find a niche and decide what content and keywords you would like to optimise against. Although some of your social networking profiles and information can be found in general search engines, you are ultimately optimising to be found within that particular social network’s search engine.

Twitter, for example, until recently did not provide access to its data firehose, therefore, search engines such as Google and Bing were shut out. This has since changed, but until sites such as Twitter and Facebook fully open up to organisations and developers alike, optimising for each site is a necessity.

The timing of this is quite intriguing following the recent hacking attack, supposedly orchestrated by the Chinese authorities, on Google, Yahoo, Adobe and some 20 other major international corporations; whilst there is also the ongoing concern from many quarters about Google is too dominant in many aspects of our online lives.

But less of the cynicism, the five principles are:

• Use information to provide our users with valuable products and services.
  Focus on providing the best user experience is the first tenet of Google’s philosophy. When users share information with us, it allows us to build services and products that are valuable to them. We believe that focusing on the user fosters both the products and privacy-enhancing features that have fueled innovation and built a loyal audience of users online.
• Develop products that reflect strong privacy standards and practices.
  Our ambition is to be at the leading edge of technology, including the development of tools that help users manage their personal information in a simple, accessible manner without detracting from a valuable user experience. We comply with privacy laws, and additionally work internally and with regulators and industry partners to develop and implement strong privacy standards.
• Make the collection of personal information transparent.
  We strive to show users the information used to customize our services. Where appropriate, we aim to be transparent about the information we have about individual users and how we use that information to deliver our services.
• Give users meaningful choices to protect their privacy.
  People have different privacy concerns and needs. To best serve the full range of our users, Google strives to offer them meaningful and fine-grained choices over the use of their personal information. We believe personal information should not be held hostage and we are committed to building products that let users export their personal information to other services. We don’t sell users’ personal information.
• Be a responsible steward of the information we hold.
  We recognize our responsibility to protect the data that users entrust to us. We take security issues seriously and work together with a large community of users, developers and external security experts to make the Internet safer and more secure.

Whether these principles can be fully adhered to by Google is an important question, but they do serve to calm the fears of many about what they’ll do with our data. If nothing else, they do serve to highlight the need for data privacy to be taken seriously by anyone considering building web applications.

If you’re interested in more of Google’s privacy stances, they’ve got an entire portal dedicated to them.

The sections we’re really interested in are 3.1.1 and 3.1.2. These are detailed below.

Regarding production software on a per-CPU and Virtual Machine (VM) basis:

3.1.1 Adobe grants Licensee a license to install and use the Software as Production Software on a per-CPU basis as provided in a separate writing. The total number of CPUs of all of the Computers on which the Software operates may not exceed the total number of CPUs separately licensed. For purposes of this License Metric, (a) all CPUs on a Computer on which the Software is installed shall be deemed to operate the Software unless Licensee configures that Computer (using a reliable and verifiable means of hardware or software partitioning) such that the total number of CPUs that actually operate the Software is less than the total number on that Computer, and (b) a CPU shall mean a single, physical chip with the capability of housing multiple processor cores. If Licensee purchases a 2-CPU Production Software license, then each CPU to which it applies such license must reside in the same Computer. In the event that Licensee desires to apply 2-CPU Production Software licenses to Virtual Machines, then (c) for the Standard version of the Software, the number of 2-CPU licenses required shall be the greater of (i) the number of available physical CPUs for all instances of the Software divided by two (any fractions shall be rounded up for purposes of this provision), or (ii) the total number of Virtual Machines on all Computers on which the Software is installed, and (d) for the Enterprise version of the Software, the number of 2-CPU licenses required shall be the number of physical CPUs on which the Software operates divided by two (any fractions shall be rounded up for purposes of this provision).

The key information here is:

• The Standard license is charged per 2-CPU or per-VM, which ever is greater.
• The Enterprise license is charged per 2-CPU.

But what does this actually mean for Joe Bloggs? Fortunately the guys at Adobe, via Twitter, were on hand to help.

Here is a little table that should whet your appetite:

Regarding production software on a cloud network:

3.1.2 Adobe grants Licensee a license to install and use the Software as Production Software on a Cloud Network on a per-instance basis as provided in a separate writing. The total number of instances that may run on a Cloud Network may not exceed the total number of instances separately licensed. Licensee must purchase and apply 1 instance license to each use of the Standard version of the Software. Licensee may apply 10 instances for each license purchased of the Enterprise version of the Software.

The key information here is:

• The Standard license supports cloud computing, but for each instance, 1 license must be applied.
• The Enterprise license supports up to 10 cloud instances, e.g. on Amazon EC3, Azure, Joyent, Rackspace Cloud etc.

In essence, if you’re going to run a [decent] virtual machine environment, or indeed a cloud environment, it would be far more cost efficient to run ColdFusion Enterprise, since it is costed by the number of virtual machines or increments of 10 cloud instances.

You can download the original Adobe ColdFusion 9 EULA (PDF 400K) from the Adobe website.

The following are free-to-read books on user experience, available online:

Human Computer Interaction

• Mental Models in Human-Computer Interaction: Research Issues About What the User of Software Knows by John M. Carroll and Judith Reitman Olson
• HCI Models, Theories and Frameworks: Toward a Multi-disciplinary Science by John M. Carroll

Interaction Design

• Search User Interfaces by Marti A. Hearst
• Designing Interfaces – Patterns for Effective Interaction Design by Jenifer Tidwell
• Thoughts on Interaction Design by Jon Kolko. with contributions from Ellen Beldner, Uday Gajendar, Chris Connors and Justin Petro

Web Accessibility

• Just Ask: Integrating Accessibility Throughout Design by Shawn Henry
• Building Accessible Websites by Joe Clarke
• Dive Into Accessibility: 30 Days to a More Accessible Website by Mark Pilgrim

If there are any more you think need or can be added to the list, please leave a comment.

(via The UX Bookmark)