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May 24, 2007 | Taken from
Digital Johnson by
Chris Johnson
A Whole New Facebook
Today Facebook announced a dramatic shift in strategy in the form of the Facebook Platform. In a sentence, the Facebook Platform will allow anyone (yes, that may mean you) to develop applications that Facebook users can install into their profile. Although rules do exist on how you can use/store profile data, Facebook promises little regulation on what the apps do, even allowing outside companies to capture revenue via their applications. This opens up the 6th most trafficked site in the world to companies and visitors alike to create applications that directly generate revenue from Facebook.At Terralever, we’ve been actively working on a few applications for the new platform for some time now and we’re participating in the launch event today in CA as a developer partner. The applications that we released along with the platform launch include: - stuffCLOUD - a interest visualization tool that allows you to compare your intersests to your friends and the Facebook community as a whole. It also includes a nifty visualization tool that shows, real-time as interests are being added/removed across all of Facebook
- FlipBook - a super-simple, visual Flipbook that allows you to take Facebook albums and present them into a Flipbook on your profile page for others to browse.
More to come on this as it progresses, but exciting times are surely ahead.
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May 24, 2007 | Taken from
The Dolphin Safe Blog by
Chris Jones
I believe in Godin
Recently a few co-workers and I went to see Seth Godin. Held at the Tempe Improv, it was an interesting venue for a marketing seminar. Maybe this is what all comedy clubs do at 9AM. Before Seth came out I had one of those thoughts you just kind of keep to yourself. I imagined Gallagher coming out on stage and smashing a watermelon with a sledgehammer, shocking the entire room of marketers. Like there was some kind of scheduling error.
So I chuckled to myself at this ridiculous scenario, then I started to really think about the legendary Gallagher. To refresh your memory, he was a comedian from the eighties who has made a career of smashing watermelons on stage. Yeah, that's supposed to be funny. And doing it for over 2 decades is the polar opposite of funny. They explode when struck with a sledgehammer, we get it. But somewhere along the line that was accepted as being hilarious, and took off. But hey, it took some chutzpah for him to try that gimmick, and it worked. I guess you can't bash the guy completely.
So anyway, Seth comes out and he's got one of those eccentric personalities that instantly grabs you. He didn't smash any large fruit on stage, but the guy delivered his marketing expertise in a very entertaining way.
Discussing subjects from his new book called "The Dip", he seemed to strike a nerve with everything he said. We all get that high off coming up with a good idea. Once we decide to execute it, you are in for 'the dip' before any success comes out of it. It’s going to get difficult, because anything worth doing is. If that 'dip' seems too hard, then we'll switch our focus to an easier idea. In essence, we give up.
‘The Dip’ is not just something for entrepreneurs to get through. In my experience in advertising and now in the interactive world, ideas I present have to get through the dips. The idea has to be worth the time and effort, and most importantly, the money. And if it’s a little out there, clients seldom go for it. The safe concepts usually get picked. There is comfort in mimicking others and being safe. Less dips.
When it comes to interactive executions, the public craves the different idea. They want something new. I will admit, it does depend on the client, the product and the situation. But if you are trying to build brand awareness, the safe approach might be the biggest waste of time and money. Personally, I think the safe ideas are what we should fear in interactive marketing.
What if Gallagher played it safe?
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May 23, 2007 | Taken from
The Dolphin Safe Blog by
Chris Jones
Myspace, can we still be friends?
I remember my first social network, 'Friendster'. We hung out a little back in 2003 and parts of 2004. I was pretty into it, then a friend introduced me to 'MySpace'. MySpace pretty much knocked my socks off, and for the first time in my life I had a serious social network. I pretty much saw MySpace everyday.
Thinking I was going to be with MySpace forever, I declined opportunities to log into this hot new network named 'Facebook'. I had some buddies tell me that Facebook was smarter and better looking, but I didn't give into the temptation and decided to be faithful to MySpace.
Well, I cheated on MySpace the other day, and got on Facebook. And I have to admit, I enjoyed it. Facebook has a beautiful interface and doesn't nag me all day with annoying requests like MySpace does. I don't think MySpace knows I have been seeing Facebook for the last week, but it's just a matter of time. We already have about 12 mutual friends. I know it’s early, but I think Facebook may be my soul network.
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May 21, 2007 | Taken from
The Terralever Experience by
Leane Waddington
Terralever wins AMA Web Advertising Creative Award
Congratulations to Terralever for taking home the Web Advertising Creative Award for work on the Flugtag site http://www.redbullflugtagusa.com , game, ad creative and web applications. The AMA sponsored event was at the very cool, retro Hotel Valley Ho in Old Town Scottsdale - what an amazing view from the rooftop!
There was a great presentation by Jackie Huba, Author - "Citizen Marketers: When People are the Message". She talked about how the face of marketing is changing and our consumers are becoming a driving force behind brand and product advertising through online evangelism and social media. As web marketers we all need to respect the power of our clients and consumers as they are constantly pushing content to the world wide web through blogging, podcasts, wikis, vlogs, social networking, Myspace, Facebook, You Tube and so many other channels. The idea is to develop creative ways to facilitate and foster that content. It's the best "word of mouth" campaign!
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May 16, 2007 | Taken from
context by
Scott McAndrew
Google Universal Search, Timeline and Map Views
Google announced the beginning of a move toward 'Universal Search' today in a press release. Directly from the press release:
Google's vision for universal search is to ultimately search across all its content sources, compare and rank all the information in real time, and deliver a single, integrated set of search results that offers users precisely what they are looking for. Beginning today, the company will incorporate information from a variety of previously separate sources – including videos, images, news, maps, books, and websites – into a single set of results. At first, universal search results may be subtle. Over time users will recognize additional types of content integrated into their search results as the company advances toward delivering a truly comprehensive search experience. Of interest elsewhere in the press release is information about a version of Google's search on Google's Experimental Lab that provides the option of a timeline or map views of results. Here's a few samples:
Here's a view of 'gas prices' shown on the timeline view:
Google Experimental Labs Search: Gas Prices - Timeline View
Here's a view of 'Starbucks' shown on the timeline view:
Google Experimental Labs Search: Starbucks - Timeline View
Here's a view of 'Nato' on the map view:
Google Experimental Labs Search: Nato - Map View
Here's a view of 'Katrina' on the map view:
Google Experimental Labs Search: Katrina - Map View
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May 15, 2007 | Taken from
The Dolphin Safe Blog by
Chris Jones
Ray Ban Gets Their Viral On
There's a good chance you've seen this. That video of a guy catching a pair of sunglasses perfectly with his face. You can tell it's fake with special effects, but it's still fun to watch. So is this just another bunch of you-tubers soaking up their 15 minutes, or is a clever ad agency behind it? If it's PG enough and has a brand attached to it in some way, you have to question it. In this case, a classic pair of Ray Ban sunglasses happen to be used in this piece.
Cue eye brow raise and rubbing of chin.
Well not surprisingly, Ray Ban is behind this viral video. And kudos to whoever put this together. Something that can get this much positive exposure is the holy grail of interactive marketing, and every company would do it if they could.
So are we at the point where we are annoyed by these attempts? This is a new form of advertising that we are getting used to, and it usually involves fooling people in order to make it spread. So it is different in that aspect, but I think it triggers the same emotions that any form of advertising would. If it's good, you don't mind it. If it's not good, you loathe it. The good thing about viral marketing is the poor executions most likely won’t land in your inbox.
So now do you see a video of a guy catching sunglasses with his face, or a group of Ray Ban execs high-fiving each other?
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May 14, 2007 | Taken from
context by
Scott McAndrew
Google and Your Personal Information
 There is a GREAT audio interview of Avinash Kaushik posted up on Eight Black. Avinash Kaushik is a Google Analytics Evangelist. The interviewer, Simon Chen, asks Avinash several times if Google intermingles the data it collects from various sources. Avinash answers "no" each time, which makes each subsequent query even funnier. Seriously though, it's definitely worth a listen if you're remotely interested in search, Google or analytics.
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May 10, 2007 | Taken from
Tater Salad by
Casey Rayl
The Video War
It's about to begin in earnest. Some Battles have already been fought. There have been a few casualties and a few heroes that have really made a name for themselves.
But the time we've all been waiting for, the time we've all been talking about for a decade now, is finally here. The real battle is about to begin.
And I think we're going to see two different sides of the war going on simultaneously; the hardware battle for living room dominance and the software battle for distribution systems. We've got some big players in this fight for video dominance and everyone wants to be the team that puts video/television (and their ad revenue stream) in front of consumers.
But to be honest, I think that hardware is the LEAST important battle right now. That hardware battle will rage on for years. Eventually video hardware and software systems will merge and the battle will continue. But that's not what's on fire hot right now.
The MOST important battle that is going to be fought this year is the battle for the PC. Google showed us just how important that realm is with its enormous purchase price of YouTube. There are dozens of other video sites popping up all over the place. If you want to stay in the browser, then that's fine. But the browser is going to go away as we know it. No time REAL soon I think (that's a topic for another post). And the king of the video delivery isn't going to be a website.
Enter the video player players: Joost, Adobe Media Player, and my favorite The Democracy Player. Apple has already gotten started as well with video delivery on iTunes. Very soon too I think we're going to see some kind of technology from Microsoft leveraging the Silverlight platform that will achieve the same kind of delivery system as these other players (though perhaps still tied to the browser). Or very likely they'll get something akin to iTunes into the Windows Media Player (though I can't say I expect anything great out of it).
But Joost, AMP and Democracy are the players I see with the biggest potential. An important aspect of these players is cross-platform-ability. All of these are either platform agnostic (AMP runs on Apollo, a runtime for Windows, OSX & Linux; Democracy is tooled in Mozilla's XUL platform which runs on anything you want to throw it on) or has at least been built for the up-and-coming OSX platform.
How these players get their content to the people work in slightly different ways. The way the user interacts with these systems works in different ways. How content creators get paid for their content works differently. What advertisers can do to get their product in front of people is very different.
XML feeds are obviously going to be a very important aspect to this battle. PodCasts have really taken off for audio, and video podcasting is really starting to gain momentum. Even content from content websites can be gotten from feeds (such as YouTube feeds). What the players allow the users, and more importantly the content creators, to do with this information is really how the battles will be fought.
I'm really looking forward to this fight!
(For some more very good reading on the topic, check out Nicholas Reville's essay on RSS and video distribution)
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May 08, 2007 | Taken from
Running With Code by
Robert Paveza
Beware overloaded operator ==
Tonight I was made aware of a bug in a library that I wrote that implements the cryptographic authentication sequences used by Blizzard Entertainment's Battle.net gaming service. The user reported that his code simply stopped executing; it never occurred to me that he might just be swallowing an exception (particularly if his code was running on a secondary thread). But when I reviewed my code, I saw that all of my loops were deterministic, and although I had a couple lock { } blocks throughout the code path, none of them were in places that I would be blocking.
Frustrated, I pulled out the code and wrote a test project using his input data to call the function. I generated a NullReferenceException when I called the function he labeled suspect, so then I integrated the actual project into my solution. I found the source of the problem immediately: it was a third-party BigInteger class I'd gotten from CodeProject. This wasn't a *major* surprise - I'd had a few issues with this BigInteger class on another project that dealt with cryptographic calculations. The big one was where the error was being raised:
1: public static bool operator ==(BigInteger bi1, BigInteger bi2)
2: {
3: return bi1.Equals(bi2);
4: }
So at this point I'm somewhat puzzled, except when I check the values of bi1 and bi2 in the debugger: they're both null! I step back one level in the call stack and find:
1: if (verifier == null)
2: CalculateVerifier(salt);
At this point I'm not entirely sure what I can do. If I modify the operator == to check bi1 and bi2 as == null, won't it result in a circular loop? Then it occurs to me that I should modify the calling code:
1: if (object.ReferenceEquals(verifier, null))
2: CalculateVerifier(salt);
System.Object.ReferenceEquals(objA, objB) returns true if the object references are identical, or if both object references are null.
This is a good lesson to me: don't overload operator == on reference types.
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May 02, 2007 | Taken from
context by
Scott McAndrew
My Maps from Google or Microsoft's Virtual Earth?
In April Google added a "My Maps" feature to its online map offering. It allows anyone with a Google account to create their own maps with push pins and annotation which can be published publicly or kept private, but still shared. I thought I'd put My Maps to a quick task and see how well it did in comparison to Microsoft's Virtual Earth which also has similar functionality.
As expected, it was incredibly simple to use. Using My Maps was completely intuitive, and within 5 minutes or so I had a map that we could provide to those visiting our offices which is far better than what Google naturally maps (for some odd reason, Google Maps incorrectly maps our location by one block).
What I Created in Google Maps with My Maps
I also tried Microsoft's Virtual Earth for comparison. I thought it might have the better end-product as Virtual Earth's 3d maps look great. Unfortunately, after spending the time to make the map and save the collection, when I tested it, it doesn't retain the map view that I selected when creating the map. So, instead of getting exactly what I created, users viewing the map get Virtual Earth's default 'top-down, roads only' view which wasn't what I'd want them to see-I wanted that great 3d view! Additionally, it lacked the ability to create different types of push pins for the map (which I thought was great on Google's My Maps). Finally, the link Virtual Earth provided for sharing my map does not work at all in Safari on the Macintosh (the link redirects the browser to intl.local.live.com).
What I Created in Virtual Earth
A 3d Map with Push Pins - NICE!
What Users who Click on my Shared Link See
Not so Nice
Virtual Earth was reasonably easy to use, and the 3d view is great. I felt that the 3d map view provided better context to someone visiting our location. However, there were too many negatives with the Live mapping overall. Google's My Maps (more information and help) is incredibly easy to use, and it does what it does well. Google takes this one.
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May 02, 2007 | Taken from
context by
Scott McAndrew
Silverlight: Streaming Video Quality
 WOW. I was very, very surprised by how high the quality of streamed video is that I'm seeing in Silverlight. I downloaded the latest plug-in (the 1.0, not the 1.1 Alpha) and navigated over to the FOX Video Browser example. The video quality is unbelievable. Go to the demo, install the plug-in (if you need to), start a video, and then double click in the video to go full-screen. It's impressive.
I've also been using Joost for several weeks now, and have been giving the quality the benefit of the doubt because I felt it was reasonable that quality be constrained by bandwidth and codec limitations. Well, the Silverlight streaming example utilizing Microsoft's codec is far better at this point.
Full disclosure: I am having a problem with the plug-in and Safari (I'm viewing the samples in Firefox). I'm not sure what the issue is and am going to see if anyone here from Microsoft can provide some advice.
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