Why SoIndustry.com? I’ve been monitoring the market[1] for quite some time (check the WebApproriate blog for proof) and SoIndustry has an opportunity, through its positioning, packaging, and initial feature set, to answer my concerns with what does (or doesn’t) exist in other Web applications & services. How? It’s probably best if you sign-up to SoIndustry, I’ll activate your account asap, and you can test out the site - but here’s a brief explanation: You get a professional/industry orientated profile alongside cleanly presented status updates, replies & conversation (which are easy to follow), and commentary on news (and the news itself). You join an industry network which quickly slices through SoIndustry to the content that matters to you (as we build up the userbase, that is - it’s early days). If that wasn’t enough, SoIndustry also allows you to start your own channels for content (group-specific status updates combined with automated RSS aggregation) in the form of ‘Newsfeeds’, which can be shared in the same way that ‘Groups’ are, in other services.

As a beta prototype, SoIndustry is already a lot of fun to use (experienced Web designer/developer friends are telling me the interface feels very polished and that the site is very easy to navigate), it gives you tools and branding opportunities you can’t find anywhere else on the Web (check out @Ryan and @JonMoss and their profile banners), it’s far from perfect, but there are big plans for improvement, and I am definitely going to enjoy working on it more than any other Web application out there right now - I can’t wait to iterate on the feature set.

As for the development process and the logistics of designing and developing a web application on your own (not advisable); getting to grips with Ruby on Rails, and Web development/programming in general, has been challenging. But now that I’ve come some way towards an understanding of how to get from an idea to a working Web application, the product development process is becoming enjoyable. From now on you can expect blog posts on the topic ‘building a Web startup’ to be published here, so if you’re interested in finding out more about how I went from an idea to SoIndustry.com, subscribe to this blog’s RSS feed or sign-up to SoIndustry.com, I’ll be posting updates from my SoIndustry profile, too. It won’t be all about the technology, either. I’ve had numerous meetings on the business-end of the product (incorporation, T&Cs consultations with the professionals, even had a term sheet on the table, at one point) and we’ll cover those, too.

Finally, check out SoIndustry.com and sign-up for a beta account (grab your preferred username identity, several first-names are still available), and leave a comment here for the VIP treatment and to have your account activated asap. And once you’re on the inside, you can send beta invitations to friends/contacts interested in promoting their professional services and keeping in touch with their industry.

[1] The handful of socially-orientated web applications that we hear about the most, i.e. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter & Jaiku.

Well now there’s a clear ‘best practice’ solution, all thanks to the clever people in Japan (and Cabel Maxfield Sasser for highlighting this international trend to people stranded in Stratford-Upon-Shakespeare): Don’t hand out URLs, hand out search terms. Despite being a navigational technique afforded by the Google robots, this really is the most humane way of directing someone to a site:

Paying for SEO services from an SEO consultant will generally get you what you want: higher, relevant ranking in popular search engines. But the majority of what SEO delivers is just best practices. After that, there remains search-engine specific tricks and link-building strategies.

Although I wouldn’t quite take the hardline that Eoghan has in the rest of his posts; in 2008, SEO really does just feel like best practices, not the one-stop-shop for taking your fair share of Internet traffic that it was years gone by.

Being the un-cool Web fanatic that I am, I’m often quizzed about SEO by friends, family, and contacts. But being a social networking, blogging, discussion forum focused Web fanatic (with very little traditional SEO expertise whatsoever), I tell them not to worry about SEO, and that keeping a site’s content semantically structured (a.k.a properly coded with h1s, h2s, CSS for styling, etc) as a base guideline, and fresh and compelling above and beyond that guideline, is far more important than condensing keywords into a welcome page. A news/blog/discussion area, or at least some kind of CMS (content management system), should be considered as a means of regularly publishing more of your clean, well-structured data.

Unfortunately, many people still look at SEO as the implement with which to take a once-off stab at getting a website right (or at least until the next web consultancy comes in for another complete makeover), and that the keyword ratio will work the traffic-magic until the next re-branding. By taking this approach, you’re just creating a static site with contrived copy, not a site which gives people a reason to visit time and time again.

Above all else, focusing on SEO promotes the wrong mindset for website owners. Websites need to evolve, they can’t be built and left to do their job on their own, no matter how many keywords you fit in a three-hundred word paragraph after the Flash intro video (not so good). Everyday you’re writing pitches, proposals, newsletters, press-releases, job ads, marketing campaigns, and sending them all through the email silo. Find a way to keep these resources flowing through your website too, and make sure your have the infrastructure in place to make this a quick, painless process.

Next up, we have the Wii 3D VR experience. This is an awesome video on an innovative application of the coolest video game console controller ever devised. I could try to explain what you’re about to see, but I’ll leave it to the genius behind it; Johnny Lee does a fantastic job of explaining his project, so prepare to be enthralled. I love it when he pulls on the shades and busts out the moves:

After seeing the above video sent to me by Justin James, I only have one thing to say: Give Jonny his PhD! Johnny Lee is a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University who took a standard Nintendo Wii remote and turned a monitor in to something special. You can check out the video above and actually find a sample program here on his website. You can find Wii Remotes for $40 at places like Amazon.com and you may also need a Bluetooth USB dongle for $10.

George Ou, I couldn’t agree more!

It may sound boring to some, but I’m very interested in finding out more about the code that Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube, use for the administration of their communities (if you can still call them that?! Shouldn’t we be calling them ‘virtual economies’ by now?). These applications serve huge numbers of people, and in-turn they probably need to deal with more customer service enquiries than many of the top on-line stores. With 70 million users and counting, just imagine how many enquiries the Facebook customer services team need to handle on a daily basis. There just has to be some nifty systems in place to aid the people on the end of the customer service email address.

So if you have any insights (maybe I’m lucky enough to have someone from one of the major social networking services browsing my site between now and the next blog post), please drop some hints, screenshots, or links to some existing info….I’ll try to pull-together some kind of reward to make it worth your while (would a pack of Smarties do the trick?).

While we’re on the subject, it would also be pretty interesting to get some dirt on any analytical tools that these services might be using. I’m 100% positive that Mark Zuckerberg won’t be sat on the end of Google Analytics account all day, so I’d love to get some idea of the inevitable, custom-built analytical dashboard from which the Facebook CEO plans his next step towards world domination…

Update: This is a bizarre coincidence - Facebook just announced their Developer Admin tool. It’s a GUI (Graphical User Interface) from which developers can make changes to data stored on Facebook’s servers….

Image courtesy of Flickr user Danny Sullivan

Social (Search) Graph API, the second stab at Facebook, is closer to the left-hook that Google wanted to throw in the first round. However, because they’d already made a misjudged move with OpenSocial, Social Graph API feels like a pretty desperate, second chance move to me, and I’m sure Nick O’Neill feels the same way. Google tackled the wrong problem with OpenSocial, they chose an inappropriate name for what is essentially a ‘universal widget wrapper’, and they should have just skipped the widget game entirely, saving all the momentum for Social Graph API. Relationships are the important part, not the trivial applications.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Celebdu

Excluding that strategic issue, Social Graph API is still lacking in so many areas, the biggest of which is a real killer; mainstream users don’t use blogging meta friend systems (XFN & FOAF) to build friend connections, and they probably never will. Why? Because they’re just too techie. Come to think of it, I never read about anyone using those friend systems, and I read blogs about XHTML!

XFN™ (XHTML Friends Network) is a simple way to represent human relationships using hyperlinks. In recent years, blogs and blogrolls have become the fastest growing area of the Web. XFN enables web authors to indicate their relationship(s) to the people in their blogrolls simply by adding a ‘rel’ attribute to their tags

This doesn’t mean to say the developers behind Social Graph API, XFN, and FOAF are doing bad things. I think they’re working towards a great goal, and they all know far more about the Web than I ever will. But because of the first move with OpenSocial, and now the ‘Social Graph’ moniker, Social Graph API just feels too much like Google vs. Facebook take two, rather than the, ‘let’s free social data on the Web!’, which Tim O’Reilly is so eager for. If the Social Graph API had just been announced by the Data Portability Group, well, that would be a different matter entirely.

This morning, I finally let myself checkout the Prologue theme from the Subversion repository with the intention of quickly evaluating whether or not I can use it as a solution for another idea. And, for once, I managed to make a quick evaluation of a new technology (I can easily lose myself for hours trying out new stuff). But that’s not to say Prologue isn’t interesting; it was just so hyped up by the press fanfare, that I was expecting a little more (I was also hoping it would be a perfect fit for that idea, which probably didn’t help when I realised it didn’t do exactly what I wanted it to do). At first, I even assumed it was a real Web service on it’s own domain name….

To quickly sum up my thoughts for you; it’s a great piece of code, but it isn’t going to replace Twitter anytime soon, despite what some may have insinuated. It feels like a blog theme which encourages you to make shorter blog posts and gives you a convenient place to post them from (the Automattic team saw fit to include a post form on the index page). In fact, I bet that’s exactly what the guys at Automattic set out to achieve. It’s really nothing like a competitor to Twitter, but I’m pretty sure Matt and the guys weren’t looking to trounce all over Evan and the team at the top micro-blogging service (not yet, anyway).

My main suggestion is that the guys at Automattic should start thinking of ways to separate content, or automatically classify it, based on the length and expected response from recipients/readers. The Prologue theme simply treats the ’status updates’ as posts, which is fine if you’re happy to work with tags and categories to separate things out (tags are just too cumbersome for status updates). I think there’s room for a system which carefully routes a user through a path of creating an article, or creating a status update. There’s definitely a difference between the two, and user interfaces should be built with consideration for this. I’m certain that status updates are a huge growth area for social networking technologies, and mixing them in with more considered chunks of hypertext, could be interesting.

If you’ve ever made a ‘Wall post’ on Facebook, you’ve seen Ajax in full effect, and you certainly didn’t experience a page refresh whilst you told Uncle Phil how drunk you were last Friday (just under 70 million users and counting, there has to be pets, parents, grandparents, and uncles & aunties by now). Obviously, this Ajax-powered process puts the ‘page-view’ metric in jeopardy.

If the page-view measurement is on the way out, or at least taking the sidelines in the usual arsenal of Web site user tracking tools, we’ll need new methods of understanding what our visitors are really doing on our .coms.

Today, Josh Catone, of ReadWriteWeb, picked up a post from a company called Alenty (whose logo seriously reminds me of the Half-Life logo, they have good taste). The guys at Alenty are demoing a tracking tool for the new Web - a Web sprinkled with Ajax and more advanced user interactions - and you really have to check it out:

The aforementioned posts have probably explained it better than I’ll ever do, but I’ll tell you what I like most about it. The screenshot, above, shows a blog post, user comments, and the new-fangled analytics tool (on the right of the screen - it’s a little intrusive, but at least you won’t miss the whole point of the excerise!). Read the blog post? Slide comments in to view, and the tracker will measure the time that you, the user, spends engaged in the comments. It takes in to account the data visible in the browser chrome, and the mouse movements, too (that would’ve been a deal breaker!).

So, you could forget working out who’s made the most comments on your website. Instead, why not calculate the person who’s comments spend the longest up on screen? That sounds far more interesting to me. However, it’s a matter of doing something with the data after you’ve gathered it, and proving that it really does give you some different insights in to how people behave on our sites. If it just tells us the same old story, but with a new, technological twist; it may be more trouble (and processing power) than it’s worth. Unless you’re Microsoft, of course.

Check out the tool and let me know what you think. In fact, I’d love to know which analytical tools you use at the moment (Google, CrazyEgg, something I’ve never heard of?), so please leave a comment or two telling me how you think this tool compares to your existing tracking tools…

Today, in one of my increasing number of Digg-browsing sessions, I noticed a highly dugg link (caution, there’s some bad language from the locals) for a site called the Internet ‘96. If you’re interested in the history of the Web, you should definitely check it out. I wouldn’t want to spoil the entire link for you, but you just have to see the original Pepsi site;

The Web hasn’t changed one bit, has it?

I’m not particularly interested in the whole Diggnation phenomenon either, although, it does look like Kevin Rose and his co-anchor have a great deal of fun on the show (I’d love to do a UK equivalent, if anyone’s interested?!). At the very least, it’ll definitely go down as an interesting part of the Web’s history, even if it feels like that corner of the Web is only populated with the most technical of the techies.

On that note, the Revision 3 site (another Kevin Rose production) has recently been updated, and it just goes to show how much the Web has moved on since the Internet of ‘96:

The Revision 3 re-design (still room for improvement)

It’s not just the production values that have changed - we’re talking about TV networks for the Internet generation, here! Some people, myself included, pretty much consume all their media through a broadband connection. Don’t even think about contrasting that against everything you saw back in Internet 96!

I know nothing about baseball, but I like the visualisation

The top-down perspective of the ballpark let’s you check out the views from most areas of the ground; just click on a seat that takes your fancy, and you’ll be greeted with a photo taken from that area. Number 359 obviously has the best view - but don’t worry, I didn’t spend my entire afternoon browsing through them all….

I bet this is the worst seat in the park from a baseball fan’s point of view.

The next step for the development team has to be live video streams through each of the image loading areas. Imagine how cool that would be?! You could pay for an ‘access all areas’ virtual ticket, and during the game you’d hot seat round to whichever seating position suits you best. I suggested the same thing on the original post, but I don’t think anyone else felt quite the same about the idea as I did.

p.s. If you’re one of the few people who saw what I was working on before Christmas, you probably have a better insight in to why I’m so excited about this innovative use of the bird’s eye perspective!

p.p.s As I was typing this post (and waiting for WordPress to load……) the SvN guys made another interesting post, but this time on an idea for self-destructing media;

So we wondered… Wouldn’t it be cool if you could attach expiration dates to images, blog entries, or anything you put on the web? You could say “in 18 months this picture should be deleted” or “3 years from now delete this blog post.”

My opinion is that employers, recruiters, and HR managers are only becoming more accustomed to finding media on social networking sites that would, in times gone by, have seriously affected a graduate’s chances of winning a job. These days, I don’t think people are so naive as to think that, just because the photos weren’t tagged in Facebook in 2002, that people weren’t getting drunk at University. We just need to stop worrying about this, to stop scouring Facebook for dirt, and to start being more realistic in our expectations of finding a spotless, online candidate persona. I find it strange if I can’t find drunken photos of my friends!