As I post more to our blog you’ll notice a common theme…efficiency. Efficiency of time, effort, materials - you name it and I’ll try to figure out how to it do better, faster and cheaper. And yes, it can be as annoying as it sounds to those around me. And yes I realize that taking time to write this post could be seen as an inefficient use of otherwise productive work time, but even robots need some down time - see Futurama, Bender Bending Rodríguez.

This post was inspired by some time I spent flipping through Super Crunchers at a local bookstore. The first line sums it up nicely:

“Recommendations make life a lot easier. Want to know what movie to rent? The traditional way was to ask a friend or to see whether reviewers gave it a thumbs-up. Nowadays people are looking for Internet guidance drawn from the behavior of the masses.”

Now, don’t immediately raise the social community banner on me. Ian Ayres, the author of Super Crunchers, is more inline with the Moneyball school of thought and looks to good old-fashioned number crunching to generate those helpful recommendations.

The most obvious examples of this are the collaborative filtering algorithms on Amazon that serve you recommended items. And there’s Google, learning all about you (maybe too much) from your search habits. One of my favorites is Farecast.com, which uses historical price information and other market indicators to determine if the current price for an airline ticket is a good buy or if the price is trending down, and you should wait. I try to be as efficient as possible with my spending , i.e. cheap, so a site like Farecast let’s me rest easy when I purchase an airline ticket.

To me there are benefits to this line of thinking beyond getting consumer-purchasing recommendations. I can envision an online experience that is tailored to my interests, not just on a specific site, but across all online content. News sites that show me recommended stories based on my previous reading habits so I don’t have to dig through content that is of no interest to me. Or having a search engine that understands context based questions rather then just matching keywords…dreams of the semantic web? Maybe, but as we become more networked and connected as a society the pool of information will be even more overwhelming.

So while Amazon learns more as you interact on their site, what is it learning about all those others sites you browse? Nothing. Amazon has no access to your shopping habits off their site.

For me this idea of decentralized and disparate data aggregation and management is one of the major questions moving forward. Every time we use the Internet we leave huge amounts of fractured data in our wake.

How can that data be synthesized and analyzed to make the Internet smarter and my time online more efficient?

Andy Sackmann, Client Services

A new study from The Nielsen Company finds that 49 percent of U.S. consumers are reducing their spending to compensate for rising gas prices, up four points from June 2007. 70 percent of consumers are combining shopping trips and errands, and 41 percent are eating out less, and 39 percent staying home more often.

Todd Hale, senior vice president of Consumer Shopping & Insights, said “…our research shows a jump in consumers shopping on the Internet as a way to deal with high gas prices… a wake-up call for manufacturers and retailers alike to step up their ‘direct-to-consumer’ efforts and utilize the Internet to communicate directly with consumers in 2008… “

One of the big questions for marketers who want to get onto social networks like MySpace and Facebook is always, how many eyeballs are on each?

The smart fellow Jeremiah Owyang, an analyst for Forrestor Research is a great person to read to keep up with the latest numbers, as well as assorted smart thoughts. The social network space changes so quickly that it really
isn’t easy to get a good handle on what’s happening (remember Friendster?…
A pupae of an idea in 2002, media darling by 2003, surpassed by MySpace in
2004 and now barely mentioned). Jeremiah is kind enough to share what he’s
gathered recently on three of the biggies: Facebook, MySpace and Reunion.

http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2008/01/09/social-network-stats-facebook-
myspace-reunion-jan-2008/

Wait, Reunion? Haven’t seen a lot about this one yet, but a social network that’s already profitable and caters to an older crowd certainly piques our interest. Personally, we are keeping an eye on Eons for the older crowd, which seems solid, though we heard they had some layoffs back in Sept.

It’s also interesting to note that, in spite of Facebook being the media darling du jour, MySpace still does have about twice as many active users. Yes, these numbers are self reported & must be taken with a large-ish grain of salt, but it’s interesting.

In the end though, going social…which we can’t say enough positive things about…does require a certain leap of faith. You’re simply not going to have the data and hard numbers you might be accustomed to if you come from a ‘trad marketing’ background. But many of your competitors are already taking the leap–if you’re thinking about Facebook, you might want to note that 13,000 applications (that’s Facebook speak for the little embedded widgets, games, etc that users can add to their profile) have been created just since Facebook opened up the application platform to outside developers in summer 2007. While not all of these are professionally created, or created for the purposes of marketing, many of them were.

If you’re thinking about taking the leap, we think there’s nothing wrong with starting small–one simple widget on one platform is a great way to learn more about what works for your brand and what doesn’t. And keep in mind that it always comes back to your brand–you can make widgets til the cows come home, but unless they resonate with real people, by being compelling or useful, or reflective of a person’s values, or connect in some other way, it’s just a bunch of pixels on a new platform…nothing to get excited about.

Beth Koloski, Interaction Design

I intentionally differentiate between my personal and professional interests. My current profession demands that I stay up to date and involved in the inner-workings of social communities. But at a personal level I have never fully invested the time to create a robust and active profile on any of the major communities. Oh sure, I have accounts on Flickr, Plaxo, Facebook, del.icio.us, Twitter, LinkedIn and the like but I use the vast majority simply for research – del.icio.us and Linkedin are probably the two exceptions, but I would argue that those are social utilities, not communities.

So what would motivate me to create that connection to a larger group of people and want to invest my time and information to interact with them? How about some actual usable, tangible and real world information that I can use to make my life easier and more efficient.

This post from Matt McAlister gives some great examples – “…you can imagine that you will walk into H&M and discover that one of your first-degree contacts recently bought the same shirt you were about to purchase. You buy a different one instead.”

This post from Jeff Jarvis describes the concept of a community of travelers on a plane. He says that “at the simplest level, we could connect while in the air to set up shared cab rides once we land, saving passengers a fortune.”

These, what I call “practical communities,” offer me actionable and useable information to improve my everyday offline experiences. In the majority of situations I’m not interested in how many friends are attached to your particular profile, what bands you like, your random rants on twitter or photos from your last outing to wherever. What I am interested in is information you have that I consider valuable. This perceived value is what will motivate me to get involved, participate and share my own information. From conversations with peers and co-workers I know I am not alone in my lack of motivation for social community participation, but as Matt McAlister puts it, “I think we’re finally about to see the useful combination of the 4 W’s - Who, What, Where, and When.”

Andy Sackmann, Client Services

Texturemedia is committed to following web standards in all of our projects. Web standards provide a basis for our technical innovation, and help us produce our award-winning designs on the web.

We recently completed a project for Boulder Associates. The project is basically a portfolio site that showcases their beautiful architecture. The majority of the site is rendered in Flash, providing a seamless user experience from one section of the site to another:

But what about people who do not have Flash, or who choose not to use it? What about people who are disabled, or who have other special needs? By applying relevant web standards, and by careful coding, we were able to produce a site that degrades gracefully even in the most primitive of browsers.

Lynx, for example, is a text-only browser that has been around since the beginning of the web. And while it cannot display any of the images in the portfolios, the rest of the content on the site is still perfectly accessible:

Standards compliance also works well with search engines, since most search engine indexing services are based on the same standards themselves.

It would have been easy to produce a site that was flash only, and presented the usual “you must have flash to view this site” message for anyone who didn’t have Flash. But going the extra step not only makes for a happier client, it makes that little bit of the web a better place.

Jonathan Reid, Technology