Two widgets, both provided by major companies have some discrepancies in their data and the election hasn’t even started yet! I’m not sure who’s wrong here, Google or Microsoft, but either way someone’s data isn’t accurate. When it comes to something like an election - accuracy is very important. As best I can tell, Hawaii is the last poll to close and from the even hour discrepancy, it seems to me someone didn’t account for daylight savings or a timezone somewhere.

Screen grabs taken at the same time

The live widgets for both companies are below. (more…)

Recently I was helping a friend get his new movie review blog started and decided to review a few monetizing strategies. The offering from Amazon struck me as interesting and so I have posted it here for everyone to see. This item in particular is a great widget because it puts content that I couldn’t otherwise create directly into my site. It becomes a value add for me, the publisher, because I get a very rich experience for my users, that I can tailor to meet my content needs, while Amazon gets potential sales leads. Of course I get a kickback too…

Amazon also offers more traditional banner size advertising, product links and other integration points. Check them out as a possible option for monetizing your site.

OpenSocial, a group effort to create a widget platform spear headed by Google, has a few glitches that I’d love to see fixed. They are largely comparison items from Facebook, who has recently announced that it will open source it’s own platform. Regardless of the motivation, there are a couple of items I’d like to see ported from Facebook to OpenSocial.

1. Support for FBML like syntax: “Hold on a second! Standard HTML is the benefit of OpenSocial over Facebook” folks are probably thinking. While that’s true, without an effective way to capture and store user information for more than 24 hours (pesky terms of service documentation) developers are left querying for friends pictures etc over and over and over again. While this isn’t inherently a problem, if you wanted to display a 1,000 profile pictures for some unknown reason, you need to call the API a large number of times. Then generate the HTML and pass it to the client. This makes applications painfully slow. It’s great to store the numeric id (12345678) and be able to pass it back to the pre-client for parsing. The best examples are and . These really are very handy.
2. Support for FQL like syntax: OpenSocial does a great job of providing methods for gathering most of the information you would want from the social graph, but it’s lacking in the ability to remix the data in new and interesting ways (easily). OpenSocial requires all of the heavy lifting to be done on the client (or the application backend if their API allows it). Most clients have a reasonable limit as to how big data structures can effectively be and have the application still function. Processing on the applications infrastructure negates another advantage of OpenSocial which is requiring very little in the way of hardware to operate.

There are also some learnings here for Facebook. I’d like to see a few OpenSocial conventions ported from OpenSocial to Facebook.

1. OAuth Signature: To be fair, Facebook does provide signed requests, but it would be great if they’d use a standards based signature instead of their own homegrown version.
2. External JavaScript Libraries: Facebook’s FBJS is powerful and provides most functionality that developers need. It’s even been open sourced so it can be used outside of the Facebook universe. However, developers who’ve been working with jQuery, ProtoType or any of the other numerous javascript libraries have to start at the beginning again. Additionally, they may be missing the functionality in the FBJS library that they need.

Both platforms still have a ways to go in terms of making developers life’s easier and users application experiences more robust. I think it’s great news that Facebook is opening their platform more. It’s really more symbolic than anything, because they still ultimately control what they do or do not implement on their platform. Bebo is the only other social network using Facebook’s model and it still requires some re-writing for developers because of syntax difference and lack of some features.

Recently I needed a color picker for a project and spent a little bit of time reviewing JavaScript color picker tools for integration in the application. What I found was a wide variety of tools that are either hard to implement or hard to use. That aside, there were a few that were reasonable and so I’m calling them out here should anyone need such a thing. It should also be said that there is a lot of room for improvement in the utility space should anyone want to take a stab at improving color pickers.

The most intuitive tool for non PhotoShop users is the one provided by ColorJack. The layout is typical of PhotoShop but without the RGB, CMYK and other color models being in the foreground. Those tools, while useful to designers and production shops, are meaningless to application users. The hue slider is intuitive and easy to use and the picker works in all browsers. What I did find complicated about the picker was it’s ability to easily integrate into a form that might require multiple color selections (such as a layout editor) and the Dynamic HTML placement was unreliable. It did have the least technical feel though ultimately making it the easiest to use. jQuery users be warned, you may need to tweak some of the code as there’s overlap. The widget includes the core functions it requires.

My personal favorite is from John Dyer who provides a clean PhotoShop like implementation. While I’ve not had the opportunity to use it on a site, and therefore have no experience with the level of difficulty integrating it, I have a feeling this will find it’s way into many administrative tools I’ve got on the roadmap over the next few months. The look at feel is clean and simple and the code is structured in a logical. I’ll likely be working to combine his code into a smaller package that I can easily add as a method to my input classes for the task (much like the tool below from WebReference.

The last color picker I want to call out is a detailed article on how to build useful picker from WebReference.com. It integrates cleanly multiple instances on a single form and has two different “modes” one as a simple scale (seen below) and another as a photoshop like tool. Obviously with a little time, this would be easy to modify to suit your needs (assuming you wanted to take away either the PhotoShop gradient or the color strip).

What none of these tools do is help with making good color choices. While I offer a tool to assist in finding some level of color harmony leveraging complementary colors, It would be neat if one of these tools let you find a set of colors based on the color wheel. Use mathematical operations, it’s possible to determine clash, complementary, split complementary, analogous, monochromatic and so on. Perhaps it’s time for a re-write of that tool?

Yesterday I posted about how bleak the social networking landscape was becoming on Facebook and by extension, other social networks as well. Today I want to explore what a traditional media and existing business can do to promote themselves on Facebook without assuming that a widget is the panacea to save their business. This is another excerpt from a proposal I developed and felt was worth sharing with the community at large.

Gone are the days of instant success large scale applications. Users have a plethora of options when selecting their applications. For example, Twitter has their own application - but there are more than 20 others that seek to compete against it, each leveraging the utility of Twitter in it’s own way. Success in this overly saturated market will come from the niche audiences and remixing successful sites that are not already on Facebook.

Businesses need to leverage the “page” feature more extensively on Facebook to build up their brand as well as a buzz. The “fans” of this page have indirectly offered you their email address through Facebook. While you can’t export them into your current email marketing campaign system, you can still target these folks directly using updates. You can promote products, actions and even feature partnerships. Very few companies are effectively leveraging this right now. (Red) and Presidential Candidate Barack Obama being two I’ve seen, although there are likely others.

Companies that have existing media outlets such as newsletters, brochures and websites can leverage their existing media to build the fan base within Facebook. Creating an online persona for their product or service is the first step. When users take action within the Facebook “page” they’re actions are recorded and eligible for promotion on their friends and larger network news feeds. This viral component is critical for success because their friends likely have similar interests. This indirect endorsement of your product reaches a like minded audience that is between 1 and 5,000 people each time one person becomes a fan, rates your application and so on. The implications are huge; it gets your brand in front of many many more people. MySpace is slowly copying this feature, under the name Friend Updates, from Facebook. This is a powerful tool that companies need to leverage effectively in their social networking strategy. How access to this feed of information is gated by MySpace will be interesting to watch as their platform goes live.

To show an example of this, I recently created a Blackberry Pearl “page”. With out advertisement, corporate sponsorship or endorsement by the parent company - without having any real content - it continues to attract “fans” whom I can now send messages to as I see fit! Not unlike traditional media, it’s important to respect your users, but you can see the power here. If RIM were to provide incentives on this page, they could grow this into a powerful advocating tool. Incidentally, if someone from RIM would like to take over this page, please just let me know. I’ve also noticed someone else followed suit and has created one for the Curve.

Depending on your core business, there may be an existing Facebook application that you can leverage to build your brand more completely. For example, if your business involves publishing of content, a RSS feed on your Facebook page is a no-brainer for driving traffic back to your website. In the event that building out your own widget is something you’ll likely follow through on, you’ll be able to leverage the fan base once you have an application. Spreading the word through direct communication with each and every fan of your application.

Last, but no least (truly most important) social networks are about making connections. If pursuing a widget is the correct strategy for your business, be warned that it must somehow allow self expression while allowing the user to feel they are connected and part of some larger community. You might be better served purchasing an existing widget that has some traction within the network, then building one from the ground up.