April 2007 Archives
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Apr30
Social Media Trends and Engagement
Social computing has decentralized brands and audiences, creating a new class of digital creators, curators, and watchful observers. Citizens of social media transcend time and space, shaping new opinions and carving out a niche audience in ways only an always-on globally-connected network can provide. This new form of distributed creation and communication changes the way brands must market and monitor their business to both new and existing audiences. Who is this new audience? Where do they hang out and participate online, and at what levels?
Forrester Research interviewed 4,500 adults and 4,500 youth in late 2006 to better understand consumer approaches to technology and various levels of social media involvement. Forrester analyst Charlene Li published the results of her study last week in a research paper titled Social Technographics, providing detailed break-downs of social media audiences already engaged in today's Web.
In this week's podcast I discuss social media engagement trends with Forrester Research analyst Charlene Li.
Current activities
Over 60% of young consumers use social networking sites at least weekly, and about 40% check their networks every day. These young creators grew up in the age of personal computers, graphical user interfaces, and digital social annotations. The social computing boom of the past few years has created an online identity and digital hub, altered as frequently as one's clothes.
Adults are also researching news and creating content online. 22% of adults read blogs at least monthly, and 19% of adults surveyed are members of a social media site. Customer ratings and reviews was the most popular online activity, with about 40% of survey participants utilizing sites such as Amazon to read the thoughts and opinions of peers before making a purchase.
Social media involvement
Forrester analysts identified six levels of social media participation in ascending levels of sophistication: inactives, spectators, joiners, collectors, critics, and creators. The categories are not mutually exclusive, as a blog author (a creator) will likely read other blogs (as a spectator), occasionally comment (a critic), and perhaps use web feeds or annotation tools (a collector).
These varied levels of social media participation highlight the need to better engage your audience across the board, easing them into the social media experience. Many social media sites focus on the joiners and creators, setting high barriers of entry and participation. A casual reader might mark a story or video as a personal favorite, or share a collection with friends. A collector might engage more audience members, creating a more focused community for a niche audience. Businesses and websites can engage multiple market segments and open up their community to wider participation.
Listen to the podcast
I discuss these findings and more with Social Technographics research analyst Charlene Li in this week's podcast on social media trends. Our conversation is 20 minutes in length, a 9 MB download.
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Apr23
Offline Web Applications
The technology we know call Ajax was originally created to bring a desktop application into the web browser. Today's heavy web applications have taken the opposite approach, stretching the web browser to its limits and looking for a new home on the user's desktop. Offline access is a hot development topic of 2007, bringing your favorite web applications to the desktop for local storage and data access when disconnected from the data cloud and software as a service.
In this week's podcast I sat down with Brad Neuberg, author of Dojo Storage and Dojo Offline Toolkit, two open source JavaScript libraries enabling the next wave of rich web application development. In our podcast we discuss the demand for offline web components, the current state of the industry, and best practices found across multiple product offerings on the market this year.
Why does the world need offline access?
Even in a world of municipal WiFi, 3G cellular data, and high-speed broadband networks we're not always connected to grid and the online applications and data we care about. Our important data disappears while we're on an airplane, commuting to work, or attending a conference. Offline access creates an additional layer of reliability, extends the reach of web applications, and improves application performance by moving important data closer to its users.
Local storage and sync
Offline web applications have two major components: local storage and synchronization with the cloud. Storage should be enabled on a per-user basis, accepting the restricted rights and access on the local machine. Synchronization is a tricky problem full of mid-air collisions and conflict resolution, causing developers to make a few smart decisions instead of overwhelming the user.
Modern developers have access to megabytes of local storage using browser-based storage technologies and Flash cookies, each bound to the requesting domain. Local storage has evolved beyond cookies, storing large amounts of web application data only a few inches from your keyboard. Frameworks such as Dojo Offline Toolkit abstract the differences between browsers and configurations in much the same way as a toolkit must handle asynchronous request methods.
A local web proxy handles synchronization and graceful fallover with online web services. An offline user sees the exact same user interface and functionality of your web application while offline, yet the browser is talking to a small local server instead of your datacenter. The proxy queues up requests for the remote server, polling for connectivity and replaying any actions when your remote server becomes available.
Performance increases
Placing frequently accessed data on a user's local machine leads to new performance gains and application capabilities. Just as a network proxy might cache frequently accessed webpages for fast access, your local web application proxy already has your most used data available on your local machine. This local server can make batched server requests, submitting 10 actions at a time and persisting its connection until synchronization is complete.
A web application with offline access capabilities will enjoy faster performance even if they never disconnect from the network.
Current product offerings
Dojo Offline Toolkit is a good way to gracefully enhance a web application, but it is not the only offering available. Over the next six months we'll see many new offline products and toolkits for almost every type of developer. Here's a quick list of options, broken down by programming language and web framework.
- ActionScript 3
- Adobe Apollo
- Java 1.5+
- Zimbra Desktop (MPL)
- JavaScript
- Dojo Offline Toolkit (BSD)
- Firefox 3 Offline
- Python with Django
- DjangoKit
- Ruby on Rails
- Joyent Slingshot
Web developers might gravitate towards a particular toolkit based on their existing programming language of choice or a best-of-breed winner may emerge. It's still a bit early to tell.
Podcast details
I cover all these topics and more in this week's podcast on Offline Web Applications with Brad Neuberg. Our 25-minute conversation is a 12 MB download.
Niall Kennedy is a web technologist in San Francisco, California in the United States. I am very interested in the world of...