So I haven’t been exactly excited about a new browser for a long time. I was a faithful FireFox user since before 1.0, but in the last year I’ve been primarily using Safari. I feel it’s just cleaner, faster and well … more Mac-like. I’ve heard FireFox 3 is now much, much faster, but I haven’t felt overly compelled to upgrade.

That said, I’ve been hearing a lot lately about this browser called Flock. It’s been around for a while. In fact, its website says it was created in 2005. At its core, Flock is essentially just a customized FireFox. For the last couple years, that’s all I really knew about it. But with the recent release of it’s 1.0 version, Flock has become much more, and has jumped into the social networking fray with both feet.

Flock’s features are many, but the one that stands out most for me is its “People” sidebar. All you have to do is log into one of their many supported social networks, and Flock detects it and asks if you’d like to “remember” that network. If you accept, that network is added as a tabbed entry in the left sidebar (see left). Log into more networks, and more tabs are added. This gives you the ability to see your friend’s status updates, messages, file uploads and more.

Currently (as of version 1.2), Flock supports Facebook, Twitter, Digg and Pownce. It also supports media sites like Flickr, YouTube, Photobucket and Picasa.

And for you bloggers, Flock can also detect when you’ve logged into a supported blog platform like Blogger, Livejournal, Typepad or Wordpress. And it makes it easy to post new blog entries directly from Flock’s built-in editor.

Other useful features include a built-in RSS reader, the ability to post bookmarks to services like Delicious and Magnolia and integrated webmail like Gmail, Yahoo! and AOL Mail.

So far, Flock is filling a very real need for me. Seems my memberships keep growing (I finally just broke down and joined Facebook), and traveling to each site for updates was getting more and more time-consuming. Now I have the exact same browsing experience, thanks to the FireFox engine, but I have all my services at my fingertips and can see updates just by glancing at my sidebar. As an added bonus, most FireFox extensions, like the invaluable FireBug work perfectly in Flock.

So if you already use FireFox and also have a lot of social networks or blogs to keep track of, give Flock a try.

For a quick crash course, see Flock’s intro videos on YouTube, or this great segment from Mahalo Daily.

Facebook has been actively trying to keep their title as one of the top “social network” sites by expanding the capabilities of their site to allow their users to do more than on others like MySpace. One of their biggest moves happened about a year ago when they started allowing developers to create fun applications or widgets that users can add to their Facebook profile. This became very popular among the Facebook community, but has recently been met with skepticism as Slide.com, one of the largest Facebook widget creators, got in trouble recently for one of their applications that exploited a security hole in Facebook’s API.

So Why is it a Bigger Problem Than it Seems?

To allow applications to be fully integrated into the Facebook interface, Facebook allows for applications to retrieve any information that you have posted on your profile, except for contact information like email address and phone number. The tricky problem however, is that Facebook has no way of tracking what these applications do with this information once they obtain it because these applications reside on external servers hosted by the applications creators, not Facebook’s servers. To protect Facebook users though, Facebook put in their privacy policy exactly what you can and cannot do with that information. In particular, it states that applications may only store a person’s Facebook ID, all other information must be obtained by making a request to Facebook’s server.

Slide.com got in trouble because it stored users’ information, bypassed the privacy settings Facebook put in place, and displayed that information to anyone who has added the application. Unfortunately, this is not an easy problem for Facebook to solve; many applications in place use people’s information in fun, creative ways that go along the lines of Facebook’s vision, so they cannot remove that functionality. For the Slide.com incident, Facebook’s only available action was to remove the problem application, they can do nothing to fix the “security hole” but to reinforce their policies, because too many applications are dependent on the current functionality.

In an age when everyone’s personal information is digital in one form or another, everyone has become aware of the risk of personal information getting into the wrong hands. This is why I believe that yes, this is an issue. But, if there is concern over the way that Facebook handles personal information, then the quick and easy fix is just to not put any information on the site that you may not want others to see. I have created a couple of Facebook applications, and I can attest to Facebook’s good intentions with information handling and to their general security practices, but I won’t be putting my social security number on it anytime soon.

Google seems to be entering the formidable teenage years and learning that it has talent but it can’t excel at everything — in other words, it can’t rule the world! Yeah, we all know that Google was touted as a prodigy because it revolutionized the search world with its search engine/friendly user interface. And it has been accustomed to constant praise - the latest comes from Harris Poll which exclaimed that Google has towered over Microsoft in reputation. But Google is hitting a wall as it tries to expand beyond search marketing.

Google’s business can still be summed up in two words — online search. It is heavily dependent on search to sustain itself (99% of Google revenue comes from search), whether through Google-owned websites or partners network. The good news is that Google’s business model will remain viable as marketers continue to invest money in advertising alongside search results. However, Google needs an alternate revenue source if it aims to protect its current position, much in the way that Apple is reliant on more than iPod/iTunes to generate revenue (Mac desktops and laptops sales are also responsible for Apple’s continued success). The problem is that Google can’t seem to focus on alternative revenue streams — in checking out future offerings on Google Labs one will find mostly search solutions. In my opinion, this is way too narrow of a focus if Google is to consider the future.

According to a recent Washington Post article, Google actually intends to focus on several areas this year, including mobile. And while mobile has produced services like Mobile Google Maps and GOOG411, a free directory assistance service, these applications have failed to generate significant revenue for Google (currently reported at only 1% of Google’s total revenue). And to add to this pain, news has surfaced yesterday via the WSJ that phones using Android, Google’s new mobile operating system (OS), are not likely to be available by the end of this year as initially promised due to integration issues and slow-going development of customized applications that run on the OS. While this should come as no surprise — The Street hinted of a potential delay earlier this month (Google denied that this would occur) — the delay is one additional setback in Google’s struggle to expand.

So what should Google do?

Again, the people at Google are bright so they must look at where the money is flowing to make a wise bet. And while enterprise applications seems to be a lucrative area (Google can just take on the evil Microsoft Office Productivity Suite), the elongated sales cycle and issues surrounding privacy (Google can now look at your data) along with industry regulations (Sarbox) should, if they haven’t already, make Google reconsider this option.

Another area that makes most sense is mobile. Why? Well, there are several reasons including:

• With mobile phone adoption reaching 50% (see article), Google has a potential market of 3.3 billion users worldwide to target with its new OS.
• Competition is virtually non-existent. Mobile marketing is still at its early stage so Google can get in on the ground floor. If it needs a catalyst, it can use its cash to buy a company.
• Mobile devices are undergoing a major transformation. Users have always complained that these devices are not user friendly due their small screen size and speed. But with the introduction of the touch-screen interface of the newly popular iPhone and investments in mobile data infrastructure/networks, users are finding that the new breed of mobile phones are actually useful replacements for their laptops.

There’s no better place for Google to break into than the mobile world — it is the greatest opportunity that it has in the pipeline. Google just needs to get  focused about mobile and show its peers that it can be successful at more than just selling online search. Otherwise, it may face the same future that the has-been Altavista has suffered and that’s rough, especially for a company that has so much talent and potential.

Cleverly designed childrens [ecologically friendly] website.

What do you think?

I’m a month shy of turning 35-years-old and I continue to grow more and more reliant on Facebook status updates to apprise me of the important (and unimportant) goings on of my friends and acquaintances. That’s kind of a scary reality for someone who never had a computer in college.

Yet there’s still part of me that thinks — and this is true when I find out that “John is tired” or “Jane is getting ready for a big day!” — I’m too old for this. Social networking is a concept I get — really, I do — but actually adopting it into my everyday life? I’m not sure that it can reach me on a really meaningful level. It’s simply too new of an idea.

Or at least that’s what I thought. It turns out that the concept of social networking — and the Internet as a whole — may be older than I am. It’s probably older than you, too. And maybe even your parents.

Paul Otlet (ot-LAY) was a Belgian academic who, in 1934, postulated that “electric telescopes” would transform the way people accessed information. A recent article in The New York Times goes on to say that these telescopes would:

“…allow people to search and browse through millions of interlinked documents, images, audio and video files. He described how people would use the devices to send messages to one another, share files and even congregate in online social networks. he called the whole thing a “reseau,” which might be translated as ‘network’ — or arguably, ‘web.’”

Here’s a short video [TRT - 1:20] detailing Otlet’s vision:

Unfortunately for Otlet, a combination of impossible scalability, government apathy, and Nazi occupation derailed his visionary project almost 70 years ago. But the remnants of his ruminations were always out there.

And so it makes me think about other ideas, both past and present, that have been discarded for one reason or another. Is the groundbreaking achievement of the year 2078 sitting in your Recycle Bin?

According to a recent Wall Street Journal article about the US economy and spending habits, consumers at every rung of the socio-economic ladder are changing their purchasing behaviors. To better deal with rising food and energy costs, consumers are increasingly turning to the web for ways to save both online and offline. To make matters complex, online retailers are accustomed to seeing high visitor falloff or abandonment. In fact, according to Marketing Sherpa shopping cart abandonment rates are normally pegged at almost 60%. This challenge presents the need to better connect the online and offline world.

In one of my recent blog entries, I discussed the online-offline gap and the methodology used to test new techniques to shorten this gap in order to understand consumer behavior. In this blog entry, I present three techniques that can potentially shorten the gap.

Solution #1: Coupons (Online coupons and mobile coupons)

The recent spike in food and energy cost has driven US shoppers to use coupons more frequently. While coupon usage rates vary, the up tick is expect to continue beyond the short term (see article). To better understand consumers, some retailers have offered coupons in exchange for personal information, including an email address. The benefit of this technique is that once a retailer has the email address, they can use their analytics packages to track visitors from an offer in an HTML email to a website. This allows to retailers to identify and track anonymous users on the website.

The new challenge is that retailers are now focusing on introducing coupons in the mobile space. McDonald’s has recently initiated a mobile coupon campaign in Salt Lake City. The campaign provides McDonald’s with aggregate data for respondents, including their phone number, age, gender and zip code). While these may seem to be valueless, a consumer’s mobile number can actually serve as a unique identifier as consumer demand continues to grow (mobile subscriptions have reached a level that’s equivalent to half of the world population).

Solution #2: Click it and Pickup

Some retailers have implemented a purchasing program that allows consumers to place an order online yet pick it up at a nearby store. This feature entices consumers who normally abandon a site due to high shipping costs to complete the purchase (this is one of the top reasons shopping carts are abandoned). The neat thing about this solution is that visitors who are anonymously browsing the website will log in to complete the purchase and retailers can then track their identity.

To implement this feature, retailers need to tie their inventory management system to the web so that employees in the store can prepare the online order for pickup. To accomplish this, retailers need to establish a solid order management process which is actually harder to do than it sounds. Retailers such as Wal-Mart (specifically Sam’s Club) and Best Buy have rolled out these programs only to get spanked due to reports of incomplete orders or items being improperly packaged/prepared for pickup. Other retailers, such as Circuit City, have perfect the process by also attaching a guarantee. The additional benefit of an in-store pick up program is that it further grows sales.

Solution #3: Customer Satisfaction Surveys

According to a 2007 consumer behaviors survey by Accenture, the quality of service was the leading reason that customers abandoned a provider (this reason actually outweighed price by 20%). In fact, retailers such as Borders are relying on these surveys to better understand how consumer behavior is driving more sales. These surveys are commonly rolled out on sales receipts; retailers encourage customers to complete these surveys by offering a monetary prize (ranging from $500 to $1,000). While these survey engage the user after the purchase is complete (unlike the two solutions above), consumers can be identified when they provide their personal information to win the prize. By combining the consumer’s purchase history with their attitude (aka satisfaction survey) and their online behavior (website analytics), retailers get a more robust profile of consumers that they want to attract and retain.

More Than Three Solutions

The solutions above are only the tip of the iceberg as far ways that retailers can bridge the gap between the online and offline worlds. In addition to the above solutions, retailers that want to bridge the gap should consider investing in a customer relationship management (CRM) solution. A CRM allows the retailer to store the necessary data on consumers (transactions, attitude, personal info), analyze the information and build customer profiles for targeting.

Shhh … don’t tell anyone, but there were folks here at Engauge that were watching the US Open playoff online, hanging on every stroke of play in arguably the most exciting major championship in golf - ever. This back-and-forth duel of Rocco Mediate (aka Every Man) vs. Tiger Woods (aka the Machine) was drama of epic proportions.

In the end, it was Tiger. He won in spite of doctors probably telling him his knee wasn’t ready, playing through his knee pain, using his driver as a walking stick.

And yet, the morning after this emotional, gut-wrenching victory, Nike sends out this email that, IMO, (whether intentional or not) seemed to ascribe Tiger’s victory to his Nike driver, ball and shoes.

To whoever was responsible for that copy: Too bad - you ’shanked’ that opportunity. A few reasons why I think this:

• Tiger’s driving was atrocious.
• Tiger’s Titleist putter helped keep him in contention.
• It was Tiger’s mental toughness and determination that shone through more than ever before.

Yes, he had his TW and swoosh gear on the whole time, but c’mon. The most you’d want to do is position yourself alongside Tiger as maybe an after-thought, a “btw” or “ps”. Am I over-reacting?

The “A-ha!” moment for cell phone marketing - and capturing the attention of the 82.4% of Americans who own them - may be right in front of us.  Not so long ago, Stephanie referenced an AdAge article that said more than “86.1% still use mobile devices primarily for talk.” I know I fit into that group of people.  I use my cell phone to talk and, even more importantly, to text.  This could be seen as some discouraging news for those looking to create a “mobile boom.”

A study by Pew Internet found 85% of 18-29 year-olds text message, while only 31% of the same age group access the internet from their mobile phone.  Think it’s just us Millenials? 65% of 30-49 year-olds text message and only 22% access the internet from their phone.  So, what does this mean?

I’ve recently discovered Google.  Now, before I have a million “What?!”, and “You’re kidding, right?” responses, let me clarify.  I have discovered Google for my cell phone, and it has quickly become one of my favorite things.  The service is GoogleSMS, and it’s free. 

With GoogleSMS, I can not only find the nearest Target, but can get driving directions to the nearest one and find out what the weather will be like on my way there.  I can look up the definition of a haiku, or even find out how to say “knee” in Spanish for the times my mind draws a blank.  (It’s rodilla for those of you who were wondering.) 

All I have to do is text message my inquiry and send it off to 466453 (or GOOGLE) and wait about 5 seconds for a text message with the answer.  Then at the end of each message it gives a Tip, such as what to text if you want movie show times, stock quotes, etc. 

Two days ago, I discovered that Atlanta Perimeter Mall lets you search the mall for an item and check to see if it’s in stock.  Once you find what you’re looking for you fill out a short form, choose if you want the store to hold it for you, and have them notify you by email or text message.  In the text message it even tells you who to ask for when you get there.  Both of these are not without their occasional glitches, but overall, it’s a great service.

         

Still not convinced this could be the beginning path for mobile marketing?  I love watching the news in the elevator.  Yesterday I saw a blurb that the Grand Canyon is now offering audio tours by cell phone.  At certain stops, you dial a number and a ranger voice recording gives a two-minute description of the site.  Yes, it uses your cell phone minutes, but you could always visit on a Saturday or Sunday.  I’m sure they could find a way to bring in sponsors, and at the end of each “tour” message, have a “Brought to you by” moment.

What strikes me most about these services is that they are getting a message out there by mobile phones using their purpose - calling and texting!  Maybe instead of dreaming of using a phone as a computer right away (something I will do when a hologram screen can be projected to save having to squint at a tiny screen), maybe we should go back to basics and figure out a way to use what we already have to take advantage of this technology today; so when the time comes when not having a mobile site is unthinkable, GoogleSMS and Grand Canyon cell phone tours will be a fond memory of how the mobile boom all started.  In the meantime, I think I’ll text Google for directions to the Grand Canyon.

Aardman Studios, whom I ardently love and admire, along with Animal Planet, is working to educate youth about eco-friendly life.

In addition to the clever, informational animation shorts (11), there are several other interesting features on the site, including:

• Calendar Wallpaper

• Fun Farting Informational Widget

• Links to Educational Sites

And to top it off - the site is hosted using 100% pure solar energy!

An agency out of Vancouver, BC designed a beautiful website - DesignCanChange.org - aimed at educating and uniting the design community to use their influence and purchasing power to combat climate change.

Straight from the website: “Design Can Change works with the notion that we can collectively encourage substantial change. By utilizing our ability to effectively communicate and build interest, we can generate awareness and further the cause to end global warming.”

The site is successful in portraying dismal facts in such a beautiful manner (with a little help from their sponsor, Getty Images), with the underlying hope that we can all make a difference and that we are all responsible for change.

While the site has great tools and resources on what kind of steps to take to “greenify” your ways, it seems to have fallen short in generating conversation and action within their site - there is a blog that seems to have gone unnoticed.

On the positive side, you can “Take the Pledge” which garners you a spot within their worldwide directory that is accessible to any visitor. Hopefully being featured in Time Magazine’s 2008 “Design 100″ issue helped to direct more attention to the site and make use of the seemingly under-utilized tools.