Over the summer, a small team of Engauge employees pulled off an extraordinary feat: in 6 weeks we produced a site for a major client, from scratch, that receives approximately 2.5 million page views per month.  At the outset, we were in an uncomfortable position for any project team: we had a tight deadline, no functional requirements, no visual/creative program established, and not much of an idea how the new site should behave.  There was only one way we could possibly produce a quality product in such a short amount of time: we would all start from zero and work in parallel, we would produce flexible assets and we would react to each other’s work as we progressed.

As Team Lead for the production effort, I felt obligated to identify a process that would allow team members from far-flung disciplines like graphic design, behavioral research, and programming to work in parallel without leading to chaos and disruption.  We borrowed heavily from the Agile software development process and came up with a strategy that we’ve coined “Interdisciplinary Agile.”

The tenants of the Agile philosophy are succinctly described (in under 70 words) in the Agile Manifesto. The success of an Agile project hinges on the quality of communication between internal production team members and between the production team and the client.

The most fundamental piece of our strategy was the 15-minute daily “standup” meeting. Every day the client services team would get together with anyone who was currently producing assets for the website (i.e. wireframes, user survey results, creative comps, or code) and each person answered three questions:

1. What did you do yesterday?
2. What are you doing today?
3. What roadblocks are preventing you from accomplishing your task?

Often, standups would precipitate small, quick break-out meetings between team members to address more complex issues.

Another important focus of our strategy involved building our deliverables within two-week “sprints.”  The idea is to define tasks in such a way that after two or three weeks, you’ve produced something you can demonstrate (and it doesn’t always have to be pretty).  We produced functioning database access code (demonstrated via an incomplete first-draft user interface) in the first two-week sprint and finalized the user interface in the following two-week sprint.  After the first four weeks, we had essentially completed the site; however, we provided another two week “client acceptance” period where we accommodated client requests for changes.

As a team, we benefited greatly from working concurrently; we managed ourselves effectively and took ownership of the work we had to do.  Great ideas that came out of the flow of the project could be incorporated into the site in short-order and everyone had an opportunity to provide new insight to the project and help guide our progress towards the final goal.

You just know that the term “Web 2.0″ is played out when an accounting firm is praising the virtues of Facebook. A snippet from an eye-opening Fortune Magazine technology article has found its way to my desk. Apparently, companies, not just consumers, are using Web 2.0 tools (who would’ve thunk it?). While this may not be too surprising, digest this: Ernst & Young’s career page on Facebook has almost 19,000 fans. And they are active - 150 discussion topics and 1,700 wall posts. E&Y recruiters personally reply to messages in the fbookers’ language.

One example wall-post reply to an internship inquiry: “Kelsie - we are not currently looking for additional applicants for Tampa internships at this time - feel free to message me personally if you have any other questions….” The reply was posted at 12:55AM on a late Thursday evening by an E&Y employee who is pictured posing like an Olympic champion in front of a snow-covered mountain, wearing a striped sweater that clashes terribly with his zany ski cap.

Rejected.

Alas, Web 2.0 poses the question: would you rather be rejected in a personal-manner publicly, or in an impersonal-manner privately? Hmmm… Rejection or no rejection, I’d much rather facebook a company representative than play their stressful game.

In the future, I think that applying for a job will be as easy as one click. All applicants will have to do is click the “Apply Now” button on a company’s LinkedIn job profile, sending along their resume, profile, recommendations, contacts, etc. No duplication of effort. No stress. Ahhhhh. The downside to this? When the 15,358,137.3 unemployed Americans apply for the new Marketing Coordinator job opening at Time-Warner. What an HR nightmare.

On the flipside, companies such as Best Buy are beginning to use 2.0 tools internally, creating employee networking communities that allow them to bounce product-knowledge and best practices off one another. Imagine a world in which these internal communities are open to the public! Today, everyone talks about outsourcing technical support like there will never be greater cost-savings to be found. In the future, these technical support jobs could be eliminated when everyone has internet access (it will happen one day!). Employees, being offered bonuses for helpful instant-responses to customers, may actually strive to make my shopping experience a pleasure! That is, if there is a retail shopping experience to be had at that point…

Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera, “oh my”…
Flock, Thunderhawk, Lynx, “really?!”…
So many derivatives of each engine…
Game Console Browsers, Mobile Browsers, Kiosk Browsers…

“Oh give me a break!”

And Google wants to introduce yet another…
Google Chrome…

Why, why, WHY?!

• I’ve heard many reasons
  • “…they want to get more market share from Microsoft…”
  • “…they have a better engine concept…”
  • “…they don’t want to be hampered by the Mozilla foundation…”
  • “…they want to have an alternative for everything Microsoft…”
  • “…they’ll get into their Android platform…”
• I’ve heard many good things
  • “…the V8 JavaScript engine is blazing fast…”
  • “…the separated process model is more stable and secure…”
  • “…the ‘incognito’ feature is a must have…”

I say Hogwash!

There are too many reasons I think they shouldn’t have done this.

• If they get any market share it is just going to frustrate those developers that have to ensure their JavaScript libraries, Flash and Java plug-ins, and HTML/CSS render the same in yet another browser
• They are most likely to cannibalize both plug-in developers and general platform developers from Mozilla, making both have to fight over the limited open source developer pool
• Opera and Safari already provide innovation and competition to a crowded market and both are available on more platforms than Chrome
• The energy would have been better spent on a partner they’ve already been working with… Mozilla. No doubt they would utilize the other building blocks Google already is providing by exposing the V8 engine and tons of code plug-ins.
• Thwarting Firefox’s attempt to grow its market share will only give more credence to support IE just to achieve some sanity in the browser space

RIA please rescue us!

This eventual fragmentation of the market, may just give the extra oomph that RIA technologies need to win adoption. As the cost of cross-browser support escalates with so many variants, web development will undoubtedly look for an easier path. Flash/Flex/AIR, Silverlight and JavaFX all promise to relieve the cost of maintaining sites for different browsers. Solve the problem once and you are good to go.

Me thinks I think I need to brush up on some new skills.

That’s right, Google is about to enter the world of web browsers.  Announced in a very discreet (very Google) manner in a comic book by Scott McCloud, the browser isn’t live yet but should be in beta form fairly soon.

We shouldn’t be surprised that Google is coming out with a browser, only that it took this long for them to get here.  Lots of good information on Mahalo, but here are the high points:

• New tab system allowing users to create tabs that open on top of the browser, rather than within it (hard to visualize but check the comic book and you’ll see a good example)
• Users can have an ‘incognito’ window if they prefer, in which nothing will be logged
• It will include a new JavaScript Virtual Machine (V8)

There isn’t much more to know at this point and without seeing the browser its hard to know what to think about the success of this. However, the ease with which the Google search bar has been accepted into most people’s browsers already would suggest to me that people will quickly start picking it up.

Beating out IE will be a tough sell but I’d argue this is probably the closest thing Google has released (or will release soon) that will be close in service type to their bread and butter: search.  It’s not surprising that the other services (Google Calendar, Google Docs, etc.) are slowing gaining traction but not really competing with Microsoft yet.  But a browser would be something that would be much easier to switch to and would be a nice compliment to their superior search services.

More to come…

I happened across a seemingly ordinary slashdot.org article talking about a conceptual Mozilla browser, codenamed Aurora. While this browser is a long way from reality and does build on some older concepts, I am noticing a pattern in how we are building our applications. I find it intriguing, novel, and fun… but I’m unsure about the problems to be exposed in this new paradigm.

Aurora (Part 1) from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.

Visual Organization and an Embrace of the Scroll Wheel

The first interesting piece of this demo is the use of more visual techniques in grouping and/or relating information. We’ve seen this technique in everything from Tag Clouds to the graphical flipping between iPhone music and Vista applications. Instead of simple text based categorization/reference of objects, everything is moving to graphical thumbnails of objects that can be scanned pictorially instead lexically. Tag Clouds are still a primarily lexical representation but they did bring in the notion of using size, color and transparency to emphasize strength and relevance. Pictorial representations typically use the same notions of size and transparency to convey the same information. What I am most excited and forlorn about is the relatively new introduction of depth into these efforts to help us relate complicated and disparate information. Demonstrated in spectacular ways by Microsoft’s Photosynth or even Google Maps and Earth, applications are developing with the notion of relevance and frame of context by a depth characteristic. Our two dimensional world of yesterday is quickly becoming and antiquated notion in lieu of a new third dimension to store and relate even more data.

Will this new way of thinking leave me cluttered in another dimension?

Kinetic Gestures and Wrist Weights for Exercise

The second big shift is coming from the advent of Wii and iPhone among others. Everything is becoming so much more energetically interactive as we make our Human Computer Interaction (HCI) devices momentum and gyro aware. We can shake our devices, sling them, and elicit different behavior based on the speed and direction of our actions. HP has release it’s new line of “TouchSmart” PC’s that offers scrolling ability and speed based on the swipe of your hand and the speed of your swipe. The above video as well as the others on Mozilla Labs demonstrate this new capability in all facets of Browser design.

Are we moving towards forced exercise in all of our computer interactions as we speedily try to navigate and pull detail information to the forefront of our screens? Maybe they should start making our Wiimotes and Gyro-Mice in 2lb, 5lb, and 10lb sizes.

Last week news broke that Adobe is working with Google and Yahoo to allow search engines to access content within Flash files or SWF file formats. In essence, Adobe released a code in the form of a SWF library that allowed these search engines to crawl and index text that’s embedded into the Flash file in almost any language (NOTE: bidirectional languages such as Hebrew and Arabic are currently not accessible).

I’m sure that Flash developers rejoiced at this news since text within Adobe Flash files has been invisible to search engines up until today’s advancement. But the question that comes to mind is whether this news is actually significant (since I’m blogging about it you would think that I feel that it is). In my mind, I can see three things that will come out of this change. These include:

Additional Competitive Pressure on Microsoft

In case you didn’t know, Microsoft and Adobe are at war over the Rich Internet Application development market. In April of 2007, Microsoft released Silverlight, a web browser plugin that allows developers to combine crisp animation and multimedia sound to create a rich experiences, to compete with Adobe Flash. Unfortunately for Microsoft, Flash is found on more than 98% of internet-enabled desktops, making Microsoft’s task of unseating Flash quite a feat. Now it is common knowledge that there’s little love between Microsoft and Yahoo or Google so in my opinion, Adobe is just using their search engine friendly Flash format to further drive a wedge between these companies and solidify their market share.

Additional Factor Influencing Search Engine Ranking Algorithms

Search engines take many factors into account in determining the rankings of a website. Since content within Flash files could not be accessible by search engines, interactive marketers could easily sway clients, who begged for Flash-based sites, to use AJAX in the site construction since it provided a search engine friendly way of developing robust text animations. With the announcement by Adobe, there’s been an outcry by some of the best known SEO experts (specifically Bruce Clay) about a resurgence of websites built entirely of Flash because now the text is accessible. While I can see why Bruce may be worried (I thought of the same concern when I read the news), I think that he forgot the basic rule of search engine optimization: highly ranked sites are composed of multiple pages that have unique, non-repetitive content. So for those thinking that they can build a site entirely of Flash, they’ll quickly realize that their Flash site will be composed of a single page and that goes against the rule above. So while I can’t put it past some folks to develop Flash-based websites, the trend to avoid content-rich Flash develop will likely remain at or near current levels.

Ace in the Hole for Google and Yahoo

While the first two deal with short term benefits to the search engine giants, I also believe that Google and Yahoo are viewing the a bigger value (that may not be exploitable today) in being able to search Flash files. The one area that both companies share is in their video sharing sites (Yahoo! Video and Google’s YouTube). Neither companies are able to sufficiently capitalize on the strong growth of online videos since the content within these videos is not readable to search engines. While the current Flash indexing advancement does not allow for Flash videos (which are FLV format) to be accessible by search engines, one could imagine that after this trial run both Google and Yahoo will ask Adobe to make the indexing of FLV a reality. I would also imagine that Google and Yahoo will look to buy some sort of Voice-to-Text technology so that can read their video assets and leverage them in search advertising. If you’ve looked at my blog entries you’ll know that I’ve beaten recently on Google for the lack of new search advertising assets but with this advancement one can see that there’s new value in video.

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.

Back in the 1980’s my beloved colleagues and mentors at Indiana University got me involved in a little project that is still going strong and finding a lot of value: The IU Technology Services “Standard Terms List” (insider nod: The use of “STL” is an acceptable acronym variation).

It was during those formative years before the web, that IU’s University Computing Services Publications Group was charged with reporting on and enticing students toward usage of the fledgling realm of personal computing. We were a young department of five persons responsible for writing technical documents, marketing pieces, instructional manuals, and newsletters on every aspect of campus-wide computing.

There was a lot of exciting writing and reporting to be done during those early years, and we quickly learned to enlist experts from across the campus to help us create a buzz.

Consistency and audience tone was key. So how could we make certain our guest writers and lecturers were speaking the same voice when even The Chicago Manual of Style wasn’t ready to offer advise on best practices for such an emerging and quickly expanding area of terminology?

Enter the Standard Terms List. As “keepers of the word,” the Ms. Thistlebottoms and I would refer to this running index as a way to illustrate proper text usage. The original document started with less than 50 key terms and their preferred (and un-preferred) usages. Eventually this index grew into a tool of 1000+ items that is used daily by writers, editors, campus Web managers and support teams across eight campuses.

Taking the success of this document on the road, I’ve found its format a welcome and differentiating deliverable for many large clients including Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, Emory University, and SunTrust Bank.

In addition to providing support to my clients’ marketing and editorial teams, this document format proves a valuable tool for:

• QA Teams
• SEO/SEM Tools
• Taxonomies
• Metadata
• and, of course, Knowledge Management and data warehouse teams.

Check out the Indiana University Technology Services “STL”.