Web Applications Alert

Mark Gibbs shares Web site tips and provides advice on getting the most out of your apps.

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Why a social networking strategy is needed: 02/09/10; When I'm not being a journalist and leaping wide clauses in a single bound or moving faster than a speeding cursor, I adopt my alternate persona: Mark Gibbs, mild-mannered consultant. Well, perhaps not so mild-mannered.
Is Twitter losing its luster?: 02/02/10; One of the biggest questions about social networking and the services that enable it is whether the whole concept has durability and what kind of durability that might be; in other words, is social networking a really long term transformative trend, a bridge to some other pattern of user interaction, or simply a passing fad?
Customer service, Get Satisfaction: 01/26/10; Last week here in the Network World Web Applications Alert newsletter I discussed some key issues that drive successful customer service and mentioned Get Satisfaction, a Web application that provides an outsourced customer service platform.
Eight rules for superlative service: 01/19/10; Its one thing to provide technical or customer service but quite a different thing to do so really well. What's really changed the whole concept of outbound service as compared to say twenty years ago is that a company's customers can now find each other and talk. They can discover and publicize your weaknesses with a speed and depth of commentary that, if they are annoyed, can be astounding and result in significant brand damage.
Social Networking Notes, Issue 3: 01/12/10; If you plan to make any serious use of Twitter for business purposes you're probably always on the look out for a better way to manage your presence. It's not that the likes of Tweetdeck or whatever you currently using aren't great, it's just that the whole world of social media is so new we have no idea what's the best tool for the job.
Quoting Web content with Kwout: 01/05/10; How often do you find something on a Web site somewhere that you want to send to a friend or post to Twitter or to your blog or maybe just want to record for future reference?
Tynt, a whole new set of Web metrics: 12/22/09; Just over 10 years ago I had a good idea and thus was NetRatings born (the company went public in 2000 and eventually became a wholly owned subsidiary of The Nielsen Company). Ever since then I've been fascinated by techniques for measuring what people do online.
Daytum and The Book of Odds: 12/15/09; This week it's all about you. Yep, I have two services that address two different aspects of our lives: What we do and what risks we take.
Dating and pricing: Being transparent matters: 12/08/09; There are two issues that I want to discuss today both of which affect your online Web presence value and reputation and they are both about transparency.
Social Networking Notes, Issue 2: 12/01/09; If you haven't got to grips with Twitter's new retweet feature allow me to explain how it works: The "traditional way to resend a tweet to your followers that you had received was to add "RT" somewhere in the tweet and, if needed, add your own comment in which case you usually had to modify the retweet to fit the 140 character limit.
Google Chrome: Redefining end user computing: 11/24/09; One of the most profound changes in how computing services are being delivered is the use of the Web as a frontend for just about everything. We have seen this transformation in the thousands of software as a service (SaaS) offerings that have appeared in the last few years that now cover the entire spectrum of applications from corporate accounting through to video editing (something that just a few years ago was hard to imagine becoming a reality).
Social Networking Notes, Issue 1: 11/17/09; There is so much happening in the social networking sphere that I'm going to start a series of notes on the topic. Each note will briefly cover two or three topics and for this, the first one, I have three Twitter related items for you.
Twitter-related apps worth looking in to: 11/17/09; There is so much happening in the social networking sphere that I'm going to start a series of notes on the topic. Each note will briefly cover two or three topics and for this, the first one, I have three Twitter related items for you.
PerfectForms: Nearly Perfect: 11/10/09; One of the most common functions of a Web site is to gather data. Building forms absorbs a huge amount of time and energy if you try to do it "old school" by which I mean getting out your Web content editor and wrangling HTML in an attempt to produce an effective form. Making the results look good is even harder.
Better video playback and font viewing: 11/03/09; I'm talking about video freezes – you know what it's like: You're watching the latest cute kitten video on YouTube and the playback pauses for a moment then resumes. Bad enough it does this at all but nope, it does this often, in fact, every few seconds.
Shoeboxed, taking the tedious out of handling receipts and business cards: 10/27/09; There are two tasks in business that are really tedious: Tracking your receipts for expenses and capturing business card data.
Wix; Web sites for even the most daunted: 10/20/09; Building a Web site is, for many people, a task that lies somewhere beyond daunting.
Adobe MAX and Augmented Reality: 10/13/09; There was a lot to be impressed about and one of the technologies getting a lot of attention was augmented reality (AR).
Xmarks, one step closer to having my stuff anywhere: 10/06/09; If you are like me you have multiple PCs that you continually switch between. You have machines that some applications only run on, others with big screens for graphics work, laptops for portability, machines for testing, servers, and then a whole slew of virtual machines.
SealCOS; identifying official brand sites: 09/29/09; Huge numbers of people are now using online Web sites to buy products and services but how do they know whether they are dealing with the actual brand holder or its agent or even some company that is just claiming some kind of relationship with the brand?
Pandora and the future of online music: 09/22/09; You can't have watched the wild ride that the music industry has had since the rise of the Internet without being amazed that the business end of the music world has tried to resist the inevitable for so long. It is a foregone conclusion that the music industry as it was in, say, the nineties is merely history.
Gist, organizing information overload: 09/15/09; The phrase "information overload" has been bandied about since it was first coined by Alvin Tofler in 1970 but the problem of too much information and not enough contextualization and filtering is now really starting to be a big issue. We have email, blogs, microblogs, news feeds, … its hard to keep up with so much "stuff".
Interclue - two exceptional products: 09/08/09; This must have happened to you: You're registering on a Web site or perhaps trying to use a Web form to raise a support request and something goes wrong. Perhaps your browser crashes or you fail to click on the right button and when you return to the form page you've lost the text you were entering. Such things can drive you nuts.
iCyte, Web clipping to the max: 09/01/09; One of the big problems with using the Internet is remembering what you've looked at. Sure, bookmarks can be a great help but often you loose the context of what it was that mattered enough to bookmark because the page contents change and or the bookmark doesn't convey enough information about the contents.
RoamBI for iPhone, not just good, groundbreaking!: 08/25/09; In my career working in the computer world there have been a few products that have stood out as groundbreaking and important. Some were outstanding in their time but their relevance has long since disappeared, for example, Digital Microsystems HiNet, while others, such as Novell's Netware Directory Services, now called eDirectory, (which should have become the leading network directory service but got its lunch eaten by Microsoft's Active Directory) still has relevance and applicability.