It’s been a great year for Go Tripod and early plans for 2012 look to be just as exciting for our colleagues and for our clients.

First off, I’m pleased to say that our team is expanding again. We have just hired a new office manager, Sophie Yule. As our client base continues to grow, Sophie has joined the Cornwall team to assist us in ensuring our services are delivered as efficiently as possible.

Secondly, to allow for our growth down in Cornwall we have moved to new premises in the centre of Truro. Our new offices are located on St George’s Road, opposite The (famously excellent) Cheese Shop.

To celebrate, the team got together at The Cove, in Maenporth, near Falmouth in Cornwall to have a great meal and one or two drinks.

So, on into 2012. The new year will bring with it a new website design for gotripod.com – allowing for easier scalability as we evolve on into the future. The new design will still incorporate the best bits of the current WordPress functionality, but if you notice anything that doesn’t appear to be working or any other bugs after the new design is launched please let us know.

Additionally, for those of you who may not know, we have a newsletter with our Christmas edition coming out this week. Feel free to subscribe for news, updates, offers and everything else Tripod-related and you’ll be sure not to miss anything.

Finally, we wish all our blog readers, clients and colleagues a very happy Christmas and all the best for 2012.

We have just rolled out an update to Stubmatic. Although on the surface stubmatic looks the same we have made some major changes to the underlying logic in preparation for some future enhancements that we are working on.

For now one of the biggest changes you will notice is we have updated the way events are published. We have changed the terminology from “published” to “listed” and events can now be listed and delisted from your box office at any time. For example, previously when an event was cancelled or sold out it remained on your box office, you can now optionally de-list these.

In addition to this we have made several fixes and tweaks to the system, including:

1. Sold out events now correctly show as available if more tickets are added
2. Layout tweaks to assist navigation.
3. For new events created from today: Have made it clearer and simplified which email address PayPal payments are being sent to.

We are centralising product blogs back to our main blog so all updates to Stubmatic will be posted here from now on.

As mobile and smartphone camera technology continues to become more powerful, there has been increased speculation into the usefulness of camera phones for driving consumers of offline marketing towards digital content via scannable tags, codes and images.

Mobile tagging adoption

From crowd-sourcing reviews and comments of physical products via barcode scanning, to embedding URLs in QR codes, there is certainly a lot of scope for methods of delivering relevant information to mobile users more efficiently than depending on them to type in a web address or make a Google search.

Yet, despite success in Asia (particularly Japan, where QR codes were created by Denso) since 2003, adoption in the West has been relatively subdued. According to research conducted by Toluna Quick, just 19% of UK consumers have scanned in a QR code (11% have done so in the US, say Simpson Carpenter) and 31% know what they are (36% in the US).

Problems?

There are numerous possible reasons for the relatively lacklustre uptake of mobile tagging to date, such as:

• Lack of standard code. The numerous different types of 2D barcodes available may be confusing and/or off-putting to potential users. For instance, in the US Data Matrix codes are also popular while in the UK, QR codes dominate. Most mobile users need to download either paid or free apps before they can attempt to scan the tag they see (although some handsets, such as Android, come equipped with QR/image recognition tool Google Goggles). There have also been a number of other niche codes released, such as Microsoft Tags.
• Not quick enough. Despite the supposed simplicity and efficiency of using a camera phone to read a tag (QR stands for ‘Quick Response’), scanning can be tricky. If tags aren’t clear enough (particularly when there is little light) it can take a few attempts for scans to work – and certain phones are equipped with better cameras than others.
• Content not worth the effort. It might also be argued that content that is most often beyond the code or tag is rarely of any more interest to the consumer than what can be found at the website anyway. There have even been reported examples of tags leading to websites which aren’t optimised for mobile.

Already beyond codes?

Mobile tagging technology is undoubtedly moving quickly, and it may even be argued that we are moving into a post-QR era, even before they really took hold. Recently launched, Blippar is an app which uses the camera on smartphones or mobile devices to unlock digital content simply by recognising the imagery – be it an ad in a newspaper or even a product itself.

By eliminating the need for a code or tag at all, services such as Blippar (other Augmented Reality tools, such as the Layar browser, exist too) have overcome the hurdle of the lack of a standard barcode. And although it remains to be seen whether ‘blippable’ content imposes any restriction on what can be included in the image, it is likely that many designers will be keen to see an alternative to the ugly black and white pixel boxes of QR codes.

Real opportunity?

There is also increased versatility with non-code mobile tagging, giving advertisers and marketers the scope to develop impressive augmented reality animations and games as well as links to URLs and more compelling content such as discount vouchers.

With more opportunity for developing inventive examples of augmented reality, Blipper and others look likely to become quite significant, particularly for multichannel and mobile commerce campaigns by larger organisations and businesses which can afford to develop such ads. If this happens, then mobile tagging will certainly reach a larger audience, and QR codes may continue to have a place too – with their remaining sole USP as the mobile tag which anyone can generate.

One of the biggest stories in the world of the iPad last month centred on the success of the app released for The New Yorker.  By turning their back on interactive features and the ‘Bells & Whistles’ approach to digital versions of offline media, The New Yorker’s developers essentially put all of their efforts into making the app clean and readable.  Simple, huh?

Impressively so.  With over 100,000 readers (and 20,000 paying in excess of $50 for subscriptions) these numbers are dwarfing those being reported for others in the magazine app category and are signalling to developers that app consumers – for all our keenness to adopt emerging technologies and try new things – are still creatures of simple tastes.

So, is simplicity the key to a hit app?  And if so, why?

These are intriguing questions.  After all, in this era of ‘the long tail’ do we really care about hits anymore?  Surely, there are as many folk buying a variety of the numerous niche and complex magazine apps available as there are buying The New Yorker for iPad.  With no limitations of shelf-space in an increasingly niche-orientated world, developers, in theory, could invest the same amount of time and money into a variety of non-simple magazine apps to similar success as they might putting the same efforts into one very simple hit app.

I needed to do a little more research so I reached for my iPhone 4, clicked through to the App Store and went in search for the hit app of the moment.  Although I wasn’t expecting something overly complicated, I was perhaps expecting something kind of new – or at least something with more than one function.  But lo and behold, at the time of writing this, the top free app (and second to top paid-app) on the iPhone is none other than… Snake ‘97 – not only a very simple app (it doesn’t even have a menu screen), but a version of perhaps one of the simplest games that remains popular to this day (at least 30 year since its original release).

Unsurprisingly, the trend is similar across paid and free apps on different devices and I believe if we were to take all the applications produced to date and plotted them on a graph, the left side (head) of the curve would be home to more of the simpler apps, while the tail would be where we’d see the non-simple apps.

So, is the reason for this simply because the majority of app buyers are keen on simple things – in the same way that the straightforward pop of Justin Bieber appeals to more people than the latest prog-funk album by Destroyer?

Maybe.  Yet additionally, I think the fact that apps are still a new media to most people means that when we start searching around the market (where we are, of course, initially presented with ‘the hits’) we’re keen to test it out with things we can understand quickly.  What might be a surprise to developers, is that this young market may need to go through a period of hit making with ultra-simple apps – especially when looking at emerging app categories like magazines – before ‘the tail’ is long enough to really invest in ‘non-simple’ niche apps.

How amalgamating social media might be able to help you get more from your feeds and highlight those networks which aren’t delivering on value

There has been much written recently (this post and this one at Econsultancy are good examples) about the difficulties businesses, marketers and individuals have in being able to quantify and analyse the actual value of social media as a marketing or promotional tool.  In simple terms it is still very hard to see whether 100 ‘likes’ on Facebook leads to a worthwhile number of conversions on your site, and even if you do have 1000+ followers on Twitter does the ROI come anywhere close to that of more traditional (but less sexier) online marketing methods such as email and search?

It is unlikely that any ‘social media expert’ will admit that the benefits of email, search and most other online marketing is a darn sight easier to see than social.  He/she will also not be likely to highlight the experimental and largely trial-and-error nature of social media marketing – and without being aware of this nugget of truth from the outset, anybody with a fledgling online presence can easily end up with a confusing mess of distracting feeds, fruitless cyber-buddies and half-maintained profiles scattered across the web.  So is social media amalgamation a viable route back towards order, and value?

Introducing social media amalgamation – making things more manageable

When thinking about making our social feeds more manageable, tools which offer us an overview of the activities of those across our networks are the ones that usually spring to mind.  Friendfeed, launched in 2007, was something of a pioneer of this.  It gives users a real time overview of Facebook updates from friends, tweets, posts from blogs they have subscribed to and countless others, as well as a simple front page in which you can interact with everything without having to open numerous tabs and logging into separate channels.  The growth of Twitter during 2008 saw the emergence of more microblogging orientated amalgamation tools both in-the-browser (such as Hootsuite) and as standalone programs (such as Tweetdeck).

Getting around distraction

Getting all your most important feeds in one place is a great way to save time that might be spent flitting between profiles.  The tendency to be distracted by social media, however, can still be a problem – and new services are striving to address this.  Launched in 2010, Rockmelt is an entire browser dedicated to getting the most from your social media networks.  By allowing the user to amalgamate feeds direct into the architecture of the browser, they do not even need to navigate away from pages in order to network.  In addition, the service also provides a customizable quiet mode to minimize distraction at the user’s request.

Amalgamating on your site, to help your site

Social media value can also be improved by how we amalgamate our networks on our websites.  Including your feeds such as Twitter and Facebook directly on to your homepage can not only increase the likelihood that visitors will want to connect, but it also helps deliver the freshest content to your site – a positive thing in the eyes of Google and other search engines.  The evolution of this comes with services such as Flavors.me which seamlessly integrates the social networks of its users as a basis for a simple and useful website.

More valuable?

Like all that is social, precisely how valuable amalgamation can be to your overall campaign is difficult to quantify exactly.  Yet, being able to see all your networks side by side is a great way to gather insight into where the most worthwhile conversations are happening and via which channels followers and fans are being most receptive.  In addition, working to cut out as much of the distractive elements of social media is no doubt a step toward value.  And by ensuring as much of your network action is assisting the relevancy of your website in both the eyes of your visitors and search engines is certainly a positive thing.  With decent amalgamation, users are likely to be in a far better position to tweak, amend and refine their social media activities.

As social networking continues to become a key strategy for businesses and start-ups to promote themselves online, photo sharing is an activity which seems second nature to some but almost entirely ignored by others.  So – from a business point of view – is it worth downloading the latest photo app, snapping away at every opportunity, then posting the results to Facebook or Flickr?

Photo sharing to ‘blend in’

It’s a question which has garnered considerable discussion online recently, not least on the newly launched service Quora.  The most popular answer came from VC Simon Olson who argues that photo sharing can form the ‘base activity of the “social” pyramid’ and that ‘it is one of the most popular activities that users engage in on social networks.’  With this in mind, it then seems logical for anyone eager to establish themselves on any social network to spend some time doing what everyone else is doing, not least to align yourself with the audience you are hoping to communicate with, as well as to highlight that you know what social media is all about, i.e. sharing, not promotion.

So just how big is photo sharing online?

Photo sharing has certainly seen fantastic growth over the last few years.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, Facebook has been the key player, increasing its lead as top photo sharing site (ahead of Photobucket, Picasa and Flickr) at the end of 2008 with users now uploading more than 3 billion pictures each month.  Yet, as Facebook’s dominance may have been seen to be making life difficult for other photo hosting sites such as Flickr, whose traffic started to decline by early last year, the site now boasts five billion photos and has increased steadily at 25% over the last 12 months.

The impact of apps and technology

Of course, photo-orientated smartphone apps and the increasing number of camera phones is having a positive effect on photo sharing – and making it easier for all of us to take better looking pictures and upload them quicker than ever before.  Instagram, Hipstamatic and PhotoShop Express all allow photos to be tinted etc. without the need to upload to your desktop or laptop beforehand.  Following this, it makes even more sense that Facebook is winning the photo sharing race with more than two hundred million users accessing the site via mobile – it figures that we want to put our pictures on this network first straight from our phones.

The case for…

For some, photo sharing is a great way to naturally instigate communications on social networks (especially at the start of a SM campaign), and it is becoming an increasingly quick and easy way to do this.  But is photo sharing worthwhile for any business or start-up with a fledgling web presence?  From an online content point of view, I would add two additional reasons why it may well be: fresh content and transparency.  In simple terms, fresh content is good for keeping both your audience and Google interested in your presence.  If you are active, even with only one piece of content a day – then a photo can be a quick way to achieve that daily goal to remind everyone that you’re still there.

The latter reason, transparency, relates to the earlier point of ‘aligning yourself with the audience you are hoping to communicate with.’  One of the ways businesses and start-ups really succeed with social media is by highlighting the human side of the organization behind the corporate persona which is often presented on the website.  Simply put, evidence of staff events and non-work activities showing that your organization is a diverse bunch of real people is much easier to see in photos rather than text-based blog posts, status updates or tweets.

Or, how a non-developer can make sense of the terminology we sometimes spout… It all starts from a simple question:

Is .NET a programming language?

No, .NET isn’t a programming language, it’s a framework.

Framework! Like Ruby on Rails!

Yes like Ruby on Rails. A framework is a load of bits of code that someone has packaged up to help developers create applications. Ruby on Rails, .NET, Django and Cake PHP are all examples of frameworks.

So frameworks are libraries?

Not really. A library tends to be focused on a particular piece of functionality – for example you might have a libraries that lets your code talk to Twitter.. In the world of Ruby, libraries are often packaged up into gems – little bundles of functionality which you can add to your app. In fact that’s a good way of looking at a library – just a bolt-on of focused functionality.

Right. So what was a programming language again?

The programming language is where it all starts. A programming language, like C#, Ruby, PHP or Python, is used to write libraries and frameworks. The language, the libraries and the frameworks combine to allow you to write an application.

You need a lot of stuff to get started then…

Well really the programming language is the bare minimum – you could write an application using just those bare essentials. But bolt on a framework like Ruby on Rails and you get things like easier ways to access the database or do localisation, and add a library to speak to Facebook and Foursquare. This enables your application to get up and running much more quickly because you don’t have to write all of that code again. You’re standing on the shoulders of giants; you’re not reinventing the wheel.

But what about security? How do you know all of these frameworks and libraries are safe to use?

Two reasons. Firstly, many libraries and frameworks, such as Ruby on Rails and the vast majority of Ruby gems are open source. This means you can look at the code yourself and check that it’s not malicious. Additionally, hundreds of other eyes are looking at that same code – in the case on Ruby on Rails some of the world’s best coders will have had a hand in developing the framework. Secondly, in the case of frameworks such as .NET, a multi-billion dollar organisation will have developed a rigorous Q&A process with automated testing and security auditing to make sure it lives up to its billing. If Microsoft can rely on .NET to run its business, chances are you can too. And recently even Microsoft has begun open-sourcing its code, so you can review it by eye if you want – all 1 bajillion lines of it.

Surely there’s no way to be sure unless I’ve written it myself though?

Possibly, but chances are you’re more likely to fall into the same holes as other developers – for example creating a web framework which falls prey to XSS vulnerabilities or other such security issues. A peer-reviewed third party framework will have been there and done that, with thousands of developers and users checking it for security problems every single day. Like I said – standing on the shoulders of giants.

Ok. I’m getting it. Language > Library/Framework > Application. So what’s a platform?

Oh God. Well a platform is at the top end of the scale. You build applications on a platform, but a platform itself will likely have been built using a framework. Sometimes platforms are applications as well – applications which provide developer APIs for example. A good example is Facebook – technically it’s a vast application, but it also provides lots of ways for developers to build on top of it and interact with the Facebook application and its users.

Excellent. So this new language we’re writing with Facebook on top of the C# library – when will that be ready?

You mus- Ahem. Well now you know so much, you can write it yourself. Get back to me when it’s done, there’s a good manager.

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…And emerging ways to pay online and on mobile

Using the internet to sell products and services is the ultimate goal of many websites we come across each day.  Yet, as an increasing number of businesses and companies move online, emerging technologies are also bringing fresh ways to pay and receive money as well as completely new ways to monetise mobile and web-based content.  While 2010 was dominated by trends such as freemium as used by services like Spotify and Evernote, as we move into 2011 new types of digital currency and payment technologies are appearing and diversifying.  This post aims to define some oft-used but sometimes confusing terms in the new world of money online.

Facebook Credits

At the end of January, social networking supergiant Facebook announced that they will be requiring all social game developers to process payments via their own in-site payment system: Facebook Credits.  The virtual currency, which has been in the works since 2009, allows users to purchase credits (currently costing $1 for 10) which can then be spent on items in Facebook games and other apps.  Advertised as being a safer and easier method of payment, it’s hard to see how the idea won’t increasingly appeal to users – and in order to get developers on board, Facebook are offering a host of cool incentives for app makers.

In-game purchases

Monetising mobile apps is often a matter of tough choices as to whether you offer free versions and advanced (often ad-free) versions, or simply charge for one version from the outset.  For mobile games, in-game purchases are increasing in popularity because they offer a portion of what is paid for, i.e. the first few levels of a game, and give users the opportunity to pay for later levels or other unlockable content.  This also ensures that such games have more chance of being discovered by potential gamers – an important factor for developers as the market becomes increasingly crowded.

Mobile payments, e-wallets and Square

Mobile payments are likely to be a big deal in 2011.  The idea is quite simple, why not leave our credit cards at home and use our 3G enabled smartphones to transfer payments for us?  After all, we all have online bank accounts?  Now, a number of companies are planning on making our wallets redundant.  For paying for items, Visa have announced that they will be rolling out their PayWave system by the end of the year.  On the flipside, Square (part founded by Twitter’s Jack Dorsey) is a smartphone service which allows others to pay you via your mobile.  Less than 18 months after launch, Square are already processing $1m payments a day.  They have also recently made the potentially groundbreaking move to stop charging $0.15 per transaction for merchants, making the new technology (a simple dongle and downloadable app) even more appealing to small businesses, freelancers and workers on the go.

Micro-donations

Micropayments has been a popular term online in reference to simple small payment transactions for a few years now.  Today, however, micro-donations are offering a new way for bloggers and start-ups to monetise content without requesting an outright payment or subscription fee, and by avoiding the sometimes off-putting ‘donate’ method.  New service, Flattr, is a good example which gives web-content providers (i.e. bloggers, journalists, developers) a button for the posts they create (similar to Facebook ‘Like’ buttons), Flattr users who view the site decide how much money to put into their account monthly – and this amount is then shared between the sites that have been ‘liked’ or ‘flattr’d’ at the end of each month.

It is certainly an exciting time for developers to approach charging for web and mobile content, and we are sure to see some intriguing changes over the coming year.  Social media is certainly having a big effect, as well as emerging mobile technologies.  We, here at GoTripod, are curious to see what takes off.

For today’s web developers, start-ups and forward thinking businesses the notion of ‘web content’ and where it’s seen is changing at an incredible rate. Gone are the days of designing and producing a site suitable just for a desktop PC monitor. In 2011 web content must be developed to be viewed and interacted with across a range of screens of varying sizes, from smartphones to the widest flat-screens – and this post should help us to start considering ‘multi-screen thinking’ and its importance.

In the interest of keeping this post quite snappy I have opted to focus on just three types of web content: home pages, e-commerce pages and promotional content (such as blog posts and news articles) which should give us a range of examples. I also wanted to make the information easy to remember, so let me introduce you to:

The 3 “…ables” of multi-screen thinking when creating web content

1. Viewable

The first ‘multi-screen thinking’ question to ask ourselves when creating web content is: will this be viewable across multiple screens? Even before we have moved away from desktop monitors and laptops, it is important to bare in mind the range of browsers web users are using to arrive at your homepage. According to TopTenREVIEWS the top 3 browsers available currently are Firefox, Chrome and Internet Explorer and it is important to bear in mind that some sites may load slower in certain browsers than others – and if your homepage is not viewable on a certain browser within a few seconds it is likely that user may give up and head somewhere else.

Of course, beyond desktops and laptops, web content needs to be quickly viewable on smaller screens such as smartphones and tablets such as iPad – and the most important information and ‘calls to action’ should ideally be seen as soon as a homepage is loaded.

2. Usable

So if you’re happy that your web content is adequately viewable across all screens (and browsers), the second thing to consider is whether that content is usable too. This is increasingly important with mobile devices in mind. As Internet Retailing reports, 18% of online shopping at Christmas was expected to be done via mobile but only a 23% minority of retailers had sufficient navigable mobile sites or apps in place for this proportion of users.

With more people shopping on mobile, e-commerce sites need to not only ensure that product pages are displaying vital information simply, clearly and concisely – but the checkout process needs to be quick and easy (and must remain safe) for smartphone users as well as traditional internet shoppers. Of course, testing and refining the process on a variety of technologies is key here.

3. Shareable

Aside from simply being viewable and usable across multiple screens, shareability is also a big factor when it comes to web content – and especially content geared towards getting traffic to your site (such as blog posts).

There can be multi-screen issues as simple as formatting, with text size and lengths of articles – but aspects of good shareable posts which really get people “liking” on Facebook or re-tweeting on Twitter, such as data graphs, images and infographics need to transfer well to smaller screens (and across 3G and 4G networks). This is the first step to ensuring prospective sharers are seeing the kinds of things they like to pass to their friends and followers as soon as possible, and on any of their devices. Good fresh content should be seen by as many people as possible, and new tech users are really the last group you want to frustrate by not considering mobile devices when producing content to be shared.

The source code which makes up the software we develop is our most valuable asset. As such, it needs to be treated with love and care. While backing up assets like this is important, with something such as source code – which is changed by multiple developers – you also want something to analyse and manage the changes which these assets go through.

Item number one on Joel Spolsky’s “Joel Test” is: “Do you use Source Control?”. Any software company who do not use source control are not taking appropriate care with their own code and potentially their customer code – and that’s foolhardy at best. At Go Tripod, we use the Git version control system which has gained a lot of traction over the past year or so. Subversion (SVN) used to be the cool kid in this arena, but Git has firmly placed itself at number one on the popularity contest.

Github’s been key to this, because it’s provided a really easy way of working with Git thanks to its excellent guides and documentation. Both myself and Jon have our own modest Github accounts, and while I’ve used Google Code in the past I really want to try and keep with Github as I move forward. Why? Because I think Github promotes healthy projects.

Look at any project on Github and you’ll see two little icons – one to keep watch on a project, to check when there’s any activity, and a second one to fork it. I believe that forking a project is the single strongest part of Github. It enables two things – firstly, for contributors to get involved without having to submit patches or anything like that – all contributions and merges can be done by the project owner by simply pulling in a contributor’s changes.

Secondly, if a project goes dormant, it’s trivial for someone else to fork it and essentially take it over. The most active fork of a project is likely to attract the most attention, so for valuable projects, we could see the end of stale, unmaintained work.

However, forking on Github does have weaknesses. In the above scenario, where a fork ends up becoming the predominant development version of a project, Github doesn’t have any way of transferring ownership of a repo from one person to another. This would make sense – the original developer doesn’t want to maintain a project then it’d really be better to allocate it to another developer rather than that developer having to fork. And in some ways forking can dilute a project, with many users adding their own tweaks and enhancements which never then get pulled back into the master. This is a shame, though ultimately I’m not sure how much of an issue it is.

Anyway, we love Github, warts and all. Look out for some more interesting Labs projects hitting our Go Tripod Github account soon.