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The Pathfinder User Experience Design team has written and published a whitepaper that was recently distributed at the annual Software 500 Conference in Boston, MA. The paper will show you how to combine Agile and UXD practices to get higher acceptance, fewer support calls, and return customers as well as define four key places in an agile development process where you can improve project success by integrating UXD practices into the Agile software development cycle. These techniques include the use of personas, taskflows, rapid prototyping, and iterative testing, among others, depending on the stage of development.

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I’ve been playing around with the Facebook API over the last few weeks. There’s only a very limited Ajax capability in the API — they call it "Mock Ajax" — that allows you to sub some very restricted HTML into the innerHTML of DOM elements. No Javascript. You’ll have to use inline CSS if you want to achieve a cool user experience.

While it is possible to display Facebook content in your own apps, it is pretty restricted (you’ll have to read at least three legal docs to figure all that out). Not much leverage for mashups here. In a sense this is the mirror opposite of a mashup. Instead of mashing together services provided by third party, you develop a service that is mashed into the Facebook platform.

Part of the promise of Ajax was that you could mash together third party services quickly and comparatively easily. While widgets and services have made their mark (Yahoo, Flickr, Google Maps to name just a few), there is also a trend toward restricting their use. See the discontinuation of the Google SOAP Search API and the heavy restrictions on the new Google Ajax Search API. Right now my money is on the Facebook model winning out over the Mashup model.

BTW, in exploring the Facebook API, I experienced a flashback to the late 90′s and the whole portal fad. The API’s and patterns reminded me more than a little bit of Plumtree and Epicentric (great portal platform before it was absorbed into the craptastic Vignette). What’s old is new again, just like bell bottoms and mood rings. Just don’t call facebook a portal.

Technorati Tags: ajax, facebook, portal, mashup

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Mr. McGuire: I want to say one word to you. Just one word.
Benjamin: Yes, sir.
Mr. McGuire: Are you listening?
Benjamin: Yes, I am.
Mr. McGuire: Plastics.
Benjamin: Just how do you mean that, sir?

Everytime I make a pronouncement about the way "the industry" is going, I feel like Mr. McGuire from the graduate — old, pompous, irrelevant. Still, sometimes you have to call them the way you see them. So it is with the continued growth of video on the web.

To me, it looks like online video is about to do to cable and the networks what the web did (and continues to do) to newspapers around the turn of the century — steal their customers and advertisers. There reasons for this trend are multi-factorial: cheaper and bigger bandwidth; faster laptops and internet enabled video devices; greater viewer comfort with watching content "offline," through DVR’s like TiVo. These factors and the trend they drive will only continue to accelerate. Imagine a TiVo that will allow you to search, pick and record online content just as well as the "legacy" cable content.

Fake Steve has similar sentiments (if you’re not familiar with the deeply tongue in cheek "diary" of Apple CEO Steve Jobs, do yourself a favor and add it to your RSS reader):

Trust me, I own one of these networks. I talk to the executives.
They’re clueless pussies who will never dare to take any risks because
at the end of the day what they care most about is keeping their jobs
and perks and fancy offices. Meanwhile the
nothing-to-lose-and-no-FCC-rules Internet stuff is coming at them at
warp speed. Worse yet, the networks have destroyed their own news
operations, which was really the only part of their business where they
were adding value. And this, by the way, is now the huge gaping
opportunity on the Internet. Forget "Ask a Ninja" or "Naked News" or
girls in bikinis on trampolines. Someone with money and brains is going
to do an Internet version of what Ted Turner did with CNN in the early
days of cable. Real content. High quality, good reporters, cheap
cameras out in the field. Streaming news and on-demand, so you could go
back and watch pieces over and over again, or email them to friends.

Just
imagine what you could do in Iraq with twenty ballsy reporters armed
with cheap digital cameras and no network brass to censor them. Imagine
how you could cover the 2008 elections. Imagine the size of the
worldwide audience. Imagine how stunned people would be if, for once,
the people doing the news could actually tell you the truth. Imagine if
the reporters were smart, funny and wise-ass, instead of Ken Doll
robots with strings in the back of their heads. Imagine if you didn’t
have to abide by the stupid rules about equal time and fair play.
Imagine if you got a handful of sales guys with TV experience (nobody
over 40) to bring in the advertising. It’ll happen. Wait and see.

Ouch!

So, what does this have to do with Ajax? We aren’t just writing code that uses XMLHttpRequest objects. We are writing applications with a purpose — to entertain, inform, sell, assist, create. And as web technologies and usages evolve, we have to make sure our apps evolve right along. People still read books, despite the popularity of TV. People will still use "traditional" webapps, without video, but video will start to play a greater role in more and more online applications. It is time for us to start thinking about how to make our Ajax-enabled apps take advantage of this trend.

Technorati Tags: ajax, video, youtube

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I was looking for a quick way to profile some code in IE. I didn’t want to grab Tito (commercial) or JsLex (browser independent, sweet, but a bit of a hog). So I went hunting for a simple little AOP library for Javascript and came across Ajaxpect. In 58 lines of Javascript, it gives you the ability to add before, after and around advice. From the included example:

// Example business logic var thing = {     makeGreeting: function(text) {         return 'Hello ' + text + '!';     } }alert(thing.makeGreeting('world')); // Hello world!

// Advice definitions function aopizeAdvice(args) {     args[0] = 'AOP ' + args[0];     return args; } function shoutAdvice(result) {     return result.toUpperCase(); } function ciaoAdvice() {     return 'Bye-bye!'; } 

// Adding advices Ajaxpect.addBefore(thing, 'makeGreeting', aopizeAdvice); alert(thing.makeGreeting('world')); // Hello AOP world! Ajaxpect.addAfter(thing, /make*/, shoutAdvice); alert(thing.makeGreeting('world')); // HELLO AOP WORLD! var filter = function(name) { return name.indexOf('Greet') != -1 } Ajaxpect.addAround(thing, filter, ciaoAdvice); alert(thing.makeGreeting('world')); // Bye-bye!

Technorati Tags: ajax, aop, profiling

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Looks like the pressure from the Cooee open source split has already resulted in some action. After many, many months of user grousing, Tod Liebeck of NextApp has just announced the launch of a bug tracker for Echo2. It’s Mantis (not my favorite bug tracker — personally I prefer JIRA), which is better than nothing.

A bug tracker is long overdo. Let’s hope that other open source best practices start to appear, so that community involvement is boosted and these bugs get fixed.

Technorati Tags: echo2, cooee, mantis

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Over one year ago, Eric Picard wrote an excellent article reviewing the issues with Ajax and Internet advertising standards:

The current IAB impression-counting guidelines don’t provide specific guidance on this topic. But they do offer general guidance on pages where advertising is automatically refreshed or reloaded. In the current audit process, every page that automatically refreshes will be treated as a unique case. The publisher must prove to the auditor that its business rules are justified. This means an immense amount of work on all sides during an audit, and decision-making criteria for every ad refresh scenario must be documented ahead of time for the auditors.

The current guidelines were last revised in September of 2004. The language in this document that might apply to Ajax is generally couched in terms of autorefresh pages, iframes, popups, popunders, etc., but it’s far from adequate:

Good filtration procedures are critical to page-impression measurement. Additionally, consistent handling of auto-refreshed pages and other pseudo-page content (surveys, pop-ups, etc.) in defining a “page” and establishing rules for the counting process is also critical. These page-like items should be counted as follows:

• Pop-ups: ad impressions
• Interstitials: ad impressions
• Pop-unders: ad impressions
• Surveys: page impressions
• HTML Newsletters (if opened): page impressions if not solely advertising content, otherwise ad impressions
• Auto-Refreshed Pages: Site-set auto-refresh – page impressions subject to the following criteria — The measuring organization and user should consider: (1) whether the page is likely to be in background or minimized therefore diminishing the opportunity to view. If the content-type is likely to be in background or minimized while in use or the organization cannot determine whether minimization has occurred, these auto-refreshed pages may be assessed and or valued differently, and (2) that the refresh rate is reasonable based on content type. User-set auto refresh – Generally counted as page impressions.
• Frames: page impressions; organizational rules should be developed for converting frame loads into page impressions and these rules should be disclosed. One acceptable method is to identify a frame which contains the majority of content and count a page impression only when this dominant frame is loaded. These items should be separately identified and quantified within page-impression totals. Significant disaggregated categories should be prominently displayed.

As advertising driven sites face a decision on whether to lose pageviews in exchange for a better, Ajax-driven user experience, this gap between the standards and the current technology becomes ever more painful. Fortunately, the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) is starting to address this gap. This past May they released a draft of Rich Internet Application (RIA) ad measurement guidelines for public review.

The guidelines state that "In instances where significant user activity (click through and responding to mail, changing search options through clicking or typing, etc.) is present, this activity can be directly tied to ad-serving and counting provided that counting rules are defined in a consistent and fully disclosed manner." The guidelines go on to acknowledge that, "In special circumstances, due to the nature of the application, there may be no material user activity, for example, a single streaming event (e.g., financial tickers, sports game coverage, long single-stream video content)." For these types of environments, currently accepted auto-refresh guidelines should be applied including the consideration of user-set auto-refresh and for site-set rates, an assessment for reasonableness based on the rate and nature of the content as well as materiality.

Vague enough to be useful? And which of the service providers in the online ad biz are staying abreast of the RIA explosion? Well, it looks like the analytics folks like Ominiture and Google/Urchin are doing something about it, providing an API to allow RIA’s to track user activity. In fact, they have been far out in front of the other service providers.

The audit folks are just starting to get on the bandwagon. Nielson has stuck a cautious toe in the water by announcing it would report time spent statistics in addition to pageviews starting in July.

At this stage of Web 2.0 development, it’s clear that Total Minutes is the best engagement metric, because it provides a common denominator for user behavior that is independent of site design. This not only ensures fair measurement of those sites using RIA or streaming media, but also of Web environments like online gaming and Web-based applications and services that were never well-served by Page Views to begin with.

Snooze. More like "we can’t really measure application activity right now, so we’ll make do with what we can measure." You can’t tell me that a page that sits on a background tab in a browser for hours is the same as a single page social networking app that is heavily used for 30 minutes. This is not good news, as it seems out of step with the IAB and will impede adoption of RIA’s by content publishers. These publishers risk becoming irrelevant — an online ghetto that will remain the last stronghold of the frequent postback.

What about the ad serving service providers? Do they have API’s or other new features designed to work with RIA’s? I don’t have any good answers there yet. Since Google has been at the forefront of Ajax/Web 2.0 apps and actually dynamically loads adsense ads into into some of it’s own RIA’s, you would expect them to be very Ajax friendly. Not so fast.

Google’s adsense terms of service are not exactly friendly to Web 2.0 and Ajax. It’s all about "include the ads on the page and shut up." It’s hard to believe this is the same company that pioneered Google Maps and GWT.

I’ll be coming back to this issue time and again as the desire to build cool apps runs smack into the need to make money.

Technorati Tags: ajax, advertising, google, adsense, nielsen

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