This is a Guest post by Annkur, if you want to write for us, check out Write for .Shoutmeloud

Today Smartphone are more than just a superior piece of hardware, the UI and applications make the biggest difference. And Apple’s has managed to change the way the industry and consumers perceive a smart phone with the iPhone alone. Right from the multi-touch UI to the App store which is a cut above the rest. A lot has been said and written about how the iTunes App Store leads the applications industry and how Nokia has failed to produce anything significant to compete with the same. And its certainly true that the iTunes app store leads with a billion app downloads, 65000+ apps live and 8500 apps coming in to Apple every week for review.

Image Credit

For Apple and its developers the task is fairly simple (not implying that its no hard work), as all their iTouch devices have the same screen size, structure and Operating System. Thus there is no great compatibility issues when developing apps for the iPhone or the iPod touch. On the other hand Nokia has 75 models for which it is trying to implement the Ovi Store. This is a challenging job as Nokia has different software profiles (Symbian 40, 60, 60 2nd edition etc) and different screen sizes, resolution, hardware layout etc. Thus getting an app live on the Ovi Store requires much more effort.

The different is in the vision. Nokia is developing mobile phones since over a decade, while Apple has just entered the marked along with the smart phone boom, their approach was better planned and revolutionizing. This makes the task of getting a app store competitor for Nokia a big uphill fight. While I would agree that the App Store leads and its certainly fabulous, I would give Nokia the benefit that they have a much wider audience to satisfy.

Hope they improve, innovate and bring us something good. At the end its the consumers (that’s you and me) who benefits from all this competition.

This is a guest post by Annkur Agarwal who writes at OnlyGizmos Network. If you like his article you can consider following him on Twitter @annkur

Yesterday UK-based SEO specialist Dave Naylor made headlines by detailing a significant Twitter cross-site scripting vulnerability, which allowed him to insert JavaScript code into tweets simply by adding some code to the field where an application developer would normally link to a product website. There are all sorts of malicious things people could have done to exploit the bug, like steal session cookies, create a Twitter worm or even infect unaware visitors with malware, so it’s safe to say this was a massive security threat.

Sure enough, when word got out Twitter moved to patch the bug to prevent such bad stuff from happening. John Adams from Twitter Operations even commented on Naylor’s blog to point out the hole had been closed shortly after he published his post.

Well, not quite.

Naylor today followed up on yesterday’s blog post with another one correctly claiming that the exploit still very much works. He proved as much by creating another dummy account on Twitter, which pops up a (harmless) dialog box when you visit the link through the website. Twitter may suspend this account soon, much like they did with the first dummy account Naylor created to make his point, so I included a screenshot of what happens when you visit that profile on top of this post.

Naylor writes:

With a few minutes work, someone with a bit of technical expertise could make a Twitter ‘application’ and start sending tweets with it. Using the simple instructions below, it can be arranged so that if another Twitter user so much as sees one of these tweets - and they are logged in to Twitter - their account could be taken over.

Imagine that for a moment. Simply by seeing one of these tweets, code can be run inside your browser impersonating you and doing anything that your browser can do. Perhaps it may simply redirect you to a pornographic website? Or maybe delete all of your tweets? Send a message to all of your friends? Maybe it would delete all of your followers, or worse still, just send the details needed to log in to your account off to another website for someone to use at their leisure.

In my opinion, it’s completely unacceptable that Twitter engineers never got in touch with Naylor to learn more about the exploit and adequately fix the problem, which the SEO consultant correctly marks a shame. Instead, the startup’s tech team apparently tried fixing it without really looking at the potential security issues:

Their idea of fixing it is to stop you putting spaces in the address box. Spaces. Other than that, everything else is fair game.

It’s important to note that you’re probably safe when you use any third-party client for your Twitter needs, although I’d recommend you make use of the more popular ones and stop visiting the Twitter website for the next couple of days. Whatever you do, be careful when you click links to Twitter profiles you don’t know, even when they are linked to by people you know and trust, and be on the lookout for suspicious-looking applications used to send out tweets.

We’ve contacted Twitter to let them know the security threat is still very much present. Hopefully, we’ll see an adequate fix and a statement from the startup soon.

Infographics can be a great way to quickly reference information.

Instead of pouring over figures and long reports to decipher data, an infographic can immediately make apparent exactly what a dataset actually means.

Below are more than 25 infographics that can be useful to web designers.

Some are incredibly practical, some provide information that might be of interest to designers and some just present data that might be interesting to those who design websites all day.

If you know of any good ones that we may have missed, please add them in the comments section below.

1. Web Trend Map 4

2. Period Table of Typefaces

3. Global Internet Traffic Map

4. Classifying Experiences

5. Flickr User Model

6. The Browser Wars

7. A Month of Spam

8. The Life of an Article on the Web

9. Online Communities Map

10. Map of the World 2.0 Mosaic

11. The Internet’s Undersea World

12. Search Engine Spider Traps

13. Google PageRank Explained

14. Building a Company with Social Media

15. SEO Check List

16. The Life Cycle of a Blog Post, From Servers to Spiders to Suits—to You

17. Software Wars

18. Who Participates Online

19. What 16 Million Colors Looks Like

20. Periodic Table of Visualization Methods

21. Periodic Table of the Internet

22. Country Codes of the World

23. Apple’s Tipping Point: Macs for the Masses

24. Infoporn: The Cost of Living on the Bleeding Edge of Technology

25. Map of All Yahoo! APIs and Services

26. Digital Media Weights and Measures

27. Global Color Usage with Respect to Time and Location / 2009 / SML + Adobe Kuler Pulse

28. Facebook vs. Twitter

Do you feel infographics are effective to display information? Please share with us any other infographics that can be of interest to web designers.

 

By Minda Zetlin

Most businesses think of Twitter as a promotional tool, but it can also be used to find sales leads. Here's how to use Twitter to find potential customers and how to convert those contacts into sales.

Boloco, a burrito restaurant chain with 16 locations often runs ads in a Boston newspaper. The ads contain coupons for the chain’s popular burritos for a special price of $3. It makes sense to advertise in Boston, since 13 of the chain’s 16 restaurants are there, but CEO and co-founder John Pepper wished the ads could also bring customers to Boloco restaurants in New Hampshire and Vermont. So, when he ran one recent ad, Pepper also posted a photo of the coupon on Twitter, inviting diners to bring in any image of the coupon -- a photocopy, printout, or even an image on a mobile phone -- to get the discount.

“It was a way to bring people outside Boston in the print advertising, and a way to increase our visibility,” says Pepper, whose Twitter ID is @boloco. The tactic proved wildly successful, he says. “Usually we get about 350 coupons on that kind of promotion. This time we got 900, including the mobile phones. About 25 percent of our transactions that day came from the coupon, which never happens.” In effect, he says, posting the ad on Twitter decreased cost per reader by increasing circulation.

Connecting with customers

Most business that use Twitter think of it mostly as a promotional tool, a way to announce new products, perhaps gain readers for a blog. But some smarter companies are actually using Twitter to sell products, such as Dell Corp., which recently acknowledged that it had made $3 million in sales in two years over Twitter, primarily by posting coupon numbers for discounts of 10 percent or more on Dell Outlet items.

“There’s no reason not to try Twitter,” notes Stefanie Nelson, marketing manager for Dell, who created Dell Outlet’s Twitter campaign. “There’s no cost, and it’s a limited time commitment, at least it was for me at the beginning. Before we built up the following and reach that we have now, it took me literally minutes a week.” (Things have gotten a bit busier now that @DellOutlet has over 700,000 followers.)

According to Nelson, the most important first step is to know exactly what you want your tweets to accomplish. “Understand why you’re on Twitter,” she says. In her case, she adds, the objective was to quickly sell Dell Outlet items, which are usually excess inventory. And, she says, “If you know your objective, and who your target audience is, Twitter can be just as effective for a small company as a large one.”

Boost sales with Tweets

Using coupons to create boost sales is only one way to reach customers with tweets. Here are a few others:

1. Give your company a human face. Pepper uses TweetDeck to track mentions of “Boloco” on Twitter, and one day it flagged a tweet in which a woman bemoaned the cool, rainy weather this summer and pondered whether to spend the afternoon at Boloco or a different restaurant. “I’ll respond to that one, with something like, ‘I vote for Boloco!’” he says. Twitter users are usually pleasantly surprised, he adds. “They expect @Boloco to be like @DunkinDonuts. They don’t expect to hear from the head of the company.” There’s a delicate balance between making human contact, and sharing too many everyday details that may not interest your customers, Nelson says, a dilemma she partly addresses by using @StefanieatDell for more personal tweets. Whatever you do, she advises, avoid spamming followers with promotional direct messages not specifically written for them.
2. Find customers when they’re looking for your product or service. Searching Twitter can be a very effective way to find new customers. For instance, Rocky Mountain Ace Stores, an affiliation of Denver area Ace store owners, uses monitter to search Twitter for both keywords and locations of tweeters. One day, the group flagged a Denver man worrying about insects in his lawn. “So we tweeted to him about beneficial insects, such as ladybugs, which will eat bugs all summer, and which we sell,” says Andy Carlson, who owns an Ace store in Denver and is on the group’s board. “He wound up coming in to one of our stores and buying ladybugs.” Chris Savage, CEO of Wistia, a video-sharing site for business use, advises putting some thought into picking the terms you search on Twitter, just as you would for meta tags. “Research the most frequently searched terms in your market on Google and other search engines,” he says. “Then search or monitor those terms on Twitter.
3. Deal with disgruntled customers -- fast. One evening Ace customers posted an angry tweet because a tool he’d bought from a Denver area store broke after one use. “We got in touch, recommended which store he should go to to return the item, and alerted the manager at that store,” Carlson says. “He didn’t know that Ace hand tools all carry a lifetime guarantee.” The man was very impressed, and went from being angry at Ace to being a devoted Ace customer. The complaining tweet came through late at night, Carlson notes, well after the stores were closed. And, he says, it was especially important to intervene quickly. “You don’t know whether he’s going to go back to the store right away, or stew about it for three or four days and tell more people. The more time between the bad experience and the resolution, the more likely he is to tell his friends, so the quicker we can solve a problem, the better.”

And that’s the nice thing about Twitter, he says. “You can catch a problem when it happens, and do something about it.”

FROM : http://technology.inc.com/internet/articles/200907/twitter.html?partner=newsletter_Technology

A gripe A e a evolução da possibilidade de contágio, levou o Instituto da Mobilidade e dos Transportes Terrestres (IMTT) a recomendar aos utentes, esta quarta-feira, o recurso aos serviços on-line, evitando as concentrações de pessoas em espaços públicos fechados.

 

Através do site na Internet, o IMTT relembra os utilizadores que podem aceder aos vários serviços, disponibilizados on-line, constituindo uma alternativa ao atendimento personalizado.

Entre os vários serviços disponíveis, os condutores podem efectuar o pedido, pela internet, de licenciamento de veículos, de revalidação da carta de condução, de alteração de morada, entre outros disponíveis no site do IMTT.

«O recurso aos Serviços on-line, além de permitir maior comodidade e rapidez, pode constituir uma forma de protecção contra a gripe, na medida em que contribui para evitar a concentração de pessoas em espaços públicos fechados», explica o IMTT.

É apresentada ainda uma outra vantagem na utilização dos serviços on-line, que consiste na redução das taxas aplicadas em dez por cento, relativamente àquelas que são cobradas num balcão de atendimento presencial.

Todavia, os serviços do IMTT estão disponíveis igualmente em Lojas do Cidadão e Postos de Atendimento ao Cidadão. Os utilizadores contam ainda com um serviço de atendimento telefónico, através da linha 808 50 20 20, disponível entre as 9:00 e as 19:30, de segunda a sexta-feira, facultando esclarecimentos relacionados com condutores, veículos ou actividades de transporte.

Fonte :  http://diario.iol.pt/tecnologia/imtt-utentes-internet-gripe-a-servicos-tvi24/1080215-4069.html

Over the last few months, YouTube has made it clear that it’s keen on helping its premium content partners monetize as effectively as possible — and it’s obviously having some success doing it, with the number of monetized views increasing rapidly. Today the site is launching a new feature that will give those monetization rates another boost: YouTube Promoted Video campaigns will now be able to appear on a video’s ‘watch’ page, turning the product into what’s effectively an ‘AdSense for YouTube’.

For those that aren’t famililar with the terminology YouTube uses to identify its pages and advertising products, here’s what that means. Up until now Promoted Video campaigns have been primarily shown on search result pages — I might run a campaign with “guitar” as a keyword, and when someone did a search for that term, my video would show up as a promoted result. In this sense, the program was quite similar to Google’s AdWords feature. Today, though, YouTube is going to begin showing Promoted Videos on the ‘Watch’ pages, where videos are actually shown alongside comments and related other content. Promoted videos that appear here will be matched with the content that’s already on the page, hence the AdSense comparison. Anyone running a promoted video campaign will be able to choose if they’d like to stick with the old product (displaying their video in search results) or on the Watch page.

Premium content partners will also benefit from the product — whenever a Promoted Video is matched against a piece of content they own (or that they’ve identified using Content ID), they’ll get a cut of the revenue as well.

I spoke with YouTube Product Manager Matthew Liu, who says that the addition is part of YouTube’s overarching goal of increasing the amount of money its partners can generate (the more money they make, the more content they put up — and YouTube makes more money in turn). Before now, the site has done this in a few ways: it makes it easier for partners to monetize more videos with Content ID, which lets them monetize UGC, and it allows partners to run Featured Video campaigns, which drive more traffic by heavily promoting the videos to YouTube users. And, obviously, today’s release will let them earn revenue through yet another channel as users begin running Promoted Video campaigns against their premium content.

Well, Twitter didn’t win a Nobel Peace Prize for its role in getting the word out about the Iran election protests earlier this summer, but it did gain about 7 million new visitors in the month of June. Twitter’s website attracted a total of 44.5 million unique visitors worldwide in June, 2009, according to comScore.

Twitter’s worldwide audience grew a healthy 19 percent from May, 2009 (and an even healthier 1,460 percent from June, 2008, when its worldwide audience was just 2.9 million).

With 20 million of its visitors coming from the U.S., Twitter’s audience is now 55 percent international. ComScore now counts it as the No. 52 largest site in the world (bigger than ESPN, just shy of the BBC and Craigslist).

These estimates only count traffic to Twitter.com. Since more than half of Twitter users don’t even go to the Website, and instead use Twitter apps to consume and publish Tweets, Twitter’s total audience is even larger. But comScore provides a consistent measure of its growth.

The global rise of Facebook is nothing less than astounding. In the month of June alone it gained 24 million unique visitors worldwide, compared to the month before, for a total of 340 million unique visitors worldwide.  It is now the fourth largest site in the world, trailing only Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo sites, according to comScore (see table below). Facebook itself only officially acknowledges 250 million active registered users (but you don’t have to be a registered user to visit some Facebook pages).

In the past year, it has grown 157 percent, gaining 208 million visitors.  It long ago passed its rival MySpace on a global basis, way back in April, 2008. Since then, it has passing even bigger sites on its way up. In the chart above, the blue line is Facebook. It passed Amazon back in August, 2008. eBay fell by the wayside in January, 2009. It surged past AOL sometime in February, 2009, and just last month it finally passed the Wikimedia Foundation sites (which includes Wikipedia).

So there it stands at No. 4. It will be a while, if ever, before it catches up to the three world leaders: Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. They each have between 240 million and 500 million more monthly global unique visitors than Facebook (see chart below). But it’s always good for a company to have stretch goals.

Worldwide unique visitors (June, 2009).  Source: comScore

1. Google Sites: 844 million
2. Microsoft Sites: 691 million
3. Yahoo! Sites: 581 million
4. Facebook: 340 million
5. Wikimedia Foundation sites: 303 million
6. AOL: 280 million
7. eBay: 233 million
8. CBS Interactive: 186 million
9. Amazon: 183 million
10. Ask Network: 174 million

In the U.S., Facebook had 77 million unique visitors in the month of June, making it the sixth largest site in the U.S. (after Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL and all Fox Interactive Media sites combined).

Productivity is something we can all benefit from, and there are a lot of ways you can work to improve your productivity. To-do lists are one of many activities people use to become more productive and ensure nothing falls through the cracks. But there is a major divide when it comes to to-do lists. There are those who believe that lists help keep them accountable and on track, and those who believe that lists do nothing more than create an environment of stress.

I am firmly aligned in the pro-list camp, and my list making habits have gone through a number of transformations, changing as my business and personal needs have changed. Based on this experience, here are 10 tips I have learned that can apply to just about any type of to-do list you may use in your life to help you make your list a productivity tool instead of a time suck.

Creating a System

1. Pick a system that works for you: There are many to-do list systems, from software, to online apps, to complete project management tools, to good old fashioned pen and paper. It really doesn’t matter what you use to create your list, only that it’s something that you can understand, keep up with and mold to fit your needs. If you’re just getting started or need to revamp your current system, watch for my next post that will include a list of online tools.

While you will likely need to modify any existing systems so they work for your individual needs, you can get a solid starting point and develop new process ideas from systems that are already working for others. Watch for a future post that will provide an overview on some to-do list/productivity/information management systems you can consider as a starting point.

2. Make it pleasing to you: Possibly because of my design background, I need every system I work with to actually look good. When it comes to to-do lists, something that is pleasing to the eye and is extremely organized makes me feel good about using the system and encourages increased productivity. So be sure to pick a system that you actually like the look and feel of.

Getting Started

3. Start with a brain dump: Start by writing/typing every possible task that comes to mind. Don’t worry about making it look pretty yet, this step is just meant to get everything in one place. If you have existing lists, be sure to grab those items and pull them into your brain dump list, too.

4. Divide and organize: Once you have everything in one place, take some time to separate your tasks into categories. Your categories may be comprised of any dynamics that work for you — business and personal tasks, client projects, high-priority items, etc.

5. Break everything down into individual actions: Each item on your list should be an individual and measureable task. Instead of “Design website,” try to break it down in digestible tasks that make sense:

• Discuss needs with client
• Create sitemap
• Collect site art and other business marketing materials from client
• Create mockup
• And so on…

It’s especially helpful when starting a new project to start with the final deliverable in mind, consider each step of the process and develop small tasks that will get you to the end point.

6. Use verbs: Every task item should be a specific act you need to do, so start everything with an action verb.

Managing Your List

7. Prioritize: Once you have your list created, look at each category and mark items that are of the highest priority. You may want to create a ranking system so you know the level of importance of every task and can sort accordingly.

8. Make a realistic “today” list: To avoid having a massive list facing you every day, it can be helpful to schedule tasks and create time-based lists – today, this week, this month, etc. And be realistic about what you can accomplish in that time period. By creating manageable and achievable lists, you will be more likely to stick with it.

9. Schedule weekly time for the un-doables: Items listed as lower priority tend to drop down to the bottom of the list, as they should. But you may find that you end up with a growing list of low-priority tasks that you keep rolling over from week to week. Scheduling regular time to act on these items will help you keep your list clean and current (and get rid of the stuff you’ve been putting off).

10. Be flexible and willing to adjust: Once you’re setup, avoid thinking of your system as being set in stone. Your life changes, so your list should be able to change as well. Keep an open-minded perspective on how to organize and manage your list in order to give your list a chance to morph as necessary.

How do you use a to-do list? What tips would you add here?

Image credit: Mateusz Stachowski

A 404 error on the web is what a web server responds with when it is tasked with serving up a resource that it can’t find.

1. It should still look like your website

If you don’t specifically tell your web server how to handle 404 errors, it will serve up a very plain and generic looking error page. That just says something like “Not Found – The requested URL was not found on this server.” on a plain white page. This is an unhelpful and rather painful roadblock for a user. A 404 page should look like an error page, but it should still look like your website. If you are using a CMS, this is probably already handled for you. If you have a static site, you can specify a 404 template through your .htaccess file.

 

2. Apologize

Nobody is trying to land on your 404. Most likely they came from a bad link either on your own site or out in the wild. They probably aren’t very happy about it, so this is a golden opportunity to apologize and hopefully turn that frown upside down.

3. Search

It’s possible the page they are looking for still exists, it’s just the URL has changed or it was incorrectly typed somewhere. Since your site should already have search anyway, this is a good opportunity to provide that search box front-and-center. This gives the user the opportunity to search for what they were trying to link to and dig up the correct URL for themselves.

4. Give readers useful links

Maybe the page they are linking to isn’t broken, it just doesn’t exist anymore. In addition to search, you may want to dish out some links they will find useful. Perhaps links to the homepage, the archives page, or other pages you already know are commonly visited / popular pages on your site?

5. Way to Contact / Report Error

It is possible a user landing on a 404 page is having some strong emotions about it. They could be very concerned, worried, or they could be down right ticked off. It is a good idea to give that user some way to release, and since you can’t hand them a punching bag, a contact form might do the trick. This is, of course, not only good for them but good for you, as you can learn about the problem in order to fix it or otherwise prevent it from happening again.

6. Automatic Reporting

Having users help report errors for you through a contact form is great, but only a small percentage of users are likely to do that. An alternative is to have your 404 page automatically report the error to you. There are many ways you could do this. A quick-and-dirty way to do it would be to make your 404 page a PHP file, and use the mail function to send an email of the URL that was landed on.

<?php
  mail("chriscoyier@gmail.com", "404 report", $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], "From: chriscoyier@gmail.com\n")
?>

NOTE: The above code is probably fine for a small site but not very practical on high traffic sites. Writing the errors to a Database in those circumstances is probably more practical.

7. Humor

Even serious sites can get away with a little humor on the 404 page. This is definitely a good opportunity to loosen up a little and do something funny.

8. Redirect?

I’m on the fence about this one, but it’s possible to automatically redirect a 404 error to another page. Perhaps the homepage displaying a message about the error? Perhaps a search page with keywords from the URL parsed out?

9. File Size

You might be surprised at the amount of malicious activity that your web server has to deal with. One thing that surprised me a while back was how many requests there were for “weird” files. Things like requesting the favicon in strange subfolders or looking for random images that don’t exist. When these things don’t turn up, the server loads up your 404 page. Needless to say, serving up a full webpage for all these requests adds up to some serious bandwidth. Your best bet is to fight against these malicious requests, but you should also take care to consider the total page size of your 404 page size and reduce it if bandwidth is a major concern.