First thing’s first

Twitter’s a micro-blogging site. Which means that instead of maintaining a full blog as I’m doing at the moment, with full articles, posts with detailed content or unedited ramblings, you’re limited to a scant 140 characters to express yourself. If the stuff you tweet (which is what we call these 140 char posts) is interesting or fun, people will follow you to keep on reading what it is you have to say. Similarly you may follow other people who interest you and read whatever it is they have to say. Pretty simple concept, and not too impressive when described so plainly, but it’s become a veritable force of nature.

Why it’s cool

The recent hype has revolved around celebrities twittering their every move basically skipping over the paparazzi and letting the public scrutinize their lives straight from the horse’s mouth. If you’re into celebrity gossip well that’s pretty much where twitter begins and ends for you. For those of us looking for something more, the involvement needs to go a bit deeper. See, the one thing newbies don’t get about twitter is that if you don’t tweet and don’t follow anyone, you have a site full of nothing. So if following celebs isn’t your thing it might be a bit harder to find good people to follow, but once you do you will have opened a door into the collective hive mind: Developers with new techniques, advertisers sharing research, industry experts talking about their “secrets”, and in general excellent people putting up amazing content that most of us would have probably not found otherwise.
It’s also the absolute best place to get breaking news. Michael Jackson’s death might be the most recent example, wherein those of us on twitter had gotten the news about 2 hours earlier than everywhere else, but it can be much more practical.
Since I’m followed by a lot of locals, and most people with a smart phone and a twitter account use a mobile app to tweet from the road, I’ve found myself asking my followers for traffic reports, for the state of a line at the movies, for reviews on all sorts of things, and many times I’ve gotten an answer, sometimes with pictures, seldom with live video.
Further it’s a fantastic place to meet like minded individuals. I follow clients, suppliers, competition, friends, and people I don’t know and will probably never meet. It’s been a particularly useful tool for organizing the local web industry. What started as a bunch of tweets amongst a group of pros very impressed with each other, is now coalescing into the Web Professionals Group of Puerto Rico, including various development, design, and e-marketing firms in the island.

Who should I follow?

First forget about hoarding followers. Too many businesses and individuals come to twitter with a half-baked idea involving a million followers and some harebrained advertising scheme. The best way to get eyes is by generating good content. This is truer on twitter than it is anywhere on the internet as most of the time you’ll be expected to converse casually with both your followers and those you follow. Also a lot people will follow you for following them as a common courtesy.  If you or your company (or your client) is looking to become a productive member of the twitter community instead of looking for followers (they’ll come in time) focus on following good interesting people. A good place to start might be twitter’s own search. Write in a word or phrase and you’ll instantly find hundreds (if not thousands) of individuals tackling that particular topic. Find a couple of twitterers who say something interesting about said topic and follow them, odds are they’ll keep saying interesting stuff. You can also follow people you actually know, just ask around and you’ll find out a couple of your friends or contacts tweet as well. Once you have a decent base you can look at the people they’re following and cherry-pick those you like best. Finally, every Friday is Follow Friday. This fun little trend started a long while back and has become a staple of the Twitter community. Every friday people send out recommendations on who to follow from the list of people they themselves follow. Just look for the #followfriday  tag and you’ll find a lot of good ones as well as some bad ones but you can always unfollow if someone gets too annoying.

Final tips

Congrats! You should now be a productive twitterer. If you’ve no idea what to write about just take a sec to think about what you’re doing and write about that, odds are someone somewhere will find it interesting. Also there’s some lingo you’ll need to know to fit in here’s a decent primer straight from twitter. You’ll probably also want to use a good url shortener. Since you only have 140 characters to write your thoughts you don’t want to waste most of them on a long dynamically generated URL. So if for example you wanted to link to a beautiful 3 bedroom home on ClasificadosMejores.com, the best classifieds site on the web, you’d be better off using this URL:http://bit.ly/2m6R3A than this URL: http://www.clasificadosmejores.com/bienes-raices-clasificados-470.html.
My favorite shortener is http://bit.ly as it’s the least amount of characters allowed for a domain and it’s really easy to type and remember.
Also there’s ways to tweet without going to twitter.com, tweetdeck is my favorite solution for the desktop with tiny twitter on my phone for keeping everyone up to date from the road.
Finally here’s a list of great twitterers to follow so you can get started:
@pabloiv, @torlanco, @alantaveras, @robetoell, @albizu, @gcollazo, @jpadilla_, @fritzo, @redod, @mercedesnegron, @kolapse, @dhowell, @garyvee, @jasoncalacanis, @wiltonv, @lbenitez

If you already twitter and would like to leave some suggestions put them right there in the comments.

The Switch

The practical switch was much easier than the psychological switch. I set the home page and default search engine to Bing and with a couple of clicks I was set. Nevertheless Google has been my unthinking default since the late 90s. Opening a browser window and seeing something other than the multicolored logo and search box, over a white background felt weird for the first week. The Bing homepage is a testament to good content presentation. Most of the screen is dominated by a large, high-res image of some usually random, interesting thing. Today it was a hanging monastery in China and it changes daily. Directly below it is a footer with links related to the main image followed by breaking news and trending topics. To the left are links to the now traditional image, video, shopping, news, maps and travel searches, directly under the Bing logo and search box. There’s a bunch of other navigation pieces but they’re all well tucked-away in their respective areas.

The Search

First thing I noticed after the switch is that I seldom use search engines. I’ve been on the internet so long that I usually know exactly where to go for most pieces of information, leaving the search box as a last resort when my usual sources fail me (they usually don’t). The times I did have to rely on Bing for finding information it shone very brightly. The search results screen innovates very little but in case you need it there’s tons more meta-data about your search than a Google result usually brings. Searching the Beatles for example produced the same basic set of results: beatles.com, the Beatles Wikipedia entry, lyrics, fan pages, etc. Bing’s results were organized with subsections such as Beatles Songs, Beatles Lyrics, Beatles Albums, etc. Each sub-category was represented on a new navigation in the left side column over related searches and my recent search history. Each result entry had additional hover-over functionality with content preview and some links from the site’s internal navigation. Images were displayed on top of the main results and video results at the bottom of the page.

The Experience

Microsoft is evidently putting a lot of importance into making this the best search solution. Every results page comes with a feedback button locked to the bottom right of the window where you can rate and comment the results of your search as well as the general Bing experience. The entire experience is very dynamic, ajaxy and generally Web 2.0. Everything that can be done asynchronously is done asynchronously. Hover over an image and a larger preview image comes up as a tooltip with some of the image’s metadata, it’s source, a feedback link and a similar images link (this feature works particularly well). Hover over a video thumb and a preview starts playing right there with sound and all. All searches can be refined. Images can be refined by size, proportions, color, style, and people. This last refinement is particularly cool as it lets you search for faces, upper body or images with no people at all. These tools are very powerful letting a user find some very specific results with just a few clicks, like this page that includes only Wallpaper sized images of red Ferraris on plain backgrounds. Sure, the further you go down the more blue and black Ferraris slip in as well as other backdrops, but the first couple dozen images fit my search perfectly and most of the times you just need one good red Ferrari.

The Conclusion

My relationship with Google as my homepage has been long and fruitful, but I think I’ve finally found a real contender for this space. I’m going to stick with Bing for the foreseeable future and I’m glad that I decided to give it a chance. It’s about time Microsoft put some real effort into it’s search division. True, it copies all the best that Google has to offer, but copying the competition is nothing new for Microsoft, and at least this time they’ve managed to provide a better product with considerable differences that really put it a good couple of feet ahead of the pack.

As web standards have changed, browsers gotten better and people’s interactions with the internet become something else entirely; 20% of Internet users insist in keeping an 8 year old browser. Do you remember what websites were like 8 years ago? Here’s Microsoft’s own from the Wayback Machine’s archive. No video, no Javascript, no CSS, basically nothing of what makes a modern site.

As developers we have to work, often tens of hours longer, to replicate the experience that works on every other browser, on IE6. And it’s not just us, here at ML. The development community has had to create workarounds and exceptions to mold our carefully designed product to IE6’s shortcomings, and lack of W3 standards compliance.

With that in mind we are ecstatic that Google decided to raise the visibility of our cause by marking IE6 as an unsupported browser for Gmail and various other Google products, and recommending instead many other free options that will better serve the user. Sure they might have ulterior motives, such as advertising their own Chrome browser, but by coming out against this seriously outdated program they help to raise the industry as a whole.

We have not followed Google’s route in that we will continue to support IE6 as long as it is used by more than 15% of Internet users, but we would like you to help us in our plight by dropping this antiquated relic and upgrading to some of the various (much better) options available in the market. Even more, here are some links to help get you started:

Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera, Internet Explorer 8

Yeah, you guys read that last one right, IE is up to its eighth version, which is leaps and bounds better than its predecessors.

So there you are, links, options and all. If you’d like a recommendation, personally I like Firefox and Chrome for the PC, Firefox for the Mac and Linux, and Opera 9.5 beta for my phone. You no longer have an excuse, upgrade today.

EDIT: IE6 finally has dropped below 15% and we have stopped supporting it for regular projects. We will nevertheless keep supporting IE6 in projects that specifically require it for an additional fee.

At first it seemed to me like a very elaborate joke, I bet similar thoughts came to their minds initially. But they have developed and designed it to a point of exquisite interaction and fun factor.

Some of the things you can do with the app are shake “maracas”, scratch “Güiros”, slap “panderetas” and hit two “palitos”. If that doesn’t seem like a blast, you can tag along other parranderos (virtual ones) and have them yell:

• ¡Asalto!
• Weeepa
• Trucuta trucuta
• ¡Felicidades!

…amongst other favorites. The app is having great acceptance in the Apple Store with clients from all over the world including Japan, India, Spain, and France. You can reach it via this link.

I hope this will be the beginning of new exciting apps for the iPhone from Puerto Rican developers.

Here’s a look at the actual app:

1. This American Life
This was originally a radio show from Chicago Public Radio which finally found it’s real audience on the Internet. Each week they take a topic and tell one to four stories based on that topic. The stories are always real life anecdotes usually told by the people involved. I realize the premise doesn’t sound particularly exciting, but skillful storytelling and an astonishing musical selection, grab a hold of the listener every single time.

2. digg.com
Digg is a social news site; people submit stories and the rest of the users vote on them, the ones with most votes appear on the site’s front page. This site was completely dominated with pro-Obama, anti-McCain articles, but since the election ended the discussion has returned to science and tech news. It’s a great place to find out about what’s going on in the bleeding edge and with geek culture.

3. The Battle for Gobwin Knob
It looks childish and it’s a comic book, but that’s where the throw-away online comic stops and this fantastic piece of literature begins. This first volume of the Erfworld saga follows the attack on Gobwin Knob by the unified forces of Erfworld under the Command of Prince Ansom of Jetstone, against Stanley the Tool. If it sounds cheesy it’s completely intentional. Under a very colorful candy coating, of overly cutesy characters, pop culture references and visual puns, lies an epic story played out in a multi dimensional dynamic world that is somehow believable. Very highly recommended.

4. Wired
Wired magazines has been one of my favorite publications for years. It finally brought geek culture out into the post-modern cyberpunk world all of us imagined ourselves to be living in to begin with. If geek is now somehow chic, Wired had a huge hand in making that happen, bringing our little club of misfits out into the mainstream while somehow staying relevant and on the edge, even after all these years.

5.TWiT, Diggnation, ELR
All 3 of these are tech industry and geek culture podcasts. I mention them together for their similar subject matter, talk show format, and availability through the iTunes store for free. ELR(or Extra Life Radio for long) is a weekly discussion of all things geek hosted by web comic artists Scott Johnson, Brian Dunaway, and Obsidian(our client), whose webcomic commissionedcomic.com is hosted by us in this very same server. This Week in Tech(TWiT) is a discussion panel led by Leo Laporte, of Radio and TechTV fame, on the tech industry. The show is focused on the business side of things and through Leo’s cred in the community is frequented by real high level insiders. Finally Diggnation is web wunderkind Kevin Rose and his sidekick Alex Albrecht sitting on a couch drinking beer going though the top stories on digg.com, it is frequently hillarious, often nonsensical, and sometimes just plain weird.

6. Pandora
If you like music, and I know you do, Pandora could easily become the best tool you will ever find. Based off of the findings of the Music Genome Project, this online app will create a playlist of music from many different artists based on the tendencies of one particular song, album or artist. As you listen to the songs it offers, you can tell it if you liked a song or not and it will in turn learn from those preferences. I can not stop raving about Pandora, I will reccomend it to anyone and everyone, seriously, go there now.

I guess that’s it for now. All of those are very impressive time wasters but most of them will teach you a thing or two about what the internet is all about. Feel free to add your own favorites in the comments.

Its a tough sell and ironically its obviously never charged for, but clients rarely like scrolling to the bottom of their website and finding a purposely contrasting visual element, till’ we list the benefits:

• Its all there, kinda like a visually appealing sitemap
• Helps your SEO, its got low visibility… ok but the links, headers, and bolds are there
• No-nonsense navigation, just scroll down and be worry free
• Include your crosslinks: a blog, relevant sites of the industry, whatever you please

If you read all this and still dont know what I’m talking about here are some of the quick-link panes you may notice in your daily browsing routine:

Quick Link Pane in social news site Digg

International Heral Tribune - Quick Link Pane Web 2.0 trend

gamespot - this Quick Link Pane is more traditional pre-Web 2.0 This case is annoyingly SEO purposed but hey! use it how you please.