It gets me in such a great mood, here at ML Studio were just a couple of guys with the dream of giving the best web product we can offer to our market, in our industry. Sometimes we are chin deep in work and yet everyone that knows us still remembers us as the bright-eyed 20 year-old entrepreneurs. There is no web development in this blog post, besides talking about our industry we also want you guys to get to know us; so just sit back and enjoy these three awesome songs I’ve chosen for y’all by some of my favorite girls.

Gal Costa – Baby

Dionne Warwick – Walk on By

Nina Simone – I put a spell on you

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.

Public Relations Pioneer and nephew of Sigmund Freud

One of the most amazing things in the face of this world, to me, was the life of Edward Bernays. Born the nephew of Sigmund Freud, he would use his uncle’s ideas along with crowd psychology to pioneer his way into the world of public relations. He would tackle problems with the consideration of the behaviour of masses of people. Perhaps the days of Bernays are over and the things he did would be considered appalling today, but certainly there is much insight on grasping the tendencies of a seemingly irrational crowd/society/mass of people.

The biggest crowd I could ever imagine taking form in a relatively practical sense is the internet. Undoubtedly we browse through it individually, yet, the thinks we like, the pages we visit, are completely biased and influenced by other …internauts.

Relating to an actual memory of mine, I remember when a friend told me I should make a profile in a site called ‘myspace’, ‘it’s a place to meet people’ he said. I remember thinking at the moment: ‘ What a silly domain name’, there was nothing on the site that motivated me to use it.

Months went by and the site became super huge and popular, it certainly didn’t look it at the time! Since, MySpace became the pioneer of the Social Web era, it achieved critical mass at some point unbeknownst to me and apparently before I joined. The term ‘critical mass’  (for the web), is generally understood by website owners but I’ve found the perfect example of what critical mass is in the following YouTube video:

Dance, guy!

Watch how at 1:18 in the video, the dance achieved critical mass, afterward he would just have to keep dancing and everyone would rush to the impromptu party, at least till the song ended.

Well yeah, I feel I’m deviating from the point which is that the popular sites we visit are actually visited because peers in the social web have recommended them to us, otherwise we would just visit them that first time. Examples of how this process is used to persuade you to register and use a site is the ‘bouncer effect‘:

Used by Facebook, you could only register if you had a @hms.harvard.edu email, they later accepted students of US universities, later any school or job and finally it was open to the public. People rushed to creating accounts as soon as they were permitted much as people would rush to a club when they have an ‘IN’ on the list. The whole situation was a tactic used on an irrational mass to create a need tied to the feeling of belonging. At the point were all universities were accepted, Facebook reached critical mass and everyone wanted in.

As of May of this year, it is estimated there are over 109.5 million websites. It is unarguable that there are probably much better websites than what Facebook was when it was only open to Harvard, yet it is perfect proof of how Edward Bernays practices can still be applied in any new medium. Much the same way there are a lot of practices used in the internet that can be twisted for a purpose, depending on the way the internet matures some have become popular, like:

Sending website invitations to a registered member’s contact list with the email subject “John Doe wants to meet with you in SomeSite.com”. This benefits from a marketing strategy called the ‘tie-up’ or ‘tie-in’ where before first-contact the site would have a third’s recommendation to use it.

So, there you have it; 2 case studies, a silly dancer, and one of the best minds of last century. I insist you discuss with me points made in this post in the comments area below, thanks for reading!

Today’s demographics are way more diverse and extended than the usual; gender, age and economic status. Our market is full of different niches, which divide into sub niches, groups and cliques. Most people  see this as a problem while others see it as an opportunity, which translate into different ways of advertising products and the creation of new products.

I once heard a celebrated ad-teacher say, the creative process of an agency stops when the rules and regulations of the FCC start. Lets face it, this isn’t Europe, where creative is a no-boundaries department that can use a topless woman to sell milk or create a whole interactive veggie-city, like the case of burger king’s ad agency in Amsterdam, to take the whopper experience out of the restaurants.  We live in a conservative society, with conservative values and conservative regulations. We are accustomed to dull ads that rarely over-pass the “noise” that is created by all the media surrounding us. Even when your product or ad campaign can be better represented with that great idea that is not so “conservative”, you have to be satisfied with what the mass media lets you communicate to your client.  Let’s take ZUJI’s, an online travel agent from Australia,  help a friend take a break campaign as a perfect example on how a company can interact, in a humorous non conservative way, with its clients through the internet to pursue their “take a break” concept. We don’t have to go to the farthest corners on earth to find some innovative and risky ads, Samsung’s London based agency just caused buzz all over the web with its, YouTube streamed, HD camera trick challenge which couldn’t be aired on any other medium due to its long running time,  and other media’s lack of interactivity. Samsung caught viewer’s attention span for more than one minute and half paying only for production.

Even locally the Internet has been able to generate excellent traffic results with relatively minimal effort. During this year’s Fiestas de la Calle San Sebastian, Open Mobile hired us and our sister company WiFiwyg, to stream live from the festivities. We set up cameras around San Sebastian street capturing all 4 days, real time, day and night, and transmitted it through fiestasdelacallesansebastian.com, which directed to a SanSe themed version of Open’s website with the Live streams running on it. By streaming live, straight from the street without censors or delays, Open ran the risk of capturing all sorts of non-PG content from the revelers down below, but through the combined efforts of a premiere domain, compelling content, and a little risk-taking, Open received over 20,000 unique visitors during the weekend (orders of magnitude above their regular weekend traffic) which resulted in a considerable spike of phone calls and conversions.

Instead   of kneeling down and cutting short the creative process, agencies should try different solutions and methods to get the clients’ message out. We should start following high end marketer’s trends like Nike and Sony’s Europe web methods.

The internet is our savior, with channels like YouTube, networks like twitter and thousands of sites with advertising space our imagination can go wild without leaving out the strategy.

Its time to start selling creative solutions here in Puerto Rico. Where there’s a will, the internet is the way.

As time went by, the site suffered from a very well documented “twit-vil war”. After all hell broke loose and personalities were irreparably tainted, a new blog emerged yosoyapple.com this blog post hopes to organize the mayhem for users that really liked the content from macuserboricua.com before the chaos and offer a review on the new site.

Review for yosoyapple.com

Yo Soy Apple Screenshot

The site design is fun and glossy, the posts are diligently frequent and the content is the best you might find on the topic for the local blogosphere, it might be time however to get rid of the bright red of the revolution. As a PC user that just recently made his first hackintosh

OSX Leopard on a Compaq Presario

, I regularly visit the site for guidance and suggest others to subscribe to its RSS feed.

The writers are very willing to help their users with any apple related information and at times design information as well. They now can do so to a broader audience; upon launch they started a new web channel of the sorts, it is really a livestream version of a local radio show and some added micro channels from the writer’s qik accounts. It’d be really cool to see this grow into an official podcast.

On the negative side, the site is slooow; made by designers and in a godaddy server, getting your content will take a couple of seconds on a broadband connection. But that is the only downside we have found for now.

The writers are the usual suspects, you will find them in twitter as @tane883, @coreanomac, @hrodriguezpr I suggest you follow them to get an insight on mac news from a local perspective.

More Content on the Subject

Best resource for iPhone tinkering

You might notice that not all writers from the former site have gone into the new one but you can still reach them at their personal projects. Some are still being brewed like @WrSantiago ‘s WebDevelopr but you can certainly find @esmandau ‘s iPhone page with his usual up to date information and now with a very complete design.

iPhonefanatic.net is the best resource for iPhone users out there looking to get a bit more action from their device. I am looking forward to blog about both of them, in the meantime please post any comments you might have regarding these sites. Many things have been left unsaid regarding the new offerings from each, but what has been published shows a very bright future.

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.

Here in just a week, I learned of all the possibilities that the internet has to offer. This is the most dynamic medium out there without a doubt. In its never-ending evolution, the web offers marketing and ad executives measurable, innovative and relatively cheap solutions for this modern and volatile market.  From reaching and knowing your target market; with networks like Facebook and Twitter, to literally doing whole campaigns and making your product move out of the shelf, the perfect example being, the controversially creepy Burger King “King”, which was so successful that it became it’s main campaign after running online. The world wide web is replacing ratings and CPM with CPC’s and Cost per leads, which are more inexpensive due the need of user interaction before a client has to put up a single dime.

In conclusion, there is much change to be made. Nowadays people are spending less time in front a television set and buying newspapers because all past media now are all mixed and mashed together in this thing we spend most of our time surfing. The Internet.

Wow, first blog post ever in my life. Lets make this happen.

This past week they’ve added another award to the trophy case, the SME’s WebAd Award for Best Website. From what we’ve read winning Best Website at the WebAds is akin to winning Best Picture at the Oscars. We at ML Studio are honored to hold their bits and bytes in our server and will continue to do se as long as they keep making great stuff.

If you’ve never heard of EyeTour, shame on you. Here it is in their own words:

“EyeTour.com has become a unique online experience in the Caribbean, where visitors
can explore Puerto Rico’s best attractions, including historical sites, beaches, nature
reserves, museums, restaurants, and much more, through high‐quality videos, articles,
and photographs. Visitors can download videos to their iPods, iPhone or personal video
player of choice and realize our company’s vision: Be your own guide,”

José Martí, President of production

Here a direct link to eyetour.com, where you can find their videos and blog. Congrats guys!

I recently met some of them in a casual meeting a couple of web designers and developers had this last Saturday. They were all in their MUB t shirts presumably for the Modernica opening in Plaza or MrTechs radio show in Red96 FM. This is something I’ve learned to appreciate from mac users, they seem to stick together and I’ve noticed from their blog they do so online as well.

The posts you’ll find in the site are not the typical regurgitation of Lord-Jobs’ keynote addresses, at least not always. What you’ll get is quality content and stuff to complement your mac lifestyle. The site is focused towards a local audience in a way that caters to Puerto Rico without alienating others. I was particularly impressed with a recent post about different configurations in jailbroken iPhones for in-network internet connectivity …that’s a mouthful.

So if you want to pimp your iPhone, just got a mac or are looking to find a great community with whom to learn or look at shiny things with, this is the place for you.

PS: visit Sugar Toys for community downloads including candy coated wallpapers.

Microsoft has taken giant steps in the right direction since the days of IE6, adding tabs, better standards compliance, better security measures, and support for things designers now take for granted such as transparent PNGs, and predictable handling of CSS rules.
The new Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) is leaps ahead from the cold dark days when it’s grandfather dominated the internet, and if you’re one of those still hanging on to IE6 I besiege you to upgrade with THIS LINK as quickly as possible. Go do it now, this post will still be here when you get back.

First thing I noticed is a markedly smaller memory footprint than the competition. To be fair I opened new instances of IE8, Firefox, Chrome and compared their memory footprint on my system, with the same 3 tabs open on each. Firefox was by far the largest using up about 200 megs of ram, IE8 was next with somewhere around 80 and the very lightweight Chrome was last with a little over 60 megs. This isn’t much of an issue for most powerful machines of today but tweakers and netbook users will appreciate the performance boost. I also haven’t noticed any memory leakage over time which has always been a huge problem with Firefox. On that note IE8 is notably faster than its predecessors delivering page load speeds within milliseconds of the fastest browsers available.

Two of the new big things launching with IE8 are Web Slices and Accelerators.
Web slices let you subscribe to particular sections of a site and have them one click away at any moment, without having to run to the original site. This can be particularly practical with news sites, e-mail services, and social content allowing you can stay updated of everything while moving through the Internet.
Accelerators bring new functionality to your regular browsing experience such as translation and dictionary tools, ebay search and Facebook posting; all straight from whichever page you happen to be in.

It’s great to see Microsoft championing content aggregation as part of what they feel should be integral to a standard web experience. On the other hand both these initiatives are IE8 specific and will require strong developer support to become part of most users’ day-to-day. Many online big guns such as the NY Times, Digg, and StumbleUpon are already part of these initiatives, it will take some time for these efforts take hold with web developers as part of our usual content delivery methods and client offerings.

Much of the other changes have to do with security and stability. Tab sandboxing allows faulty sites to crash their tab while leaving the rest of the browser unaffected. While this doesn’t allow you to just rip a tab out and open a new window, it does create a much more pleasant user experience while navigating through the darker waters of the web. On the security side it molds user behavior towards safer browsing with subtle and not so subtle notices. Domain highlighting for example, helps users distinguish between legit and phishing sites by slightly graying out most of a web address and leaving just the domain black. Although subtle, this tiny change makes users much more aware of their browsing practices and reinforces safer web habits . Microsoft has also upped the security in general fixing the old wholes and vulnerabilities of previous editions.

The browser is also better integrated with other Microsoft products which is a great plus for a more natural workflow. Without adding any Accelerators you can blog with Live Writer, send a page through Live Mail, or add it to your mobile favorites. This is part of Microsoft’s concerted, Live branded, Internet efforts which I really have to applaud them for. Although independently each tool is nice and well put together as a whole it is a very time saving solution which delivers time and again.

The last, and to me, biggest change is a large move towards better standards compliance. Although Acid3 test results aren’t what Microsoft would like, practical real world results speak for themselves. Page rendering is fast and consistent showing exactly what developers intended, usually on the first try. The change has been so significant that it even comes with a compatibility setting which will use IE7’s rendering engine so older sites developed around older versions of the browser will still work consistently.

IE8 has come full force into the current browser competition integrating the best of other browsers, cleaning up the old mistakes and even innovating in various areas. It is also a huge improvement over its predecessors as it includes all the features now commonplace in the market and integrates them seamlessly into a  well put together application that benefits greatly from being part of the larger Microsoft family. If you’ve been looking to upgrade browsers now is definitely the time.