Every Company Needs a Blog…
I deal with a lot of clients today that have been with me since I got into this industry almost a decade ago, and for the most part my partners and I have had a hand in developing every aspect of their web presence from the bottom up so when they see their competitors launching these things called “blogs” they naturally reach out to us for advice as to whether they need one or not. My answer 90% of the time is yes, and here is my reasoning…
Your corporate website is what it is, it’s a great resource for information about your company, products & services, etc., but a blog can bring so much more to the table. A blog is a lot more personable and interactive in my opinion, and in a lot of ways it should be viewed as a direct link between you and your consumers where they also have the opportunity to communicate their needs or perspectives on your posts. This can be extremely valuable not only in making sales but also in improving your product or service offerings.
A lot of the companies that my partners and I work with on a daily basis have blogs, and for the most part I subscribe to each of them if for no other reason than to stay in the loop with what’s going on within their organization, but it has also helped me to find additional products and services offered by these providers that are well suited for our company.
If your company isn’t providing a blog right now, you could be missing out on establishing a much closer relationship with your existing clients as well as reaching new ones. One misconception we run into is that given the fact that some organizations we have worked with might already have 20 or 30 thousand dollars already tied into their web presence, they instinctively think that adding more functionality to their site is going to be expensive, and that could not be further from the truth. Adding a blog to your existing web presence is extremely cost effective and can possibly have a larger return than any other component of your web presence if it is managed correctly…
For more information about adding a blog to your corporate or business website, please don’t hesitate to contact my partners and I for a free consultation, click here.
Converting to Add to Cart Button (PayPal)
While talking with a pro bono client today they were wondering how hard it would be to add an “add to cart” button instead of a single item “buy now” button on their site. At the time their website was developed (approximately 7 years ago) they only offered one item for sale.
Of course 7 years later they now have 5 items they sell online. Currently the solution is not setup to add items to cart but after doing a little bit of research today, it’s not hard to covert those… This is an example of what the “single purchase button” is coded…
1: <form method="post" action="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr">
2: <input type="hidden" name="cmd" value="_xclick">
3: <input type="hidden" name="business" value="payments@yoursite.com">
4: <input type="hidden" name="item_name" value="Baseball Hat">
5: <input type="hidden" name="item_number" value="123">
6: <input type="hidden" name="amount" value="5.95">
7: <input type="hidden" name="shipping" value="1.00">
8: <input type="hidden" name="shipping2" value="0.50">
9: <input type="hidden" name="handling" value="2.00">
10: <input type="hidden" name="currency_code" value="USD">
11: <input type="hidden" name="return" value="http://www.yoursite.com/thankyou.htm">
12: <input type="hidden" name="undefined_quantity" value="1">
13: <input type="image" src="http://images.paypal.com/en_US/i/btn/x-click-but23.gif" border="0" name="submit" width="68" height="23" alt="Make payments with PayPal - it's fast, free and secure!">
14: </form>
The first step to converting the button is to add this to the form tag:
1: <form method="post" action="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr" target="paypal">
The next thing you will want to do is to locate this line of code:
1: <input type="hidden" name="cmd" value="_xclick">
and replace it with this:
1: <input type="hidden" name="cmd" value="_cart">
This line will also need to be added to the form tag:
1: <input type="hidden" name="add" value="1">
Then you will want to locate the input-type-image area and replace that code with this:
1: <input type="image" src="http://images.paypal.com/en_US/i/btn/x-click-but22.gif" border="0" name="submit" width="87" height="23" alt="Make payments with PayPal - it's fast, free and secure!">
The finished product once you have finished inputting everything and swapping out these snippets of code should look something like this:
1: <form method="post" action="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr">
2: <input type="hidden" name="cmd" value="_cart">
3: <input type="hidden" name="add" value="1">
4: <input type="hidden" name="business" value="payments@yoursite.com">
5: <input type="hidden" name="item_name" value="Baseball Hat">
6: <input type="hidden" name="item_number" value="123">
7: <input type="hidden" name="amount" value="5.95">
8: <input type="hidden" name="shipping" value="1.00">
9: <input type="hidden" name="shipping2" value="0.50">
10: <input type="hidden" name="handling" value="2.00 ">
11: <input type="hidden" name="currency_code" value="USD">
12: <input type="hidden" name="return" value="http://www.yoursite.com/thankyou.htm">
13: <input type="hidden" name="undefined_quantity" value="1">
14: <input type="image" src="http://images.paypal.com/en_US/i/btn/x-click-but22.gif" border="0" name="submit" width="87" height="23" alt="Make payments with PayPal - it's fast, free and secure!">
15: </form>
Fortunately for me the non-profit that was asking about this has now got their in-house IT guy to make the changes, it’s somewhat time consuming and if you only have 5 products or so, you can probably almost generate new add to cart buttons just as fast, which is what I recommended.
Creating an Add to Cart button – PayPal
Integrate PayPal Recurring Subscriptions / Payments
From time to time I do some pro bono consulting for non-profit organizations and lately I had one such client that I had worked for several years ago reach out to me for advise on setting up a subscription based service solution using PayPal as the payment gateway.
Being forced to reacquaint myself with the solution I wrote for the client almost 4 years ago I realized that there weren’t any “off the shelf” solutions that I could roll into the solution, so I explored PayPal’s API and found that they now offer Recurring Payments and Subscriptions as a service. No sense in recreating the wheel when you can just piggyback off of their product.
Here is a case study that I ran across that really helped me get up and running quickly. Also, be sure to skip down for the sample codes to get you started.
Recurring payments case study
In order to explain this PayPal feature, consider a simple case study. An online service offers customers a monthly subscription for US$10.00 per month. Users may sign up for the service through the online service’s Web site, and each user is assigned a unique account username that serves as an identifier.
With such a service, subscribers would normally be invoiced on a monthly basis. To understand how this would work with PayPal’s Subscriptions And Recurring Payments feature, consider the following process flow:
- The user (let’s name him Sam Subscriber) arrives at the service Web site to sign up and, after entering and saving the required profile information, is assigned a unique username. Sam can then either try the service out for free (if a free trial is available) or immediately sign up for paid service. The latter is accomplished by hitting a clearly-visible Subscribe button.
- The Subscribe button is actually an entry point into the PayPal system. On clicking it, Sam is redirected to the PayPal Web site, where he can either log in to an existing account or create a new one. This is because, to use PayPal to send or receive money, both parties in the transaction must have PayPal accounts; PayPal does not process payments between non-PayPal parties (for this same reason, the service provider must have a business account with PayPal to receive payments). Account signup is free.
The Subscribe button is preprogrammed with certain important informationâ€"the service provider’s account details on PayPal, the billing cycle and amount, and the currency in which the payment is to be billed. This tells the PayPal system how much money is to be billed, how often, and where to send it. Since Sam’s account name at PayPal may not necessarily match his newly-minted account on the service provider’s site, the account username assigned to Sam is also passed to PayPal to simplify reconciliation later.
- Once Sam authorises the PayPal payment, an e-mail containing details about the transaction is dispatched to the service provider (who also has a PayPal account, remember). The provider then logs in, checks that the payment has been received, and activates paid service for Sam. The account username passed to PayPal also appears in the e-mail, and helps the service provider identify which user made the payment and thus activate the correct account.
- Because the first payment took place through PayPal’s Subscriptions And Recurring Payments, PayPal automatically keeps track of the billing cycle stated at the time of first payment, and rebills Sam on a monthly basis until Sam manually cancels his subscription. The service provider receives e-mail notification of payment from PayPal on a monthly basis, and thus keeps Sam’s service alive until a cancellation notice arrives from PayPal.
This recurring payment process is completely automatic, and requires no intervention from either Sam or the service provider.
Programming the PayPal button
As a service provider interested in offering customers a subscription service via PayPal, the first step for you is to acquire a PayPal account. This is pretty simple: drop by the PayPal Web site and sign up for a Business Account. Then log in to your new account and navigate to the Subscriptions And Recurring Payments option. The resulting page allows you to specify various parameters for the subscription:
- Subscription Name: A descriptive name for the service/item that a user will sign up for
- Reference Item: A reference number or code that you can use for internal tracking purposes
- Subscription Price: The amount to be billed
- Length of the Billing Cycle: The period (days, weeks, months or years) over which subscribers are to be billed
- Once you’ve filled in all the data, choose a PayPal button to display on your Web site. If needed, you can even allow users a free trial period or give them a link to cancel their subscription if they’re not satisfied.
Examples:
Listing A shows what the button code, generated by PayPal from the basic information you provided, might look like.
1: <form action="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr" method="post">
2: <input type="image" src="https://www.paypal.com/en_US/i/btn/x-click-but20.gif" border="0" name="submit" alt="Make payments with PayPal - it's fast, free and secure!">
3: <input type="hidden" name="cmd" value="_xclick-subscriptions">
4: <input type="hidden" name="business" value="john.doe@johndoe.com">
5: <input type="hidden" name="item_name" value="My Special Service">
6: <input type="hidden" name="item_number" value="SS-001">
7: <input type="hidden" name="no_note" value="1">
8: <input type="hidden" name="currency_code" value="USD">
9: <input type="hidden" name="a3" value="10.00">
10: <input type="hidden" name="p3" value="1">
11: <input type="hidden" name="t3" value="M">
12: <input type="hidden" name="src" value="1">
13: <input type="hidden" name="sra" value="1">
14: </form>
When placed on your Web site, this code generates a PayPal button which links into the PayPal payment system. You should place this code somewhere on your How To Pay page. But before you do that, you need to add one more field to the automatically-generated code…a hidden field that contains the subscriber’s username. This field will be dynamically populated at runtime by your Web site.
Assuming you’ve got a PHP site and store your user’s account name in a session variable called username, Listing B shows what the updated code for the PayPal button would look like.
1: <form action="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr" method="post">
2: <input type="image" src="https://www.paypal.com/en_US/i/btn/x-click-but20.gif" border="0" name="submit" alt="Make payments with PayPal - it's fast, free and secure!">
3: <input type="hidden" name="cmd" value="_xclick-subscriptions">
4: <input type="hidden" name="business" value="john.doe@johndoe.com">
5: <input type="hidden" name="item_name" value="My Special Service">
6: <input type="hidden" name="item_number" value="SS-001">
7: <input type="hidden" name="no_note" value="1">
8: <input type="hidden" name="currency_code" value="USD">
9: <input type="hidden" name="a3" value="10.00">
10: <input type="hidden" name="p3" value="1">
11: <input type="hidden" name="t3" value="M">
12: <input type="hidden" name="src" value="1">
13: <input type="hidden" name="sra" value="1">
14: <input type="hidden" name="custom" value="<?php echo $_SESSION['username']; ?>">
15: </form>
Once a subscriber logs in to your Web site, his or her username will be stored in a PHP session variable for use where required. On the How To Pay page, this session variable is used to dynamically populate the hidden field inside the PayPal button. The advantage of this little modification: since PayPal will now incorporate the additional username information in all its notifications and e-mails pertaining to the transaction, you, as the service provider, will be able to clearly distinguish between different users and transaction records.
In case you’re wondering what all the other fields are, they’re related to the subscription period, bill amount, and billing frequency. Look in the PayPal manual for a complete explanation of each variable.
When a subscriber clicks the button generated by the code above, the username is transferred to PayPal along with the billing details. Once the subscriber completes the PayPal payment process, an e-mail receipt is generated and sent to the subscriber, and an e-mail payment notification is generated and sent to you, the service provider. You can then activate paid service for the subscriber, matching the payment with the subscriber through the unique username that PayPal supplies from the button’s Custom field.
Now, while the process above is fairly simple and works well in practice, it has one fatal flaw: It requires you, as the service provider, to manually perform the task of reading PayPal’s e-mail and activating each subscriber account. As your subscriber base increases, such manual account activation becomes less feasible, especially if you’d prefer to take all the money you’re making and go to the Bahamas for a week. And that’s where IPN comes in.
Integrating IPN With subscriber payments
IPN, which stands for Instant Payment Notification, is PayPal’s automated notification system for payments. Once you begin using IPN, you can completely alter the way you deal with subscriber accounts, replacing the earlier manual process with an automated one. This is because IPN sends you a signal every time you receive a subscriber payment or when a subscriber cancels a subscription; you can then intercept this signal and write code to "do something" with it, such as automatically activating or deleting a subscriber account.
To enable IPN for your Business Account on PayPal, simply visit your account on the PayPal Web site and turn the feature on. As part of this process, you also need to supply PayPal with the URL to a script on your Web site; this is the script PayPal will invoke every time it generates an IPN, and this script must therefore be capable of trapping IPN signals and taking appropriate action based on each.
IPN signals can be intercepted by scripts written in most common Web development languages, including ASP.NET, PHP, and Perl. Take a look at the PHP pseudo-code in Listing C, which shows you how such a script might work.
1: <?php
2:
3: // define array to store PayPal request
4: // as key-value pair
5: $postvars = array();
6:
7: // read post from PayPal into local array while (list ($key, $value) = each ($HTTP_POST_VARS)) {
8: $postvars[] = $key;
9: }
10:
11: // add a 'cmd' parameter to the parameter list that is POSTed // back, as required by PayPal $req = 'cmd=_notify-validate';
12:
13: // append each parameter posted by the PayPal // as name value pair to the "req" variable for ($var = 0; $var < count ($postvars); $var++) {
14:
15: $postvar_key = $postvars[$var];
16: $postvar_value = $$postvars[$var];
17: $req .= "&" . $postvar_key . "=" . urlencode ($postvar_value); }
18:
19: // post the request back to PayPal system to validate $header .= "POST /cgi-bin/webscr HTTP/1.0\r\n"; $header .= "Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded\r\n";
20: $header .= "Content-Length: " . strlen ($req) . "\r\n\r\n";
21:
22: // open file pointer to the paypal server $fp = fsockopen ("www.paypal.com", 80, $errno, $errstr, 30);
23:
24: if (!$fp) {
25: // HTTP error
26: // log an error
27: } else {
28:
29: // POST the data using the file pointer created above
30: fputs ($fp, $header . $req);
31:
32: while (!feof($fp)) {
33:
34: // read the response from the PayPal server
35: $res = fgets ($fp, 1024);
36:
37: // check if the request has been VERIFIED by PayPal
38: // if it is, then you can proceed further
39: // if it is INVALID, then abort the process
40: if (strcmp ($res, "VERIFIED") == 0) {
41:
42: // get the value stored in the "custom" field
43: // (username) in a local variable
44: $username = $HTTP_POST_VARS["custom"];
45:
46: // check if the username sent with the PayPal IPN request exists in the database
47: // using a custom function called userExists()
48: if(userExists($username)) {
49:
50: // check the transaction type for the subscription sent by PayPal
51: // and take action accordingly
52: if(isset($HTTP_POST_VARS["txn_type"]) &&
53: strtolower($HTTP_POST_VARS["txn_type"]) == "subscr_payment") {
54:
55: // a subscriber just paid
56: // increase the subscription period by X days
57:
58: } else {
59:
60: // incorrect transaction type
61: // log an error
62:
63: }
64:
65: }
66:
67: } else if (strcmp ($res, "INVALID") == 0) {
68:
69: // an INVALID transaction
70: // log an error
71:
72: }
73:
74: }
75:
76: }
77: ?>
78:
This looks pretty complicated, but it’s actually not. The first bit of the code involves verifying that the IPN is actually from PayPal and not from a hacker trying to break into the payment system. This verification is accomplished using a standard process outlined in PayPal’s IPN manual, reposting the entire request back to PayPal, and using the encrypted key within it to check the source of the request. Look in the PayPal IPN manual for more on how this authentication system works.
Assuming the response is VERIFIED, you can go ahead and process the data sent by PayPal in the IPN. First, extract the value of the "custom" variable the subscriber’s username"and check that the subscriber actually exists in your system. If the test is successful and the named subscriber does hold an account with your service, proceed to handle the txn_type field, which contains information on the PayPal transaction that generated the IPN.
In the context of subscription payments, the txn_type field may contain any of the following values:
- subscr_signup – a subscriber has signed up for the service
- subscr_payment – a subscriber has paid for the service
- subscr_failed – a subscriber tried to pay for the service but things didn’t work out
- subscr_cancelled – a subscriber cancelled a subscription
- subscr_eot – a subscriber has reached the end of the subscription term
- subscr_modify – a subscriber profile has been modified
Most of the time, you only need to be concerned with the subscr_payment type this indicates that a payment has been made to your PayPal account. On receipt of this signal, the script can immediately (and automatically) update your subscription database, and activate paid service for the subscriber. You may also be interested in intercepting the subscr_cancelled and subscr_eot signals, to update your database with the change in subscriber state.
This automated process does away with the need for manual processing of PayPal e-mails. The script above automatically intercepts payment notifications via the IPN service, and turns a subscription "on" or "off" depending on the contents of the notification. As with the manual process outlined previously, the Custom field with the subscriber’s username is used throughout for reconciliation and tracking. Try it out for yourself, and you’ll quickly see how valuable it is.
Targeted Advertising for Nascar Fans
It’s no secret that Nascar is by far one of the most popular sports today, it’s even surpassed baseball and football in some reports. My partners and I own and operate an extremely popular Nascar community driven portal that provides blog posts, news & information, forums, message boards, and live racing chat to the Nascar community.
If you have a product that you are trying to promote online, you should consider advertising on NascarView. We can put your product in front of our readers and active members and give you unprecedented exposure. If you are interested, please feel free to contact us: editor@nascarview.com or visit our website, http://nascarview.com and click on advertise. We would love the opportunity to help promote your products or services…
From the NascarView website:
NascarView.com offers a potent venue on which you can target your most-desired customers. Our reach and readership provide incomparable value for your advertising investment. Through our site you will get your message to the right audience at the right time.
NascarView.com exists as joint project spearheaded by Pleth, LLC. Pleth, LLC is an Arkansas based company whose mission is to provide web development, search engine optimization, internet marketing, managed hosting, & email services accompanied by unsurpassed, long-term project support.
By advertising with NascarView.com, you tap our expertise and creative services to target the customers you value most. To contact us call 888.276.0848 or email us at editor@nascarview.com
Central Arkansas Refresh Meetup
In case you missed David Kincade’s post on The Arkansas Project this morning, we are going to have our first Central Arkansas Refresh Group Meetup this next Tuesday, February 24, 2009 at Starbucks (9401 Rodney Parham Road, Little Rock, AR) this next week.
We plan on hooking up around 6:00 or so and kind of setting the stage for this unique group. If you are interested in the meetup, here’s a link to our Facebook Event Page:
A couple weeks back I posted about this little group of Central Arkansas technology enthusiast types that Cotton Rohrscheib, area web guru/tech wizard/blogger/NASCAR fan, is looking to launch for networking and education purposes. Remember that?
Well, good news: We’ve set the inaugural meet-up for Tuesday, Feb. 24 at 6 p.m. in Little Rock, at the Starbucks on 9401 N. Rodney Parham Road. (A location somewhat arbitrarily arrived at because several of the interested parties may be coming from Conway and it has reasonably ready access to I-430. We may find another venue for future gatherings, once we have a better sense of who’s attending.)
This inaugural meeting will help us to develop a fuller organizational sense of who’s actually interested, what kind of topics we want to explore, how frequently we want to meet — mostly a ‘get to know you and swap ideas’ session to determine how we can make this a constructive venture for all involved.
You don’t necessarily have to be a hands-on tech wizard programmer type to join up — maybe you’re a blogger or an avid social media user or a chronic Internet porn consumer or just an all-purpose nerd with an abiding interest in the Web and technology issues. That’s fine; the more the merrier. Though probably the fewer the chronic Internet porn consumers, the better. I mean, a couple would be OK, but let’s not go overboard.
Go to our Facebook group page to get involved (or if you’re a hold-out who refuses to get on Facebook, just show up Tuesday).
Facebook | Central Arkansas Refresh Community
Just another update regarding the Central Arkansas Refresh Community, tonight Nick Brewer and I setup a group page on Facebook for those of you that might be interested in attending our meetups. To join the group click here. Once we get some members in the group we will primarily do most of our communication through Facebook regarding meetups, locations, discussion topics, guest speakers, etc.
Be sure to signup if you are interested. This should be an excellent opportunity for us to share ideas and stay on top of emerging technologies that are out there.
Facebook | Central Arkansas Refresh Community
Facebook Advertising w/ Tim Kendall
One of the things that make Jeremy Schoemaker stand out from the rest of the “how to make mo money” folks out there is that Jeremy actually makes money! He has done quite well over the years w/ his business and has earned my respect, which is not easy to do these days. My business partner Greg sent me a link to his latest podcast where he as talking w/ Tim Kendall about monetization on Facebook.
Personally, I have clients that are already diving into Facebook and actually seeing some results. I have been crying Facebook, Facebook, Facebook, for a while now and it’s great to see that folks are jumping on board w/ it and doing well.
If you have thought about placing ads on the Facebook network, you should listen to this podcast. Here’s an excerpt from Shoemoney.com:
On yesterday’s ShoeMoney Show we talked about making money with Facebook. Tim Kendall, Director of Monetization, was my guest during the show. Tim is in charge of monetizing the entire Facebook advertising system.
I started off the show by talking about the current state of affiliate marketing and some of my recent experiences. I also addressed some of the comments made on last Monday’s post about my recent Facebook campaigns.
After the first break Tim came on the program, talked a little bit about his background and explained some general things about the Facebook advertising platform. Then we dove into users’ questions!
Right off the bat, I blindsided Tim with some questions about the Beacon Project (mostly because I thought it was a ingenious way to make money). Although I did give Tim a list of questions before the show started, this question was not on the list. He was great, and I was glad he still answered my questions. I think you are somewhat seeing Beacon in a small amount through advertisements you can target by social actions. I have a feeling we have not seen the last of the Beacon Project.
During the show Tim answers many questions… I tackle a few also. We cover everything from how to get started with Facebook advertising to how to conduct split testing on your ads. Tim also addressed all the questions about their ad approval proccess (of which there were many).
Throughout the great interview, I thought one of the key points Tim made was that Facebook is still in the "start-up phase". The ad platform is only about 1 year old and people are already trying to compare it to Google Adwords which is about 9 years old.
I want to thank Tim for his time, great answers, and for coming on the show with very short notice. I thought he awesome.
Making Money With Facebook – ShoeMoney Show – ShoeMoney®
Refresh Group Update
Just wanted to post an update to a post I made earlier in the week regarding the organization of a Refresh Group for Central Arkansas. This idea has gotten a lot of good feedback from those that I have heard from. A few have commented that they would be interested in attending these type of get togethers.
Today, I heard from David Kincade of The Arkansas Project and he mentioned that he was interested in attending. Also, Butch Renfroe, the webmaster from TodaysTHV.com also mentioned that he might be interested as well. If you are interested in attending, please leave a comment on this post to let us know so that we will be sure to include you in our mass email once things start coming together.
Some of the topics that we have expressed an interest in covering are Content Management Systems like Wordpress, MODx, and Joomla as well as Web Standards and Usability. We might also cover topics related to web development in general and SEO (search engine optimization). Of course nothing is set in stone so if you have some suggestions, please feel free to throw them into the mix.
I plan on posting some updates to this as I have them. If you are interested in attending or being a part of this group be sure to leave a comment and let us know. I think that this will be an exciting and beneficial time of networking for all of us.
Cotton Rohrscheib – Blog Archive » Central Arkansas Bloggers / Developers
Predictions for 2009
I just posted Josh Catone’s Top 15 Stories of 2008 on my blog a few minutes ago and then stumbled upon his predictions for 2009, I figured this was worthy of posting as well.
I think that Josh has hit the nail on the head again w/ this article. I share his belief that technologies like Twitter and Facebook can’t be ignored by developers going into 2009. We owe it to our clients to provide them with the best tools to tap into these social networks.
It’s that time of the year again. As we noted earlier in the week, nothing is more fun for tech bloggers than looking ahead to next year and trying to predict the future. Prediction posts are an annual tradition in the blogosphere, and we enjoy doing them.
So below are eight prognostications for the new year in web tech. Of course, if you saw our list of 2008’s top stories, you’ll know that reality is often too wacky to predict — and that A LOT happens in a single year. Remember to check out how we did with last year’s predictions, as well. And let us know in the comments what you think 2009 has in store for the web.
Note: I use the corporate “we” in this post, but these predictions are really just my own and not those of anyone else at SitePoint. So, don’t blame them for the terrible lack of foresight!
1. Twitter gets a business model.
Twitter has a bunch of different options when it comes to monetization. Targeted ads in the Twitter stream based on what you tweet about, built in micro payments, charging high volume users, charging developers to use the API, etc. Twitter may try some or all of these options, but we think the most likely path to monetization is in corporate accounts. When SitePoint ran our highly successful and well publicized book giveaway via Twitter, it was only really made possible because we were able to get on Twitter’s white list and send a large number of direct messages without being blocked. Prior to getting on that list, things didn’t go nearly as smoothly. That’s the sort of added functionality that only corporate accounts would likely need, and that Twitter could charge for.2. Lifestreaming gets big, but not via FriendFeed.
FriendFeed made a huge impact over the past year among the early adopter crowd, but lifestreaming hasn’t quite made its way into the mainstream. People are just now beginning to regularly use enough social services at once — YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Digg, blogging — that aggregation will start to make sense. In 2009, it will be commonplace to publish your online life in a single stream, but it will be done via Facebook.3. The Web OS will really start to become a reality.
The Web OS race is on. In 2009 we’ll start to see the vision really begin to coalesce from major players like Adobe (Flash, Flex, AIR), Google (Chrome, Gears, Native Client), and Microsoft (Silverlight, Live Mesh), among others.4. Some really great stuff will come out of Yahoo!, but it won’t be enough to save them.
Yahoo! has been doing some awesome stuff by opening up their search results and most popular pages and applications by making them more social and giving developers more hooks. That’s the sort of thing that will ultimately make the web a better place, but unfortunately it won’t be enough to save Yahoo! on Wall Street. Their stock will continue to slide, unless they sign a big search deal with Microsoft or sell their search business outright to focus on the content/platform side.5. Chrome will take at least 5% but not more than 10% of the browser market by year’s end.
Google’s browser, now out of beta and being actively promoted by Google, will take at least 5% of the browser market by year’s end and as much as 10%. IE will continue to decline with both Chrome and Mozilla Firefox on the scene, but Chrome will actually cause Mozilla’s growth to stall, and will probably even steal some market share from Firefox once it supports extensions.6. Microsoft Office will make people comfortable with web applications.
When Microsoft pushes out a web-based version of Office, users in the mainstream will finally start to become comfortable will web apps. Google’s Docs and Spreadsheets apps have certainly already pushed a fair number of people in that direction, but Microsoft will have a vastly bigger impact on the adoption of web applications by mainstream users. Their software + services vision will emerge in 2009 as the clear future of software.7. Facebook takes over the web.
Well, not literally. But Facebook will continue to grow in size worldwide, and will finally over take MySpace as the biggest social network in the US. A lot of the cool web applications that early adopters love, such as FriendFeed, will reach the mainstream as features of Facebook, and Facebook Connect will help spread the Facebook brand by entangling it with other popular sites on the web that people know and trust. The company will also expand their search deal with Microsoft and make web search integration more prominent and more powerful. For many users, Facebook will become their default search engine in 2009, and this will pave the way for an IPO in 2010.8. Palm will surprise everyone at CES
Palm’s new entry into the smartphone market will be very impressive. The Nova operating system will look like something that could challenge Android, Blackberry, and the iPhone in the mobile market, but success will depend on the hardware.
SitePoint » What’s On Tap: Predictions for 2009
Top 15 Stories of 2008
I am a big fan of SitePoint, they not only put out some great resource books for web developers and hosting companies, but they also have a great list of contributors that post some great content.
I was reading their newsletter today and found the Top 15 Web Tech Stories posted by Josh Catone and thought that it was worthy of reposting. This is definitely a comprehensive look back at the year 2008 and all that we saw happen within our industry and kudos to Josh for putting together a great piece.
2008 was an eventful year on the web. From Yahoo! spurning Microsoft to Google launching both a browser and a cell phone (sort of), there was a lot to write about this year. Even though I only started writing about web technology news for SitePoint starting in July, I’ve actually been writing about this stuff all year. So it was fun and interesting to take a look back at everything that’s happened this year on the web, and try to pick out the top 15 stories. Below are my selections, along with plenty of links to further reading material to keep you busy. It’s a lengthy post, but it was a long and action packed year.
Hopefully you’ll enjoy reading this year-end recap as much as I did creating it. Let us know if any big stories were left off the list that you think should have been included by leaving a note in the comments at the end of this post. These are presented in no particular order (but numbered for readability).
1. The US Presidential Campaign
The Internet played a huge role in the presidential election in the United States in 2008. No only did more people than ever turn to the web for election information, the Internet also allowed candidates to raise incredible amounts of money from small donors and build powerful grassroots networks that were never before possible. US President-Elect Barack Obama in particular was able to build a campaign on the back of this emerging political long tail and energize people who were not easily reachable using previous methods of organizing and fundraising.
The second episode of the new SitePoint Podcast was dedicated to the effect of the Internet on electoral politics.
2. Yahoo! Turns Down Microsoft
On February 1, 2008 Microsoft made a $44.6 billion takeover offer of Yahoo!. A couple of week’s later Yahoo! would reject that offer — a move that might go down in the annals of company history as their second worst decision (the first being not buying Google in 2002 for $5 billion) and ultimately led to CEO Jerry Yang stepping down in November. Yahoo! tried to sign an advertising deal with Google a few months later that would have outsourced their search ad sales to the more popular search engine, but that went south when the US Department of Justice got interested in the potential antitrust implications.
Rumors still run rampant about Microsoft potentially coming to the table again, purchasing just a piece of Yahoo!, or offering their own search advertising deal, but one thing is for sure: Yahoo!’s market cap is now less than half of what Microsoft offered to spend to acquire the company.
3. Apple’s iPhone App Store is a Huge Success
iPhone debuted the App Store for their iPhone device in July of 2008 and it has been an undeniable success. Analysts predict that next year the App Store will be a $1.2 billion business for Apple, and we reported in August that many developers are doing quite well writing software for the phone platform full-time.
The iPhone platform now has over 10,000 applications, but we’ve wondered how many of them are worth your time and money. More importantly, we’ve wondered if the Apple model for the App Store is really good for consumers. Closed platforms like Apple’s, in which one company is the ultimate gatekeeper, are ultimately a bad thing for the web.
Regardless, iPhone users should not miss our list of 5 awesome iPhone productivity apps.
4. Google Delivers Android
Not content to let Apple have all the mobile fun, at end of last year Google launched Android, their open source mobile phone operating system. In September of this year, the first Android phone arrived, in the form of the T-Mobile G1, manufactured by HTC.
The phone hasn’t been quite the iPhone killer that pundits hoped for, but it is certainly one of the most compelling phones on the market, and because Android is open source, more “Google phones” from other handset manufacturers are sure to follow.
5. Google Releases Chrome Web Browser
The mobile web isn’t the only place Google was getting “Googley” this year. The Mountain View, California-based search giant surprised everyone in September by releasing their own web browser. Called Chrome, the open source web browser is based on the WebKit rendering engine and left beta earlier this month. Though still very rough around the edges, Chrome has already garnered as much as 1% of the browser market worldwide in just 3 months, a number that we expect to rise as important planned features — such as extensions — are added.
Chrome is specifically designed with web applications in mind, and as we’ve discussed, it is an important part of Google’s 3-pronged Web OS strategy. Along with Gears (offline data store) and Native Client (local CPU resources for web apps), Chrome gives Google a compelling platform for the delivery of web applications.
However, Chrome might be coming at the expense of Firefox, which Google has long supported. At the very least, the release of Chrome has complicated Google’s formerly warm relationship with Mozilla.
6. Microsoft Plans to Bring Office Online — Finally
Starting sometime in 2009, Microsoft will finally begin to offer a web-based version of Office. That’s a huge departure from their previous attitude toward web applications, and a somewhat surprising development considering what a cash cow the Office line of products has been for Microsoft. It is, however, in line with the new future that Microsoft has been talking up in which both the client and the cloud play complimentary roles.
“I contend it makes no sense to try to push [lots of data and processing] up the wire [to the cloud, just] so that it can come back and talk to you,” Microsoft Chief Research and Strategy Officer Craig Mundie told Technology Review in September. “And so, ultimately, that leads us back to what I call this composite platform, where you’ve got a balanced set of roles between what you expect the cloud to provide and what you expect the clients to provide themselves.”
In Microsoft’s vision of the future of software, web services and web-based applications rely on local client software to get more intensive processes done. That’s a future that isn’t all that different from the one that Adobe is also working toward.
7. Economic Recession
In December, the United States’ National Bureau of Economic Research officially admitted that the US has been in a recession since December 2007. The effects of that recession have been felt worldwide, including in the tech industry where over 110,000 jobs have been lost since October.
That’s some depressing stuff, and it’s putting a damper on my holiday spirit, so we’ll not spend much time on it. But if you were one of the unfortunate people who lost their job or have found yourself a few clients short as a result of the economic crisis, be sure to check out our 10 essential tips for landing your next job, as well as our list of 20 places to find your next web dev job. Also don’t miss our 12 killer ways to make extra income on the web.
We definitely wish you luck in finding a new job in 2009!
8. OpenID Gains Traction — Sort Of; So Does Facebook Connect
OpenID won some huge partners over the past year. Most impressively, Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft are all now OpenID providers. Unfortunately, that’s as far as their integration of the single sign-on standard has gone — none of them have taken the plunge to become relying parties. Further, they have each implemented OpenID in their own way creating a single sign-on war (they each want to be the de facto identity provider for the web), that is ultimately bad for consumers in our opinion.
Perhaps worse news for OpenID: according to Yahoo! research most people still have no idea what it is. And, Facebook might just eat OpenID’s lunch.
Facebook Connect, which was announced in July, is a single sign-on solution that on some level competes with OpenID. What gives is an advantage is that Facebook Connect comes with your social graph data.
“Because Facebook Connect is not just a registration system, but also a marketing channel with a built-in audience of 130 million monthly active users (according to Facebook), this program will crush competing registration systems,” wrote CNET’s Rafe Needleman about Facebook’s system. “Sites will adopt Facebook Connect for two reasons. First, their users are already actively using it; millions of users have OpenID log-ins and don’t even know it. And second, because it’s not just a registration system, it’s that marketing channel. Self-interest (on the part of site owners) wins over philosophy. Facebook gets that. That’s why it wins.”
9. The Price of Music is Now … Free?
Radiohead’s name-your-own price release of their album In Rainbows last fall set the stage for the price of music to start a decent toward zero in 2009. The success of Radiohead’s gimmick encouraged other bands to follow suit. REM streamed their new album for free on iLike, and Pennywise put their album on MySpace, as did Oasis.
But the most famous free release from 2008 was from Nine Inch Nails. Trent Reznor — who had previously experimented with alternative album release schemes with Saul Williams, a slam poet whose album he produced — put out not one, but two new albums for free on the web.
By selling value-adds, such as signed copies and deluxe DVD editions of the albums, Reznor was able to still make a considerable amount of money by self-publishing his music online and giving it away for free. Likely, he also garnered some new fans to support NIN’s 2008 tour due to the all the attention and awareness that the word “free” commands. Though Reznor had a lot of help from major labels in building his group of core fans, his success at giving away a free album was on some level a confirmation of Kevin Kelly’s theory of “true fans,” which states that artists can make a living from a small group of die-hard fans.
10. Professional Video Content Fights Back
According to comScore, Hulu — a joint venture between Fox and NBC that offers professionally created content — cracked the list of the top 10 video sites on the web in July in the tenth spot at 88 million views. A few months later in October? Hulu is now sixth and streaming 235 million videos in the US each month.
Think that worries Google? You betcha. YouTube is still way out in front, dominating the online video market with almost 40% of all video views at over 5.3 billion, but the average length of the videos that users are watching is up from 2.7 minutes per video in July to 3 minutes in October. The likely reason: Hulu.
Clearly, people are responding to professionally created content. People are becoming so used to getting their TV content on demand, via web sites like Hulu and DVRs, that we think on demand will be television’s future. Not wanting to be left behind as long-form, professional content shifts to a web distribution model, YouTube began supporting full-length video content in October.
Remember, YouTube initially rose to its dominant position on the back of professional content (like viral Saturday Night Live clips such as “D*ck in a Box”) that were uploaded to the site. Everything old is new again.
11. Firefox Hits 20% Market Share
In June, the popular Firefox web browser released its third version with the goal of setting a world record for most downloads in a 24 hour period. They definitely met that goal with a super impressive 8 million downloads over the first day of release.
More impressively, though, Firefox hit 20% browser market share for the first time over a couple of weeks in October, and has since stayed there. Unfortunately, once extensions arrive for Google’s Chrome, Firefox might start to see those numbers slip. And their relationship with Google is already starting to turn, as we noted earlier in this round up.
12. DRM Almost Dies … Almost
DRM is still here, but it’s a lot closer to dead at the end of 2008 than it was at the end of the 2007. In January, the final hold out among the major labels from Amazon’s DRM-free music store, Sony-BMG, gave in and decided to start selling music on the service without the burden of DRM. That said, Apple’s iTunes, which controls about 70% of the digital music market, still only has DRM-free tracks from one major label (EMI).
That’s less encouraging, since it has now been more than a year and a half since Steve Jobs wrote in a treatise on digital rights management: “If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store.”
However, Apple is apparently in talks with the other three major labels about offering DRM-free tracks via iTunes. Those talks may or may not come to anything, but clearly, the labels are open to selling DRM-free music, since they all now do it via companies like Amazon, MySpace, and Napster. What remains to be seen is what the labels want more: the ability to frustrate Apple (whom they don’t want controlling their digital sales channel) or pleasing their customers.
Looked at from that perspective, we’re less confident that DRM will die completely in 2009. Oh, but we’re so close!
13. Reading is Back! We Hope
The stats on reading don’t look good. Our attention spans are rapidly approaching zero, and that’s bad news for books. Or is it? Starting at the end of last year a curious thing happened: eBooks suddenly became cool. The reason? The November 2007 launch of Amazon’s Kindle eBook reader.
Amazon is projected to sell a billion dollars worth of Kindles by 2010. But the real eBook success story of 2008 might be the iPhone. As we reported in October, the iPhone and its cadre of eBook applications, is actually the most popular eBook reader. eBooks are so hot, that even Nintendo wants in on the action, and Sony is planning a huge marketing blitz in airports, train stations, and bookstores in an attempt to capitalize on Kindle shortages.
2008 might be remembered as the year that reading became cool again and books started going digital in earnest.
14. Yahoo! Gets Really Open
When it comes to Yahoo!, 2008 will be remembered in one of two ways: either as the year that the company put the final few nails in its coffin by rejecting Microsoft’s $44.6 billion takeover offer, or as the year that it began to claw its way back to the top by opening itself up to third-party developers.
First, Yahoo! launched SearchMonkey, a platform that allows developers and site owners to use structured data to enhance search results. Then came the Build Your Own Search Service, which opened up Yahoo!’s search infrastructure and allowed developers to create their own search mashups (including powerful custom site search applications).
Most recently, Yahoo! announced a brand new development platform on top of its super popular email application and MyYahoo! start page. Yahoo! is enacting its extremely ambitious plan to rewire their entire network of sites from the inside out to be more open and provide more hooks for developers. Incidentally, that’s close to what I advised that they should do a year and a half ago.
15. Everyone Has their Heads in the Cloud
The buzzword of 2008 was without a doubt, cloud computing. Early in 2008, the aggregate bandwidth of all companies using Amazon’s AWS cloud infrastructure services surpassed that of Amazon’s own sites. Amazon is a top 10 property worldwide, which means that a lot of sites are now putting their faith in Amazon’s back end services.
As is the theme of everything else on the web, if you have success, Google will eventually decide that they too want a piece of the action. 2008 saw Google become interested in offering developers cloud-based infrastructure services. In April they launched App Engine, their own cloud-based infrastructure service. According to venture capitalist Albert Wenger of Union Square Ventures, App Engine is the only true cloud computing platform. For now, App Engine only supports the Python language for development, but Google plans to add support for another runtime in 2009.
Microsoft is also getting in on the cloud computing buzz, preparing a Software as a Service release of Office (as we noted earlier in this round up) and talking up their client + cloud future. However, for all the talk of the cloud, desktop apps will remain important. Why? Because the cloud will go down. That’s why companies like Yahoo!, Adobe, Microsoft, and perhaps even Google think that the future of Rich Internet Applications will very much involve the desktop.
SitePoint » The Top 15 Web Tech Stories of 2008
