Archive for March, 2011

Facebook brings chat everywhere

1
1 year ago
by Jonathan Puddle in

I just had a rousing conversation on Facebook about penises, and that’s not even the good part. The good… even great part, is that this conversation took place in real-time, in relation to a status update. We didn’t use Facebook Chat, to talk about a status update;  we talked via comments in the comments area… live. With the addition of in-line updates (new notifications/comments/etc. loading without the page having to reload) and the recent oft-maligned change to the Enter key behaviour, Facebook has turned everything into a chat area.

I’ll let that digest for a second, if you haven’t already realised this. The thing that I’m most impressed by with this, is that neither of these techniques are new. In-line updates via AJAX or other JavaScript methods have been popular for a few years, it’s the sauce that powers Gmail amongst almost all other popular web tools. As for the Enter key, when building websites you can choose to “trap” the enter key on whatever you want; that’s why sometimes you visit a site, input your login credentials/search terms/whatever and hit enter, only to find that nothing happens. This is due to the site having trapped the Enter key elsewhere, or having not trapped it at all.

So these are old techniques, but by combining them in just this way, Facebook has turned any place where you make a comment (status update, photo, product, ANYTHING) into a live chat area. And that is genius… because while we were having an amusing conversation about penis waving, there was any number of other people on Facebook having a real-time conversation about a company’s product. And that conversation is what drives commerce in the new digital economy. Google is to search, as Facebook is to online conversations: not only have they won top spot, but they’re successfully defending it with continued innovation.

Kik Messenger

2
1 year ago
by Jonathan Puddle in

In my post the other day about business cards, I mentioned Kik Messenger as being an awesome replacement for SMS. It really is, and I want to take a minute to tell you why. In the interest in disclosure, I will tell you that the founder and CEO of Kik is a personal friend of mine. You might think that makes me biased… but remaining in the interest of disclosure I will also tell you that I’m a technology professional, who evaluates a lot of software and services and then has to stick with those decisions for the long-haul. So… whatever man.

Ted showed me Kik back before it was called Kik and it was intended to perform an entirely different function. A function that was pretty sweet, in it’s own right. (more…)

Business Cards, Job Titles, and the Cult of Self

2
1 year ago
by Jonathan Puddle in

Catch the Fire, my employer, was getting set to print some new business cards for us. I’ve recently changed jobs, and so was asked what I’d like to include on my business card. In time this led to a conversation at a one of our weekly meetings about business cards, and the idea was presented to drop job titles from our business cards. I’d not heard that idea before, but I liked it. It’s been in the back of my mind until today, when Slashdot had an article discussing the future of the business card. (more…)

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