April 5, 2010
Many websites are developed for an audience local to the company. There are developers who don’t consider the product that they’re developing may be used in another country, in another timezone, or even another language. Whether this is a budgetary issue or just being short-sighted with respect to who uses the product, it’s important to consider usage outside the box.
Supporting different countries, timezones and languages opens up a whole bunch of opportunities from other cultures and markets. The internet is called the world wide web for a reason. It encompasses people around the world. If people cannot understand what your website does because they don’t read the one language your website supports, you will miss the opportunity for a whole group of people and the markets they are in.
While it may be easy to say these are important and that they should be supported by every website, there are many logistics behind implementing them. Languages require templating and translating all the text in your service. If no one speaks a particular language in your team, a third party is necessary to translate the content. Futhermore, a fourth-party needs to verify that such translations are correct and don’t include offensive alternate meanings. With future updates to the service, new content will need to be translated as well, so an ongoing contract may be necessary.
Timezones are tricky. Converting timestamps into different timezones is trivial. One issue is that people in different timezones need to consider that people they chat with may be sound asleep for another four hours. Shifting conversations to odd hours of the day may be important.
As far as being in different countries, you want to keep your service (servers and support) close to your audience’s location. The farther the distance, the longer the delay can be. If an act of terrorism affects one country, your service shouldn’t crumble to a halt. Having backup plans for each country is a good exercise to practice.
This topic can be very complex and take companies years to implement. In some cases legal issues may prevent your service from being available to other countries, such as video and music licensing agreements. Keeping an open mind about people outside of your box during planning and development will keep the door open should it become feasible in the future.
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April 2, 2010
The internet provides a lot of information and entertainment for free. People pay for access to the internet through internet service providers, or find alternate means through a cafe, library, or school. How someone connects to the internet reveals how much they value the connection and convenience. YouTube provides free videos to watch. Gmail provides free email to communicate with others. Facebook provides games and photos to play with your friends. There are alternate pay-to-use services that offer comparable services.
So when a service expects a user to pay for part or all the service, the barrier to retaining the user may be grand. The average user is spoiled. If it isn’t free, they will find it somewhere else where it is offered for free. Look at movies. You can pay full price for a dvd, watch it once, and put it on the bookshelf. Or you can rent a dvd for a few bucks, watch it once, and not have to worry about storing it on your bookshelf. Or lastly, you can download it (perhaps illegally) and not pay anything, watch it once, and have it available anytime you want to watch it again. It may depend of the perceived value compared to the actual cost to choose one over another.
Providing content isn’t cheap or easy. You have to pay people to create and maintain the content so that users can continue to enjoy content over time. If you don’t produce content often enough, the user won’t wait around and you end up losing viewers. Many companies never find the right balance of giving users what they want for free and making at least enough to keep the company above water financially.
Allowing users to try a service before they buy is one way to strike a balance. Show them what they get if they pay a few bucks. Let them actually use it and input their data into the system. Enticing a user to come in the door makes it much more likely they will pay to stay in. And give a user a little (or a lot) more than what they could get for free with another service. Many users weigh the benefit they get in return for the cash they hand over. If the deal isn’t all that great, they won’t bite.
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March 31, 2010
Developers make API calls to get data and submit data to web services. Usually, a POST or GET to a url is made, using a web library in most languages. This data is returned in the response and is then parsed by the application.
This works for the most part. Calls to the API are simple, short, and don’t usually occur too frequently. So when thousands of applications are requesting data, the server can handle it like visitors to the main website.
If you do have to make a bunch of calls to the API to get similar data (like the names of a set of users), some APIs allow you to batch them up to help reduce the number of connections. Resources are used more extensively with individual connections and additional data wraps the desired data, which can lead to a higher load on the server and more bandwidth being used. A batched API call usually returns all the data wrapped in one wrapper and in one connection.
One would think batching would be easy to implement and better than individual calls to the API. This isn’t always the case. Sometimes the service wants to restrict the number of requests made or you could get all their data in a matter of (milli)seconds. Other times, the API isn’t a high priority and the main website is given more of the resources.
Batching also complicates the interface of the API. Are you getting a single user’s data back, or data from a number of users. Understanding the varying response is critical to getting the right data.
The amount of data returned is reduced with a batch call, but can also present too much data at one time. If you have to download all this data at once, the connection must remain open. Making more calls may be slower, but can also help even out requests overall. If a server is hit with 10 requests for 10 users at one time versus 20 requests for 5 requests in twice the time, the data tubes aren’t filled as much all at once. It all depends on the load. With more requests, you can determine how often a request should be made and can choose to pause or stop after each request.
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March 29, 2010
Cable broadcast and DVD boxsets of shows are so oldschool. Why wait for the exact time the show starts or use up the valuable Tivo space when you can open your laptop anywhere there is an internet connection and start watching a show for free.
Many broadcast networks have started posting full episodes of shows on their website for people to watch. No iTunes or special software is needed. A browser and Adobe Flash, along with a highspeed connection is all that is required.
You may even luck out after seeing a show and want to watch the whole season. ABC had past seasons of Lost available for those who got lost. There are commercials but they tend to be under 30 seconds per segment and cannot be skipped which could be annoying to some viewers.
The networks have more control of the shows they post because they don’t have to deal with a third party distributor. iTunes takes a cut on each download (which you have to pay for, but are commercial free), whereas the network website can control the commercials and other content displayed on the free content.
Some shows are split up into segments and are offered to the viewer in smaller chunks. Rather than have the viewer watch two hours of a show, each topic discussed is a separate video. No need to scan through the whole show looking for what they discussed, or where a particular topic is that you desire.
There are even web-only videos like extras and alternate endings similar to what DVD boxsets often come with. Networks can offer more insight on character profiles and show clips of upcoming episodes or seasons that would be limited to 30 seconds on television.
And free is good too. You don’t have to chip in a couple of bucks hoping that the show will be entertaining to you. If you don’t like the show, skip it and continue viewing other shows.
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March 24, 2010
Most people want to donate to special causes. From saving animals that are picked up off the streets to feeding people in third world countries, we as human beings feel for those less fortunate and in need of a little help. We have a sense of what it feels to be less fortunate and hope we never have to experience it first hand.
While we wish we could help, other things prevent us from following through with such assistance. When budgets are already busting at the seams, donating money to organizations may help someone else, but will cause difficulties for ourselves. Finding the time out of a busy schedule to donate can be nearly impossible. Weekdays can be packed with job responsibilities and weekends filled with things that didn’t get done during the week.
So what does one do to help out? Donate with something simple but very big when combined with others. Everywun provides a conduit for you to benefit an organization. The website gives you a “badge” to place on your website similar to an ad. When visitors click on this, a certain amount is donated to the organization. The more clicks, the more donated. It only takes a few minutes to get the badge and place it on your website, the same amount of time it takes to check whether you got any new email within the last five minutes.
This simple yet powerful tool makes you, as well as your visitors feel good. Your visitors, who are also very busy and feel the same will be happy to click on the badge and donate to a good cause. It can be viral as well, where they add a badge to their own blog or social network profile.
It may seem like a small step. A few cents here and there doesn’t make much difference, one might think. But if there are enough clicks, the few cents can add up to a big difference for people or animals.
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