Google Analytics: Flow Visualization
Google introduces Flow Visualization for Google Analytics: visitors flow and goal flow; http://eicker.at/GAFlowVisualization
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Gerrit Eicker
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Gerrit Eicker
Google Plus Growth
Google Plus is joined by millions of new users since its opening, according to Paul Allen; http://eicker.at/GooglePlusGrowth
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Gerrit Eicker
Allen: “My team just completed a new round of counting Google+ users by surname. And I have updated my model. Our sampling of 400 uncommon surnames in the U.S. also reflects usage in many other countries, since the list of 400 includes names that are popular in India, Germany, Italy, France, Japan, and many other countries. … On September 9, our model showed 28.7 million users – This morning, our model shows 37.8 million users, with most of the growth coming in the last 2 days – By adding a fudge factor (see below) to account for private user profiles and for non-Roman surnames (both of which are totally overlooked by our surname counting model), my current estimate is 43.4 million users … My earlier model… which proved to be very accurate in the first 2-3 weeks, did not address either private profiles or non-Roman alphabet. According to FindPeopleOnPlus.com, there are substantial numbers of users from countries like Indonesia, China, Vietnam, Japan, Thailand, and many other countries, which my surname counting approach does not include. So I have decided to add a 5% privacy fudge factor and a 10% non-Roman alphabet fudge factor in my Google+ model. I’ll need to develop a way to actually calculate those percentages somehow, rather than just guess on them.”
SEL: “A Google+ post by Paul Allen, founder of ancestry.com and a self-proclaimed ‘unofficial Google+ statistician’, shows significant growth of Google’s social network since opening to the public. These growth rates were only first seen during the first few weeks of field testing when the user numbers were very low. In terms of the current growth spurt Allen states: ‘it is clear that Google+ is absolutely exploding – 30% growth in just 2 days and with a base of nearly 30 million members already.’ … So what does this mean? Google+ may be cementing themselves as a credible social network, but the mass exodus from Facebook just isn’t happening.”
eWeek: “Facebook now has 800 million users. Grumble as they might at the privacy and UI changes Facebook makes every few months, the users that comprise the vast social network stick around. – That’s user engagement, and by extension social advertising opportunities, Google can only aspire to at this stage.”
UG: “With Facebook’s recent introduction of the Timeline profile, the two networks are going to be quite different from one other – which is a good thing in my opinion. After all why would anybody want to use two of the same thing? Google is keeping it simple and minimalistic, while Facebook seems to be going in the opposite direction by letting users add even more about themselves on the network. Both services have their merits, so I guess we’ll continue to see users using Facebook and Google+ instead of completely migrating to one.“
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Gerrit Eicker
Gartner Hype Cycle: Technologies 2011
Gartner Hype Cycle: eReaders, mobile apps, predictive analytics mainstream adopted soon; http://eicker.at/HypeCycle2011
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Gerrit Eicker
Gartner: “‘The Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies report is the longest-running annual Hype Cycle, providing a cross-industry perspective on the technologies and trends that IT managers should consider in developing emerging-technology portfolios… ‘Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies‘ targets strategic planning, innovation and emerging technology professionals by highlighting a set of technologies that will have broad-ranging impact across the business,’ said Jackie Fenn, vice president and Gartner fellow. ‘It is the broadest aggregate Gartner Hype Cycle, featuring technologies that are the focus of attention because of particularly high levels of hype, or those that may not be broadly acknowledged but that Gartner believes have the potential for significant impact.’ – ‘Themes from this year’s Emerging Technologies Hype Cycle include ongoing interest and activity in social media, cloud computing and mobile,’ Ms. Fenn said. ‘On the social media side, social analytics, activity streams and a new entry for group buying are close to the peak, showing that the era of sky-high valuations for Web 2.0 startups is not yet over. Private cloud computing has taken over from more-general cloud computing at the top of the peak, while cloud/Web platforms have fallen toward the Trough of Disillusionment since 2010. Mobile technologies continue to be part of most of our clients’ short- and long-range plans and are present on this Hype Cycle in the form of media tablets, NFC payments, quick response (QR)/color codes, mobile application stores and location-aware applications.’ – Transformational technologies that will hit the mainstream in less than five years include highly visible areas, such as media tablets and cloud computing, as well as some that are more IT-specific, such as in-memory database management systems, big data, and extreme information processing and management. In the long term, beyond the five-year horizon, 3D printing, context-enriched services, the ‘Internet of Things’ (called the ‘real-world Web’ in earlier Gartner research), Internet TV and natural language question answering will be major technology forces. Looking more than 10 years out, 3D bioprinting, human augmentation, mobile robots and quantum computing will also drive transformational change in the potential of IT.”
Gartner: “Many of the technologies featured on this Hype Cycle contribute to the four themes featured in Gartner’s recent report on top technology trends ‘Technology Trends That Matter’. – The connected world: Advances in embedded sensors, processing and wireless connectivity are bringing the power of the digital world to objects and places in the physical world. This is a slow-moving area, but one that is now accelerating with the growing pervasiveness of low-cost, embedded sensors and cameras. Relevant entries on this year’s Hype Cycle include the broad trend referred to as the Internet of Things; identification technologies, such as NFC payments (which will lead to broader use of NFC for other applications); QR/color code and image recognition; application layers, such as augmented reality, context-enriched services and location-aware applications; and communication technologies, such as machine-to-machine communication services and sensor mesh networks. Although this area will take at least another decade to unfold fully, many interesting and profitable opportunities will arise along the way. – Interface trends: User interfaces are another slow-moving area with significant recent activity. Speech recognition was on the original 1995 Hype Cycle and has still not reached maturity, and computer-brain interfaces will evolve for at least another 10 years before moving out of research and niche status. However, a new entry for natural language question answering recognizes the impressive and highly visible achievement of IBM’s Watson computer in winning TV’s Jeopardy! general knowledge quiz against champion human opponents. Gesture recognition has also been launched into the mainstream through Microsoft’s Kinect gaming systems, which is now being hacked by third parties to create a range of application interfaces. Other areas continue to progress more slowly, including speech-to-speech translation, augmented reality and virtual assistants, while virtual worlds remain entrenched in the trough after peaking in 2007. – Analytical advances: Supporting the storage and manipulation of raw data to derive greater value and insight, these technologies continue to grow in capability and applicability. Predictive analytics is approaching maturity, but researchers and developers continue to apply and improve the core techniques for new data sources. Image recognition is driving new capabilities in search, retail and social media, and also contributes to advances in other areas, such as augmented reality and video analytics, for customer service. Social analytics continues to take advantage of new sources and types of social information. Computational advances, such as in-memory database management systems and big data, take the scope and scale to new levels. – New digital frontiers: Crossing the traditional boundaries of IT, new capabilities are reaching levels of performance and pricing that will fundamentally reshape processes and even industries. Examples on this year’s Hype Cycle include 3D printing and bioprinting (of human tissue), and mobile robots.”
Gerrit Eicker
Web Engagement Management
WEM, Web Engagement Management, may replace ‘CMS‘ for using content to deliver business results in 2011; http://eicker.at/WEM
Gerrit Eicker
Wetware
Evans: Throw out your touchscreens, your Kinects: thought-controlled computing is the new new thing; http://eicker.at/Wetware
Gerrit Eicker
Web Design Application
Santa Maria: We should have native tools to do our jobs, a real web design application; http://j.mp/cpGqbU (via @rivva)
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Gerrit Eicker
Santa Maria: “The web and its related disciplines have grown organically. I think it’s safe to say the web is not the domain of just the geeks anymore – we all live here. And those of us who work here should have sophisticated, native tools to do our jobs. … So why not build a desktop app for web design around WebKit? I’m not talking about an in-browser AJAX toolkit for dragging elements around and changing fonts, but an actual desktop application built with WebKit as the core to its display. It could have accurate rendering and previews for the way page elements would look, but with some of the WYSIWYG tools desktop design apps have. We wouldn’t just approximate pixels in a flat comp, our CSS would be baked in to the layouts we draw and create on the page. And as Webkit grows, so to could this new app, always taking advantage of the latest and greatest functionality. Just like a browser, it could pull assets from remote servers; and just like a desktop app, it could make use of local processing power and OS level functionality. This would allow it to effectively combine some of the best of both worlds, with a foot firmly planted in the web. – The advantages would be monumental, allowing a strong creative and explorative process, while seeing how things could react on a live stage. It would fulfill many of the items on my wishlist because these are already part of core browser functionality. We would essentially be designing with live page elements; not a picture of a text field—but a text field you could click into and start typing, and then drag to a different area of the page entirely. – I know I’m generalizing; I’m a designer first and most certainly not a developer, but I’ve been occupying this space and using these tools long enough to have a hunch for what works and what doesn’t. An application like this could change the process of web design considerably. Most importantly, it wouldn’t be a proxy application that we use to simulate the way webpages look – it would already speak the language of the web. It would truly be designing in the browser.”
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Washington DC Web Designer
Interesting, this is something I’ve overlooked as a web designer.
Gerrit Eicker
iPad Interface Design
Nielsen: iPad apps are inconsistent. iPad user interface should not be a scaled-up iPhone UI; http://j.mp/axulz1
Gerrit Eicker
Second Life Viewer 2 (Beta)
Linden Lab launched Second Life Viewer 2. Everything you need to know: http://j.mp/SLViewer2 (via @GiannaBorgnine)
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Gerrit Eicker
LL: “Today, we’re excited to announce the launch of Viewer 2 Beta, the next generation of Second Life viewers – combining an easy browser-like experience with shared media capabilities – providing what we believe is the best experience yet for accessing Second Life, and a new option to choose from among Viewer 1.23 and other Third Party Viewers. … Shared Media, a standard capability in Viewer 2, makes sharing standard Web-based media and content in Second Life easy, and enables content creators to make more compelling, interactive experiences. Content creators can now place Web pages, video, Flash content, and other web media, onto any surface in Second Life. … But, it’s still Beta. And that’s why we’re putting it into your hands now. So, put it through its paces, stress test it, and give us your feedback in the Viewer 2 Forum.”
SCS: “While all of these features are great, and there is a whole slew more of them… there is something bigger. Perhaps bigger than the launch of the viewer itself, is the launch of Second Life Shared Media (SLSM). SLSM is 100% a game changer for Second Life. It will allow you to display fully interactive, shared web content on any surface of a prim in Second Life including Flash, Javascript, and embedded movies.”
ST: “Viewer 2.0 is, in fact, dozens of long-requested features. The fact that these features we’ve asked for years and years of Linden Lab to deliver for the Second Life platform is a testament to the teams and leadership, and is a very good sign for the longer-term viability of Second Life as a platform. Two of the most stand-out features are HTML on a prim and treating a browser like a browser. But there’s lots more. … Many, many doors have just opened for the possibilities of Second Life. Having interactive HTML and flash support alone makes lots of possibilities available. Combine with an array of interface improvements, and this really is a much cleaner, better experience.”
HB: “The ability to pull WebEx, Google Docs, YouTube videos into a virtual world would be ‘perfect’ for government, educational and enterprise users.”
DW: “This shift goes deeper, however, than rethinking the Second Life experience. There are early hints that this opens up a new front in which Second Life the world, Second Life the brand, and Linden Lab (the company behind it) may no longer be one-and-the-same. – Whether the shift from engineering-based to a more design-based approach, from evolutionary commerce to blatantly commercial, and from business-agnostic to business friendly will so overturn the in-world culture that the result is a diluted online experience remains to be seen. … And welcome to the new future. It begins now.”
VWN: “Perhaps most importantly for bringing new brands and services to Second Life, though, is the ability to drop Web pages, video, Flash content, and other media onto any surface in Second Life. TVs can now broadcast Hulu in the virtual world and arcades can play host to a variety of Flash games (including some casual MMOs) without leaving Second Life. The company also says it will be announcing new services for shared documents and collaboration, making the Web makeover as much about business as entertainment. – With the move towards the mainstream has come a bit more mainstream attention.”
Scoble: “Linden Labs has just released a new player for its virtual world, Second Life. This is important because it makes significant moves toward the Web and shows a new strategy: one of integrating into social networks (much of that shift has yet to come, Linden Lab’s CEO, Mark Kingdon told me in an interview).”
Prokofy: “I’ve never cared about HTML on a prim. If I wanted to HTML on a prim, I’d go out on the Internet, where they have HTML without slowing it down by putting it on a prim. That works best. There really is such a thing as a sensible membrance between web and worlds that is like ‘the blood/brain barrier’. Useful, evolutionarily developed helpful stuff that keeps your brain from being suffused with blood. The membrane that kept out the web from the world of SL for six years was a good thing, too.“
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Gerrit Eicker
LL: “Second Life Shared Media, a new Viewer 2 capability, makes sharing standard Web-based media in Second Life easy and seamless. It enables content creators to make more compelling, interactive experiences. Basically, Shared Media brings the Internet inworld. – For the more technically inclined, what this means is that you can now put media textures on any prim in Second Life. More specifically, the viewer uses WebKit to create a fully interactive, dynamic texture from a Web URL. … Behind the scenes, Shared Media is different. Second Life always stays synchronized for all Residents. That is, the simulation takes place on our servers, and each person’s viewer renders their perspective on that simulation – everyone is looking at the same thing. Shared Media, on the other hand, can look different to different people — sometimes. Everyone’s instance of the Shared Media is always presenting the same URL.”
BV: “Second Life 2.0 Viewer … has a lot of potential to open the door for more nonprofit, educational and government applications for virtual worlds. … Bringing your web-based content into the virtual world is essential for most organizations that have been operating on the web for the past 15 years. … It’s a lot simpler for a non-expert user to figure out with all the main stuff on handy tabs on the right side and bottom of the screen. … For your average public sector institution, being able to bring in your existing web content, get your users in-world more smoothly, find what you need fast, and access all the power tools, pushes Second Life way ahead of the other virtual world platforms.”
MJ: “Overall, Linden Lab deserve kudos for delivering a significantly revamped viewer that should make using Second Life markedly easier for new residents in particular. Linden Lab have consistently stated their commitment to improving the user experience and this is one of the more concrete examples of how that is now being delivered. The proof of Viewer 2’s success will only come with widespread use, but initial impressions are positive. Of course, Linden Lab need to pull off a usability coup to ensure ongoing growth. Combined with potential improvements in grid performance, the horizon seems a little brighter than it has been in a while.“
Gerrit Eicker
WordPress 2
The WordPress 2 app for the iPhone is available: an entirely new version and interface overhaul; http://j.mp/23t4EU
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Martin Seibert
Das ist aber nur für wordpress.com-Nutzer, oder?
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Gerrit Eicker
Eigentlich nicht: “We’ll continue with the next version, and eliminating the bugs and incompatibilities with some self-hosted WordPress setups that was the source of the majority of the support requests we see in the forum.”
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Gerrit Eicker
WordPress’ New Dashboard
Forthcoming WordPress 2.7 offers a new dashboard design, viewable at WordPress.com right now; http://is.gd/alqU
Gerrit Eicker 09:06 on 20. October 2011 Permalink |
Google: “[A]t Web 2.0 Summit [we] unveiled the release of ‘Flow Visualization’ in Google Analytics, a tool that allows you to analyze site insights graphically, and instantly understand how visitors flow across pages on your site. Starting this week, ‘Visitors Flow’ and ‘Goal Flow’ will be rolling out to all accounts. Other types of visualizers will be coming to Google Analytics in the coming few months, but in the meantime, here’s what you can expect from this initial release. … The Visitors Flow view provides a graphical representation of visitors’ flow through the site by traffic source (or any other dimensions) so you can see their journey, as well as where they dropped off. … Goal Flow provides a graphical representation for how visitors flow through your goal steps and where they dropped off. Because the goal steps are defined by the site owner, they should reflect the important steps and page groups of interest to the site. In this first iteration, we’re supporting only URL goals, but we’ll soon be adding events and possibly other goal types. … These two views are our first step in tackling flow visualization for visitors through a site, and we look forward to hearing your feedback as all users begin experiencing it in the coming weeks. We’re excited to bring useful and beautiful tools like these to help you understand your site, so stayed tuned for more!”
SEL: “Path analysis has historically been a feature that provided little insights on user behavior, mainly because visitors behave in such non linear ways that it is hard to learn something from their paths, even when looking at aggregated data. The best option to path analysis has been to analyze micro conversions, i.e. looking at each page and trying to learn if the page has fulfilled its objective. However, the visualizations below bring some interesting approaches that will be very helpful for web analysts. … As some might recognize, the visualization used on this feature is very similar to the one created by Charles J. Mainard shown below. This image, created in a 1869 to describe Napoleon’s disastrous Russian campaign of 1812, displays several variables in a single two-dimensional image…”
LM: “I need Red Bull. Seriously, I can’t keep up with all the new features and announcement coming from Google Analytics lately. In the last few months, they’ve released a new interface, real-time data, multi-channel funnels, Google Analytics Premium, Google Webmaster Tools integration, plot rows, site speed report, new mobile reports, social media tracking, and now Flow Visualization. You can read their official announcement, but ours is much more informative [and we have video!]. … Navigation Flow: provides a graphical representation of your start/end nodes, and the paths to or from your site that your visitors follow. When you create a navigation flow, you have the option to identify a single page by URL, or to create a node that represents a group of pages whose URLs match a condition, for example, all pages whose URL contains a particular product identifier like shirts or jackets. … Sometimes, things are best explained with video. This is one of those times, so sit back, relax, and enjoy this brief tour through this new feature.“