It seems that everything has a “Like” button now days. Apparently 65 million Facebook users “Like” things on a daily basis. Here are two things to consider with the “Like” revolution.

First is your business taking advantage of it? Are you making it easy for users to spread your products, services and ideas? If not you’re missing out on a huge market segment. There are a lot of ways to leverage this but start with a plan. Also if folks aren’t sharing your ideas in real life, it’s not very likely that they’re going to share them virtually either.

Secondly, what do you like? Are you careful or liberal with what you “Like”? Facebook is starting to allow people to touch your news feed if they’ve liked your page so if you’re a liberal liker you could end up with a very interesting news feed. I often see folks “Like” dozens of pages within Facebook at a time (perhaps) without the realization that these pages can see a lot more about you than they might think (and so can other people who “Like” those pages) and that they’re opening their news feeds up to anything that’s posted to these pages. There are also a lot of privacy implications surrounding the “Like” pages, some worth more consideration than others. Just like the dangers of Foursquare stalking, being aware of what you share and what you “Like” definitely deserves some consideration.

How much do you share? Do you care if people and companies have the ability to see deep into your personal life?

This is a post from the Nullvariable Web Consulting Blog.

What does it mean to “Like” something?

As a sponsor and the team that built the InnoVenture South East 2010 website we might be a little biased when we say that you can’t miss InnoVenture South East this year. Don’t take our word for it, watch this video, 45 more reasons to attend Innoventure this year, from the GSATC and decide for yourself.

Reason #46, Nullvariable will be there.
I don’t know about you but the opportunity to connect with so many people who need customers, capital, talent, and technology is too great to pass up. See you at our booth there?

www.innoventuresoutheast.com

This is a post from the Nullvariable Web Consulting Blog.

46 Reasons to Attend InnoVenture South East 2010

Greenville, SC isn’t the only city that’s yearning for Google’s fiber project. There’s plenty of competition from Topeka, KS (who didn’t really change their name, just said you should call them Google), to Baltimore, MD and many others. So why does Greenville matter in all this, and why should folks from Greenville care?

Greenville is a most excellent city with fabulous dining, beautiful scenery, wonderful parks and an awesome, highly awarded downtown. Greenville’s culture is progressive and very innovative. Greenville is also uniquely located in the sweet spot of what’s considered the “Southeastern Innovation Corridor,” a six-hundred mile long region roughly as large as from the San Francisco Bay Area to San Diego, CA and regionally is only exceeded in population by California. This Innovantion Corridor is home to many international industry leaders including BMW, Michelin, Bosch, Royal Dutch Ahold, Fujifilm, Milliken, Kemet, and more. My friend Richard Peck describes in detail some of the benefits of this corridor. If Google is looking for a place that can take this level of technology and turn it into something amazing there really is no better option. Greenville and the Upstate are moving forward with or without Google but what a sweet ride it would be to share.

Residents of Greenville should be excited about this opportunity for a few reasons, some of which I cover in this 30 second video:
There are of course plenty more reasons and I want to hear about them from you in the comments.

Are you feeling lucky yet? Want to get involved? Visit http://www.wearefeelinglucky.com/ for the whole scoop. And don’t miss Google on Main Saturday March 20th!

In case you needed more reasons Greenville is great:

• Main Street, Greenvile: Top 10 Great Places in America 2009 – American Planning Association
• Top 20, Best and Worst Bang for the Buck Cities – Forbes
• Best Places to Live the Simple Life – AARP
• North American Cities of the Future: Greenville Named Microcity of the Future [PDF] – Regions Magazine
• A Tale of Two Cities – Good Morning America

Update (3/22/10):

Here’s the end result of 2200 glow sticks, some social media, some traditional media and some serious desire for Google Fiber:

This is a post from the Nullvariable Web Consulting Blog.

Why We Want Google Fiber

How long as it been since you updated the copyright date on your website? I don’t know about you but I see this as one of those little things that is important. Same as a company blog that hasn’t been updated in months. Did you know that you can keep the copyright date on your site up-to-date with just one simple line of code?

Yep, all you have to do is use the following code:
<?php print date('Y'); ?>

That’s all it takes for your site to display an up-to-date copyright date. Blogging isn’t quite so easy but you should really get rid of the blog if you’re not going to post anything to it. You’re probably losing sales because people wonder if you’re still around. Neglected blogs make me wonder what else you neglect.

This is a post from the Nullvariable Web Consulting Blog.

It’s the Little Things

Usability refers to how well people can use something. It can be anything from a sign on a door letting you know which direction the door opens (making it more likely you’ll be able to open it on the first try) to arranging the navigation on a website in a logical fashion.

Recently Jakob Nielsen posted about Progress in Usability, specifically with regard to websites. He comes to several interesting conculsions, and states that it will take us 74 years to reach six-sigma quality.

I have a couple of problems with his logic and data. First, he uses data from 262 websites that his company has collect formal usability metrics for. He doesn’t state at what phase those metrics were collected. It’s not clear if the data is collected before or after the sites have been tested or if there was any work done to improve usability prior to collecting these metrics. I’m assuming that these metrics are being collected prior to optimizing these sites. What I’d like to know is how much improvement was able to be made across these sites. Just because the default out of the box design wasn’t 100% usable doesn’t mean that subsequent generations were only improved by 6%.

Another area that Nielsen ignores is that users are getting smarter. We know that users learn and adapt over time. Are websites getting more complex and staying “un-usable” to users that are more advanced? I doubt it. So Nielsen’s number could actually be a lot worse since most of us have been using the Internet long enough to figure out a few things along the way and be more likely to successfully accomplish our goal. Or it could be that my next point is causing his data to be wrong.

My final problem with the assumptions Nielsen reaches is that he’s only got 262 data points that he’s comparing. That’s not even remotely close to the number of websites on the internet with Netcraft reporting that it touched 206 billion websites in January 2010. (In 1995 there were 18000 websites, in 2006 we hit 100 million.) The Internet has exploded in it’s size and yet Nielsen’s data covers a mere 26 websites a year. It’s hard for me to believe that we can judge usability progress accurately with such a tiny window into the massive amount of data that is the internet. I have to think that these are skewed numbers without increasing the number of sites measured proportionally each year.

Nielsen even admits that he left out 15 major websites that they conducted recent studies on because he didn’t want to bias the data. While I agree I still believe that his data is too biased to come to the grand statements he’s making.

Perhaps I misunderstand what Nielsen is trying to say but I can’t help but think two things, his slice of the pie is really too tiny to hold up against the whole of the internet and that we’re not seeing the important numbers (how much a site can improve just by working at it). I don’t know of any other six-sigma measured processes that improve with zero effort.

I believe that education is the biggest factor in improving things like this, what do you think? Did I miss something with Neilsen’s data? What tactics do you use to increase usability for your site so you can stand out among 206 billion websites?

This is a post from the Nullvariable Web Consulting Blog.

Is Usability Getting Better?

Recently I interacted with two different large companies about problems with merchandise or advertising. One company stonewalled and acted like they almost wanted me to never spend money with them again. The other company, however, went far beyond my expectations and won a customer for life.

When I was in retail, one of the companies I worked for spent a lot of money researching the lifetime value of a loyal customer. This company discovered that once we had won a customer’s business, the value of that customer (if we could keep him or her) was more than $50,000. That’s quite a bit of cash. That company is no longer in business, and I believe it’s because it failed to see some opportunities and because it was truly one man’s vision. Not long after that man passed away the company lost its direction, ran amuck, and soon folded. But that’s another story.

Back to the lifetime value of a customer. In our increasingly connected society I believe that the lifetime value of a customer has increased ten or even a hundred times over what it was just a few years ago. One customer who has a good experience and raves about it to his friends most certainly drives more value than the amount he could purchase alone. But a customer with a bad experience (statistically for every one who speaks up there are nine with a similar experience who didn’t) can have the same effect in the opposite direction, perhaps even more so.

In my recent customer experiences, the manager of the first store I dealt with claimed that the salesman would never have made a mistake because she’d been working there for too long. She then suggested that if I wanted the original discount I’d thought I was getting, I should just come back and spend more money in her store. She never once offered anything except reasons why she couldn’t or wouldn’t help me. But if she had gone above and beyond even just a small amount, I would have left the store a much happier customer–perhaps not a raving, satisfied customer but not a customer who warns everyone he knows to shop elsewhere.

The second company, on the other hand, had no obligation to me and yet bent over backwards to have things done earlier than promised, reordered product so that items could be swapped out, and was very careful to make sure that I was satisfied. The one company has earned my respect and repeat business as well as recommendation while the other company has earned my distaste and adamant warnings.

This is a post from the Nullvariable Web Consulting Blog.

Is your company like a bull in a china shop?

An example of follow-through from an icon that is currently experiencing the reflection of his previous actions.

Recent events have brought to the front of my mind the importance of follow-through. While I’m not much of a golfer (and I’m pretty sure games like Wii Golf were designed specifically to humiliate me), I do know that one of the most important aspects of the sport is the follow-through. There are two things about follow-through that are important. First, if you don’t focus on the end of the stroke, the follow-through, you’ll lose a tiny amount of contact time between the ball and club, which can make a big difference in the outcome of the swing. Second, follow-through, whether great or poor, is really just a reflection of the actions taken previously, a culmination of the full swing.

Have you ever been to a great concert? The concert is really just the follow-through, a reflection of the time and energy that went into preparation for the concert. It’s the result of hard work, hours of practice, and years of school. So often we focus on the end result and are amazed by it. What’s truly amazing is the journey to get there starts with simple steps and is often the result of the things that we hate doing the most. The little day-to-day tasks really do add up to make an amazing impact.

• What processes do you work hard on so that good follow-through happens?
• Are there tasks that you’re neglecting that you shouldn’t be?

Being organized and disciplined in small things really does make a difference in bigger things!

This is a post from the Nullvariable Web Consulting Blog.

Why Follow-Through Matters

Merry Christmas! A very special thank you to all of our customers, friends and family for an amazing year. It’s rare for a small business to do so well so early on and especially with the economy the way it was this year. We’re looking forward to a great 2010. Here’s wishing you and yours an awesome new year!

Doug Cone (for the Nullvariable team)

This is a post from the Nullvariable Web Consulting Blog.

Merry Christmas!

Recently I’ve been moving the Nullvariable web servers into the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud. This means our customers will be getting some great benefits in increaced speed, better backups and future scalability.

AWS is a fantastic platform but it’s not for just anyone. Recently I wrote a couple of tutorials on setting up Drupal sites within the AWS cloud. I’m currently using the fantastic Pantheon project as a basis for some of the projects that we’re running in the cloud now.

If you’re a coder or a Drupal user you might find these tutorials helpful in taking full advantage of the AWS platform.

• How to setup EBS with Pantheon’s Mercury
• How to setup EBS with RAID0 for Pantheon’s Mercury project

Using these tools and techniques along with the Pantheon project we’re able to launch fully redundant servers that can easily scale into the thousands while handling traffic at lighting speed. (In a recent benchmark that I ran, a single Drupal server that we configured was able to serve 10,000 sequential requests in just 5.43 seconds!)

Want more? Check out the Pantheon and Amazon Web Services groups over on drupal.org. Nullvariable.com goes live using AWS next week!

What’s your take on cloud technologies? Are you using AWS or another cloud service?

This is a post from the Nullvariable Web Consulting Blog.

Cloud Computing with Amazon and Drupal

It used to be a problem when short links (tinyurl, bit.ly and other services that shorten URLs) were first introduced. People would hide affiliate links, goatse pictures and all sorts of stuff using them. We trained ourselves just not to click on those links and they quickly dissipated when people learned we didn’t trust them. Now with the advent of Twitter and other services that similarly limit posting size, shortened urls have surged in popularity. They often offer cool features like stats tracking (see my post about Understanding Bit.ly) and make it easier to share URLs that are really long or have lots of gobbly-gook in them.

The increasing problem with these URLs is that spammers and the like are once again using these URLs and abusing our trust of them. Here are some quick and easy tips to KNOW for sure where that URL is going.

• Turn on TweetDeck’s short URL preview.
• Grab the LongURLPlease bookmarklet.
• Grab the LongURLPlease FireFox extention.
• Add a + at the end of bit.ly URLs.

Turn on TweetDeck’s short URL preview

TweetDeck offers a built in preview feature that lets you see the title of the page and the actual URL that it’s sending you to. You can turn this feature on by clicking the settings icon and finding the setting (on the first tab) that’s labeled “Show preview information for short URLs”
Once you’ve enabled that option you’ll see a screen like this:

whenever you click on a short URL that TweetDeck recognizes. (Doesn’t do anything if it doesn’t recognize the service)
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Grab the LongURLPlease bookmarklet

If you use Twitter from the web interface one of the best ways to see the long version of a URL before clicking it is the “LongURLPlease” bookmarklet. Just drag this sucker [ LongURLPlease page to get the bookmarklet or extension.

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Grab the LongURLPlease FireFox extension

Another alternative for FireFox users is the LongURLPlease extension. It offers the same features as the bookmarklet mentioned above but also allows you to automatically expand short URLs whenever they’re encountered. You can also follow LongURLPlease on Twitter.

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Add a + at the end of bit.ly URLs

If the URL that you’re looking at is a bit.ly URL you can easily see the stats for that URL by just adding a plus “+” at the end of the url.
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Final thought

Showing the long URL is only helpful if you’re careful about what that URL contains. You can further enhance your security by using FireFox or Google Chrome as they both will block most phishing sites for you. Beyond that you can start using OpenDNS which will block most phishing sites for you too. Be vigilant! If you’re not sure if you can trust a link just take a few seconds to ask the person who sent it to you to verify that they sent it. That few seconds and make a difference in the hours of agony and lost time, followers etc that can result from clicking something you’re not sure about. Anytime that you get to a log in page, check the address bar to make sure it’s really the site you expected. Not sure? Type in the URL.

What do you do to stay secure? What advice have you given to friends and family to help them stay safe on the Internet?

This is a post from the Nullvariable Web Consulting Blog.

Do you know where that short link goes?