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Web Design, Internet Technology and Online Marketing News: Current
Google closes a number of web services to focus on core
January 22nd, 2012In a recent blog post, Renewing old resolutions for the new year, Google announced the closing of a number of publicly available services and tools. The search giant has been on a killing rampage with the goal of removing under-performing and peripheral businesses from it’s portfolio.
Examples of the recently killed Google programs include:
- Buzz social network
- Google Labs
- Google Health
We are pretty saddened at one of the now-doomed services, Picnik, an online photo editing toolset. Picnik is possibly the best-known of the services that Google is killing. The craziest part is that Google purchased the company less than a year ago–in March 2010. Most likely, Google will be incorporating photo editing tools into it’s core products, and perhaps even recycling the Picnik technology.
Other tools that will be phased out, rolled-up or merged:
- Google Message Continuity (GMC)
- Google Sky Map
- Needlebase
- Social Graph API
- Urchin: This online web analytics product became the foundation for Google Analytics
“Ask On Google+” invades search
January 21st, 2012More Google+ references make their way into search. Google’s latest push is to introduce a new component ”Ask On Google+.” Essentially, Google is concluding it’s search listings in some cases with the question, which points people to their social network. It doesn’t seem to take effect for all users and all searches. Danny Sullivan (and Tom Critchlow before him) tipped off the SEO community about the new component on Search Engine Land.
“Page Layout” algorithm judges ad placement above the fold
January 21st, 2012Google’s new “Page Layout” algorithm gives penalties to websites with too many ads above the fold.
Certainly this is a frustration for many users that do a search query only to keep landing on sites crammed ads and no consideration for user-experience.
Google acknowledged their users’ frustrations in a recent Search blog post:
We’ve heard complaints from users that if they click on a result and it’s difficult to find the actual content, they aren’t happy with the experience. Rather than scrolling down the page past a slew of ads, users want to see content right away.
Their warnings have also been posted on the Google Webmaster Central blog, as well.
For webmasters that are concerned about their site’s search ranking. One tool that can help would be the Google Browser Size tool, which gives an understanding of relative browser size to a website’s content. The Google anti-spam team is not planning on providing any tools for measuring the safe number of ads to page content. Perhaps it’s the best thing. Rather than giving the formula for the maximum allowed ads vs page content relative to a page, it Google makes it a little more vague than web designers need to focus on best-practices, which is ultimately better for the user and less about gaming the system.
Amazon Web Services introduces new cloud database product
January 19th, 2012Amazon Web Services just introduced DynamoDB, a new cloud computing service: a distributed database. The new service will help web services deal with sudden or frequent spikes in demand. Such spikes can tax traditional databases or databases housed within clusters. Quite possibly this service may be geared for smaller companies with successful websites and web products that may find themselves dealing with the “high class” problem of a spike in demand.
This on-demand web-scale distrubted database is a “a fully managed NoSQL database” that relies on solid-state drives, which increase the speed of data transfer–reducing bottlenecks. The service can be scaled up or down according to demand. Amazon deals with all the provisioning and management of the database, which will be very useful for web development companies.
SOPA support wanes
January 16th, 2012The anti-piracy bill in Congress known as SOPA (and its Senate equivalent, PIPA) has been the target of scrutiny by many in the Internet and web development industries. Congressional leaders seem to now to stepping back from the legislation as more and more speak out against the bill. The White House even recently issued a clear rejection of some of the main components of SOPA.
Specifically, the White House states:
While we believe that online piracy by foreign websites is a serious problem that requires a serious legislative response, we will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet.
Just because the SOPA supporters seem to be backing down slightly doesn’t mean that opponents of the bill have won.
Full documentation now for Google custom search javaScript API
January 14th, 2012Google has had their custom search team working hard to launch a number of improvements in 2011. Documentation was a big concern for users and developers who wrote in. As a result:
- JavaScript reference documentation has been completed for the Custom Search Element. They overhauled their documentation for JavaScript methods available with custom search API.
- Parli L’Italiano? Google has added an array of new languages to the help center, including Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Spanish, and Swedish.
- Design overhaul. Google updated the design of the Help Center to make it easier to find what you are looking for. Specifically navigation has been improved.
Google “Search Plus Your World” feature goes live
January 11th, 2012Google has enacted big changes that should dramatically affect search ranking results and certainly get the SEO community up in arms. Google’s new feature “Search Plus Your World” was launched today, and many users have already experienced the differences. Some pros in the SEO community are beginning to question how much the new feature favors Google+.
Signed Out Users Seeing Google+ Suggestions Offered
Search Engine Land reported that Google+ data has been offered even when signed out of the account. Originally, we figured the changes to the search results pages would be for logged in users only. This is quite a surprising change that may show just how profound of a change the “Search Plus Your World” feature may be for SEO.
New additions to search
- Search for photos shared with you on Google+
- Receive photos uploaded by you and your connections as search result suggestions
- Google profiles may appear right as you type a name in search
- Google+ posts and comments that have been shared with you will now appear in your search results
Certainly, the availability of the content from Google+ will be determined by the visibility settings specified by the user who submitted that content. The visibility categories are: 1. Public 2. Extended circles 3. Limited and 4. Only you. Google’s new direction is heavily focused on the categorization of content, which will pave the way for new ways of personalization, creating recommendations and promoting engagement within the network.
Designers love speedy fonts
January 9th, 2012Speed is vital to web design. For this reason, Google decided to work hard to speed up it’s web fonts system in collaboration with the Monotype Imaging Fonts.com Web Fonts team. The Google Web Fonts system now utilizes Monotype Imaging’s MicroType Express compression format for fonts on the web. Basically, this upgrade offers a 15% reduction in file size over the gzip option.
Ok. So Google Upgraded Their Web Fonts…So What Next?
Well, web designers should not fear. Google isn’t requiring web designers and websites to update any code at all. They will update the CSS snippet and font files on their side. Basically, web designers and visitors get the benefit of faster fonts without any hassle.
Monotype Imaging, the web font software company that partnered with Google on this release, has decided to make MicroType Express available to the public at no cost. Very exciting. So, MicroType Express compression will now be part of the Embedded OpenType converter, adding to the WOFF compression in the sfntly library.
Top 10% of mobile users are using 90% of the bandwidth
January 7th, 2012The NYTimes explored a recent study by a mobile advisement company, Arieso, and explained that the “mobile airwaves are being divided in a lopsided manner.”
According the the studies by Arieso, ten percent of the world’s mobile users are consuming about 90% of the bandwidth. As you drill into the mobile data further, about 1 percent of consumers generating half of all mobile web traffic. The survey by Arieso also found that 64% of the biggest web users were armed with a laptop, a third were sporting a smartphone and 3% possessed an iPad.
Web designers most hated browser is almost a thing of the past
January 7th, 2012For years, Internet Explorer 6 has been the butt of many jokes. To Econsultancy, a UK-based marketing association, “IE6 may be the worst web browser ever created.”
The browser has been chided by web designers and developers for it’s complete lack of web standards and it’s blatant security issues.
Now, that web browser, which was the default portal to the Internet for the majority of Windows XP users, is clearly and nearly almost dead–with market share below 1% in the most important Internet market. Microsoft, itself, has created a website to help accelerate the demise of IE6. The IE6 Countdown site was launched last March. Besides the US catching up to Austria, Poland, Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Norway as having the browser used by less than 1%, a new fleet of countries will be joining these celebrated ranks. In Czech Republic, Mexico, Ukraine, Portugal and the Philippines, IE6 will soon seen less than 1% usage as well.
It will be a great moment when IT professionals and web developers can stop fussing over that pain-in-the-ass browser and focus their time on building better and more exciting applications.