I’ve used Firefox for years now and have always reverted back to it even when swayed slightly by Google Chrome or the latest IE. Obviously as a developer I always test in as many browsers as I can, but for my own personal browsing Firefox is the one I hover that pointer over and double click on the most.

Although I feel Firefox has always led in terms of new features which is down to the amazing efforts of an open-source community, for me it boils down to speed and put simply I have always found Firefox that bit faster.
That said, Google Chrome does give it a damn good run for its money which is why I do find myself now and again using Chrome.

The one feature that pulled in the punters for Firefox and set it apart was tabbed browsing. When Firefox introduced this feature way-back-when in 2002 it introduced an easy tabbed interface that helped users browse multiple pages quicker. It wasn’t until IE7 in 2006 Microsoft caught up. For me that’s a long time to react to such a good feature. Safari reacted much faster incorporating tabs in 2003.
Google Chrome launched much later in 2008 and has therefore never known a life without tabs.

So what’s the next big feature in terms of web browsing. Well, un-surprisingly it’s based on the feature that made Firefox one of the worlds favourite browsers… tabs.

The feature was code named Tab Candy, but will be incorporated into the official new release of Firefox as Panorama.
Firefox Panorama allows the user to group tabs together. This is done through the thumbnail tab view and by simply dragging one page over another to group them. You can drag just one page or as many as you want into a new group space and then name the group for easy access later.
If the window’s not big enough for all the pages your compiling together, Firefox cleverly stacks them together and you can select the stack to view the page thumbnails.

Being an iPhone owner I can see the process of dragging one thumbnail over another to make a group isn’t a totally new concept. This is after-all how the new “folder” feature in the new ios4 works to allow users to group apps together. I’m not a big fan of lifting ideas off others (see my last blog post) but this is only part of how Panorama works.

Enabling this grouping will mean you can easily have groups of pages for projects you’re working on or interests you have.
A simple concept, but amazingly powerful. For me though, it builds on a feature that meant quicker more efficient web browsing and that’s what makes me choose a particular browser.

This new feature will be available in Firefox 4 and is already in the Beta release if you want to take a look.

The launch of facebook places is not only significant in the fact that it shows as a company facebook is continually developing and looking for ways to expand it’s platform, but it is also significant in the fact it shows they can take any new idea which has been thought up by them or not and integrate it into facebook to open it up to the largest community on the web.

Facebook places is a way for users to “check in” to locations so their “friends” can see where they’ve been. Users can also add notes against places so their friends can see what they thought of it, what deals they may be able to get there etc, etc… just general info.

All in all, a good idea. Yes. But not an idea of some bright young developer within facebook HQ!

This idea happened to be the brainchild of Dennis Crowley who was named one of the “Top 35 Innovators Under 35″ by MIT’s Technology Review and Naveen Selvadurai.
This pair launched foursquare in march 2009 and now has over 3 million users.
Now, 3 million users all of a sudden doesn’t sound like that many. But that is only because of the monster that is facebook. The majority of websites would be more than happy and may even open a bottle of bubbly at the fact they’ve attracted 3 million users to their website.

The point here is that facebook can take any new idea, such as foursquare, integrate it into facebook and instantly expose it to an audience far greater than anyone else can imagine.

Therefore facebook faces no competition.

Although foursquare’s user base has apparently risen since the launch of facebook places, this will surely not continue. I can only guess this is due to the fact people are now more aware of the concept of “checking in” and are therefore searching for this and discovering foursquare.

Apparently facebook have been developing this for 8 months, so it took them only 9 months to track foursquare’s growth and decide to copy it’s idea.

It’s a shame, but I really feel we won’t see a new successful concept independently run, not integrated into facebook and grow enough to compete with the social giant.
It’s also a shame that more people hadn’t discovered foursquare first. As the 497,000,000 users that are members of facebook and not foursquare will think – cracking idea facebook… Well done.

May 27, 2009 at the Google I/O conference a new development was announced that I felt may cause a decent stir among web users. Something that might not only establish Google as a serious social media player but also change the way we use the web to communicate. Google Wave was described as “a new web application for real-time communication and collaboration”.

The idea was essentially to combine e-mail, instant messaging, wikis, and social networking into one real-time environment. It also allowed for spelling/grammar checking and automatic translations, but in the main a wave was a working real-time collaborative message, therefore it could potentially replace email!

Google Wave had 100,000 users in September 2009, each of which were allowed to invite additional users. But it wasn’t until May 19, 2010, Google Wave was released to the general public. This is why it seems strange Google are ditching the development of Wave only 3 months after the full web community could get their hands on it?
One of the main reasons I’ve heard Google are no longer developing Wave is that it simply hasn’t had the traction Google expected? Well, maybe not, but how much marketing has Google put into Wave since it’s been made widely available? Not a lot!

The other reason Wave has failed so badly is because of the perception it has amongst even those tech-savvy web users that have heard of it. It’s seen as a complex application and one that requires studying before anyone can pick it up and use. In this day and age when time is the most precious commodity of all, people just haven’t got the time to learn how to do something new… Like create a Wave.
The only surprise here is how Google missed the fact they had to make Wave at least appear simple. It’s the very fundamental that made Google search such a success – a logo, large search bar and a couple of buttons on a plain white background – that’s all it took before!

So, was Wave a complete failure? No, not completely. It was maybe a little before its time, maybe had the wrong perception amongst users and maybe had a much better development team than marketing team behind it. But it was also a new fresh approach to communicating, collaborating and socialising online and in that sense it has left behind some great ideas that a company like Google can surely build upon to create something special. Maybe that something is just around the corner and google doesn’t want anything to be stealing any limelight, not even Wave.

“Google Me” anyone?

Over the past few weeks there have been several important “Facebook factors” that have happened which could really impact on the way we all use the Internet in the future.

1) Facebook reaching 500,000,000 users. (active? Maybe not – but still!)
2) Facebook beta testing Facebook credits
3) Security researcher Ron Bowes crawling 100,000,000 Facebook urls (maybe blown out of all proportion as the data was publicly available but the the relevancy here is the medias love affair with online security)
4) Neilsen research finding 40 percent of online time is spent on just three activities — social networking, playing games, and e-mailing.
5) Google investing $120 million on Zynga the online game company (responsible for Farmville and Mafia Wars) last month.

The reason these 5 factors are so important. Combined, social networking and online games make up 32.9 percent of the time spent online. Facebook has the largest user base on the Internet. And Facebook credits will be in full release by the end of September 2010.
In my opinion the only issue that could possibly stop Facebook changing the way we pay for purchases online is factor number 3. Do the public trust Facebook enough?

Facebook Credits are currently in beta trial – click on your “Account” link in the top right corner and you can access a Facebook credits section. You may even have some that you’ve earned through playing games within the Facebook platform. However you will soon be able to use these credits for more than just buying virtual gifts. Something that although seems quite pointless to most people, has piloted the concept perfectly for Facebook.

The issue for many companies would be they wouldn’t want their users leaving their website to buy their products – perfectly reasonable. But with the launch of Facebook Connect and using the Open Graph protocol, users can connect to use their Facebook credits from any website that has implemented the necessary code. Problem solved and a massive impact on how we potentially buy products and services online created.

Users will in the main purchase credits within Facebook using their credit card, but there is also the opportunity for brands to incentivise the engagement of their brand through offering credits to users who “like” their business page on facebook or play their social games.

This new “social commerce” may be the way we find ourselves paying for downloading software, games and videos as well as purchasing our shopping or even booking our holidays. Why not? It’s only a variation on how paypal works, but now it’s being applied to a social arena it has led to creative thinking on how developers can issue credits and apply credits to what is now the most common activity on the Internet… Socialising.

One of the first companies to trial social commerce is Procter & Gamble having already started selling Max Factor cosmetics through Facebook. Disney also allowed users to purchase tickets for Toy Story 3 within Facebook using credits.

This isn’t a new concept. Microsoft brought out a Passport scheme that allowed users to store their credit card credits in an account that could be used on multiple websites. However, users didn’t trust the scheme enough back then… So do they now?
This is the only reason social commerce could fail. Because stories such as the recent “security” issue of facebook users details being available on a torrent made the news. It was a pointless story and one that didn’t even register with IT professionals. But not everyone is an IT professional and the media loves Internet scare stories. Therefore hundreds-of-thousands of potential users will be put off by the fear their credits will be stolen because they have them stored on a social network that carelessly puts them in control of their own details! What next? Banks issuing credit cards with a simple 4 digit pin that your not suppose to tell people!

Many people have questioned for some time how Facebook makes it’s money, with the simple answer being advertising. However, this will be small change compared to social commerce if the web community adopts it. It has been stated Facebook will charge a 30% commission for developers using it’s credits. Now that’s revenue!

Even with the large commission charge, developers will not be able to ignore the fact that the largest community on the web are using this new currency and will therefore almost be forced into using the system. Therefore I feel it boils down to the fact that if users trust social commerce it will be how we conduct our business online in future. If not, just like in the late 90’s it will fail again.

I’ve been quite pleased with my purchase of an iPad, but when you spend your hard earned monies you want to be more than quite pleased. The reason I purchased an iPad was because I thought it was a revolutionary device, one that would bring a new dimension to surfing the web, enjoying multimedia and playing simple games.

But most of all I was looking forward to some apps from some highly skilled developers that would take advantage of the amazing apple UI that made the iPhone the best device of our time so far and the quality HD screen that displays bright vivid images beautifully.

Until now, I have been largely disappointed with the apps on offer, until now I have been struggling to find an app that delvers something new and noteworthy. Until now! So what app have I stumbled upon that has urged me to go as far as pick up my iPad and blog about it?
Answer: Flipboard.

Flipboard is a new take on the flip style flash interfaces many catalogue sites such as Next are offering. It allows you to add categorised content that is gathered from multiple sources to your contents page. So, you’re interested in technology? Add the TechCrunch feed, love food Add the smitten kitchen feed. The feeds are then presented in a flip style format, but you can also touch the article you want to read more about to see it in large format. This is presented beautifully with a slick zoom fade animation. If you want to see the full article on the web then a simple click on a web link takes you to the page. The clever part here is that it doesn’t just open up safari, it does this in it’s own browser so that when your finished you can go back easily to where you left off.

As well as adding content from multiple feeds, you can also add your Twitter and Facebook accounts. This again presents your Facebook and Twitter feeds in the same flip magazine style format. As far as Twitter is concerned, for me, this now makes it 100 times more interesting. The reason for this is the tweets from people you are following are pulled in as well as some of the content from links they are including in their tweet. This means you can read a snippet of the information on the URL they’re tweeting and see if you’re bothered enough to read the whole article.

The Facebook feed is also nicely done, allowing you to focus in on certain status updates or photo postings and add your own comments.

From the opening of Flipboard where you are presented in style with pics of the latest articles slowly zooming in and out, to then point you close the app after feasting on the all the content you’ve just flicked through. You know it’s an application you won’t be deleting any time soon.

I wouldn’t like to criticise anything about flipboard. You can see the time and effort that has been put in by the development team with every aspect of the app. I would like to see the option of adding more content boxes on the contents page, but understand this may have performance implications. The only other improvement I can think of is the ability to add urls of any rss feeds that are then pulled into the flipboard environment.

All in all though… What a Flippling good app! (sorry!)