Now on to QR code killers. There is no such thing, why? QR codes are tiny, barely anyone uses them and they should not be seen as a standard to live up to. There have been more and more articles saying how this new system is going to take the crown from QR codes. What they fail to mention is that the crown is made of wood and who wants a wooden crown?

Whoever rules over this area of the market is basically ruling over a cult. There are very few people who use QR codes. Personally I can’t resist a QR code no matter how long it takes me to scan it but is that is rare and it only because I am a geek. I must however admit that I have never had a fantastic experience using them and I am less and less excited about it when I see one. The current crop of advertisers are ruining what has the potential to be great. Poor placement and over exaggerated expectations equal a bad user experience. Scan the QR code below!

Standard practice for QR codes

We commend these advertisers for what they do with creative usages and the initial CTR will be high but these negative experiences are killing the QR code and hindering the growth. My basic opinion is that these negative experiences make people far less likely to do it again and therefore the effectiveness decreases along with CTR until basically nobody uses them.

QR codes have potential, the readers need to be integrated into the camera app and not as a separate app, people need to know why they are using the code and also it needs to be in a great location. Baiting people in with pictures is all well and good but this has to be backed up with some serious content. The reward needs to be there and until it is QR codes will remain a fad and a gimmick.

Being part of so many communities is giving you the opportunity to increase your business, family and even old friends network but at a price: how are you going to keep up? On one hand you’ve got the possibilities of a great social network you are already involved in (in most cases not very well organised, let’s face it) and on the other hand you are literally holding a “smart” phone you are not using very smartly… yet. Let’s go mobile and let’s do it the smart way.

Organise your contacts

Have you started to count your contacts in hundreds? It doesn´t matter anymore if your social network is spread across different communities (Facebook, Messenger, Skype, Google Talk, etc.). Everybody is trying to keep up with the latest ways of communications and so are you. Now it’s time to organise your social network.

I love testing applications that are going to help us being in contact and in a very simple way. This is why I recommend Nimbuzz Mobile. Nimbuzz is a new-generation mobile service that allows you to combine all your buddies from Skype, Messenger, Facebook, ICQ, Yahoo, Google Talk, etc. into one contact list. It allows you to chat, make phone calls, send messages and files… and it´s free

In your growing social community an important step is being able to communicate, keeping up-to-date. The concept of being in touch adopts a new meaning and goes further with applications like Nimbuzz.

Try it out and don´t forget to let us know what you think! We appreciate your comments.

Download Nimbuzz and start to really enjoy being in contact.

The below graph shows average internet traffic across ten leading US ISPs when Google routed their services through Asian servers that weren’t up to the job. Google services including search, Gmail and Calendars were unavailable for two hours.

Is Google too powerful? Its services now account for around 5% of all internet traffic. Does this graph show how reliant we have become on one specific company?

Google’s argument that users are only one click away from choosing competitors instead may hold true for Search, but with every new service that the big G offers, are we not becoming more and more dependent on one company.

Check out more info here:

http://asert.arbornetworks.com/2009/05/the-great-googlelapse/

Being an early Windows 7 beta adopter, I’ve been using IE8 beta for a few months now and have only really come to the conclusion that it is better – just – than IE7. Alex posted about the IE8 beta over a year ago now, and proclaimed then that “IE8 is quite a handsome beast but it won’t be replacing Firefox or Opera in our hearts (or on our desktops) anytime soon”. In this case, I concur absolutely here – it most certainly is not my browser of choice – but since IE still has the global browser market share (well, besides Antarctica), IE updates are still of great importance to us.

Microsoft have had the unenviable task of trying to please everybody: IE8 is compliant with current web standards, but needs to revert to an IE7 ‘compatibility mode’ in order to render sites correctly that were designed with previous versions of Internet Explorer in mind. It’s a novel idea for Microsoft to be embracing backwards compatibility, something for which they have been maligned as recently as office 2007 introducing the new XML file formats (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx etc.), which are completely incompatible with previous versions until Office 2003 and older users download a compatibility pack.

Google Street Views – one of my preferred methods of wasting far too much time on the internet – is starting to cover more than just America. The Googlemobile is really starting to rack up the miles – areas of the UK, France and Japan are starting to turn that satisfying shade of blue which tells you that you can zoom straight on down. Sadly, Brighton isn’t on the map yet, but we’ll be sure to wave if we see the Googlemobile coming around the corner.

Up until now Street Views coverage has been limited to America – which is mapped from coast to coast – as well as Australia and New Zealand. When it comes to online map solutions, it’s hard to see how anybody else is going to get close to what has been achieved so far with Google Maps.

During February 2009, 1 in 35 UK internet visits was to a video website. That’s up 40.7% on last year, when the figure was 1 in 50.

At Upstream Connections, we love video. Quality video content on an ecommerce site helps inspire confidence and greatly improves conversion rates (if applied correctly). Did you know that a well-timed video can also be a route into Google’s top 10 results?

This is a result of Google’s much vaunted (and much maligned) Univeral Search. In a nutshell, Universal Search is an attempt to provide search results from a variety of sources, including blogs, images, authority sites like Wikipedia and video sites like YouTube. If you can create an interesting video with the right title, you have the potential to leapfrog onto Google’s front page. This can be particulary useful if you are selling a product that people search for using its name.

If you are interested in our video production services, drop us a line and let’s talk!

For anyone who’s interested in how the Upstream office building looks, check out this video which we made last year:

Sadly, you won’t see our subterranean office itself, but what a nice building, huh?

But they’ve got it spot on with this new viral video for their SSD drives:

This is currently top of Reddit and is likely to be doing the rounds for a good while yet. Just goes to show that social networking people aren’t entirely against big brands as long as they approach viral advertising in the right way!

Looks like my role on this blog is slowly being more clearly defined – I get the fun job of posting about updates and prototypic versions of software we find ourselves enjoying here at Upstream. I’ll leave the higher-brow stuff for Alex.

Ubiquity, a unique, experimental and potentially groundbreaking extension for Mozilla Firefox, has been available for around 6 months now, so it’s not exactly a new concept. However, as part of the Mozilla Labs project, it’s not exactly well-known to those who don’t often delve into the development side of things.

The concept of the early alphas blew me away entirely but I had some problems getting it running properly on Firefox. I re-downloaded the latest version about a month back and have been playing around with it, and have found that it is quickly becoming integral to my daily surfing habits.

So, what does it do? Well, in the words of Mozilla Labs, it aims to “connect the web with language”. In real terms, it’s a command-based interface that helps you create user-generated mash-ups in seconds with simple, customisable, and extensible contextual commands. Say I want to search Flickr for pictures of the newest Asus Eee PC, the Eee 1000HE. Usually I’d have to go to Flickr (via typing the address into the address bar or selecting a bookmark), click in the Flickr search field, type “Eee 1000HE”, and press enter.

Surely in this day and age, we should be able to do something this simple – searching a website – without having to go through all the boring bits of actually going to the site and searching. Well, now we can. All I have to do here is press the Ubuiqity shortcut key – CTRL+SPACE by default – and type flickr 1000he. That’s it. The images appear within Ubiquity. If I press enter it takes me straight to the search results on Flickr, or I can click on one of the thumbnails to go straight to that photo’s page.

Bear in mind that this is just a very, very basic way to use Ubiquity – the real magic is in the way it generates the content that you need, and puts it wherever you want. Ubiquity is still very alpha, so this is just the tip of the iceberg compared to what this thing will eventually be able to do, but the way I can just throw my own mash-ups into email messages is so much simpler – not to mention quicker and more efficient – than going through the (now seemingly arduous) task of attaching files. I can send interesting pages to friends in a single command; I can update my Facebook status or Twitter without having to visit those sites; I can add appointments to my Google Calendar in a second, speaking to Ubiquity like I would do to a human being; I can translate foreign language websites in a completely instant, ad-hoc way… I’ve never felt so connected to something I use every day. The best thing is that people are constantly creating and releasing their own commands for sites and APIs not yet supported by Ubiquity, and you can really see how the community has embraced the concept of Ubiquity and the power it gives your browsing experience.

There have been launcher-type applications before (perhaps most famously Mac OSX’s built-in Spotlight), allowing people to press a shortcut key, type a short command and have the computer run a particular program or script; but I have never seen one as far-reaching and extensible, nor one that understands contextual commands and uses open APIs to perform such a potentially wide array of tasks.

The best way to explain Ubiquity properly is to see it in action – here’s Aza Raskin, currently Head of User Experience at Mozilla Labs, giving a brief overview of some of the things Ubiquity can do.

Warning: may revolutionise internet.

Well, Robert Kahn co-invented the Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol, which allow systems to send sizeable chunks of information to each other. This is absolutely central to the idea of a “web” of computers working together. First registered in 1974, the protocol is still used extensively on the internet today, for email, web browsing and FTP. Vint Cerf is now Google’s “Chief Internet Evangelist” and, along with Kahn, was responsible for TCP/IP. Both of these two are pretty strong candidates for the title “father of the internet”.

As an interesting sidenote, the IP system that we use at the moment only allows for 4.2 billion IP addresses. With the huge growth in the number of internet users, we are running out of IP addresses. Cerf is leading the charge to switch to a new Internet Protocol (IPv6) which should be commonly adopted in the next two years.

Before Kahn and Cerf, there was Paul Baran, who developed packet-switched networks. Packet Switching allows information to be sent in small chunks, without the need for a dedicated route to be predetermined (absoutely central to the internet we know today). The technology was applied to the US Military’s ARPANET, which is acknowledged as the precursor to the modern internet. Baran’s work laid the foundation for the TCP/IP protocols.

Being a UK SEO company, we have to mention Sir Tim Berners Lee. The World Wide Web that we are familiar with was largely shaped by his vision. The actual physical internet was in place long before Berners Lee applied the idea of hypertext transfer across the network, but the web that we know and use every day is his. Before Berners Lee, the internet had been used for the transfer of data from one computer to others, with none of the “cyberspace” we know today. His innovation lead to websites, URLs and HTML.

Are we missing anyone out? Almost certainly! This is a complicated paternity case indeed.

Last Friday Jose and I attended dConstruct 2008 in Brighton, an annual conference aimed at those “designing and building the latest generation of social web applications”.

Held at the Brighton Dome, there were hundreds of people in attendance, representing companies and web startups from all over the world; and in terms of insight into the increasingly social nature of the web, the conference was a tremendously informative and constructive way to spend a Friday!

Amongst the speakers on the day were Daniel Burka (creative designer at Digg and co-founder of budding social network Pownce), Matt Jones and Matt Bidulph (the co-founders of Dopplr, a social network for ‘intelligent travellers’, Steven Johnson (co-creator of FEED, plastic.com, and most recently, the particularly interesting ‘hyperlocal media site’, outside.in), Tantek Çelik (ex Chief Technologist at Technorati), as well as several other experts in the rapidly-growing field of a phrase we heard all too many times during the day: the social web.

Some of the more interesting revelations during the day for us included the concept of microformats, a simple, open data format built upon the web standards, which (amongst many other uses) combine with widely-adopted web standards to help create a ’semantic web’. One example of a useful bonus of microformats would be an address listing on a web page – if marked up as such, you can find this address on one of the popular mapping sites in a single click, rather than having to copy-paste and bring it up on a separate site.

outside.in was a particularly interesting idea for me – making the web more geographical. Since everything else we do in life is centred on where we are, it stands to reason that the internet should become more like this as it evolves. Whilst it’s still in its relatively early stages of development, I definitely recommend checking out the site and seeing how it works – it’s far too intricate to go into any level of detail here!

Finishing off proceedings was an extremely interesting talk on ‘the system of the world’ from acclaimed web developer (and deep thinker, clearly) Jeremy Keith, who spoke mainly about certain patterns found in nature and how they relate to social interactivity, the ‘wisdom of crowds’, and how today’s web developers can encompass these concepts in design and functionality. At least… that’s what I got out of it.

While Jose and I felt very much out-nerded by an entire auditorium of people clutching Macbooks and iPhones (we made do with an Eee PC and an N95), there was certainly a lot to take in; and there was plenty of transferable knowledge for us to work into our site designs, web apps, and overall understanding of social bookmarking and networking sites.

All in all, an extremely interesting day, with plenty to remember, and plenty to have forgotten thanks to the constant deluge of information… thankfully dConstruct have been kind enough to deliver all the sessions thanks to the magic of podcasting – take a look if you’re that way inclined, or perhaps if you’ve just got a few hours to burn!

Check out the dConstruct08 group on Flickr for photos of the event!

Google’s success is often attributed to continual innovation and the allocation of huge resources to new projects and Chrome is no different. While the version to be released tomorrow is just a Beta, don’t expect there to be many flaws. Using both human testing and their tremendous network of datacenters, Google’s engineers are confident that the browser is fully compatible with all major websites and the vast majority of less-visited locations too.

Google are open about having borrowed from Firefox and have kept the spirit alive by making Chrome open source. There is an interesting interview with Mozilla head honcho John Lilly here where Lilly says that Mozilla does not feel too threatened by Google (who, of course, support Mozilla financially) and that another browser on the market will not have any negative effect on the Mozilla project.

Ultimately, it is unlikely that Chrome will throw a fork in the road of internet browsing in the way that Firefox did a couple of years ago, but it is highly likely that Google’s own browser will be shiny, sleek and impressive. And less used than Internet Explorer ]]> http://www.upstreamconnections.com/blog/2008/09/02/firefox-today-chrome-tomorrow/feed/ 1