Cool New Marketing Technologies: Caught and Served

Archive for August, 2010

Is a mobile app right for my content?

By Steve Gogolak

We recently had an excited discussion on our corporate Yammer feed about mobile apps and what sort of content was appropriate for a custom app vs a mobile-optimized website. The conversation was sparked by our UX guru, Brian Yoder who posted an article from Wired Magazine titled “The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet.”

iPhone App Store Logo

I jumped on that idea right away because I see the line between apps and sites as pretty clear cut, noting that the article is “true, but i’m not sure that browser-based stuff is ‘dead’ completely.  It seems like people are going to apps for specific, recurring tasks while the “web” is being used more for seeking out information. there is also something scary about moving from an uber-compatible web to a lot of different, incompatible device platforms.” Read This Post

Google Realtime – Google Updates

By Greg Jones

The Real time web has recently taken a giant leap forward. Before, if you wanted to find breaking news you had to subscribe to the feeds you thought would bring you that news. Now, Google has introduced real time search right in their search engine.

This allows your search query about earthquakes to bring up the Wikipedia entry first when using the default search, but by switching to “Updates” on the left-hand side bar, it pulls in the most recent tweets, status updates, blog posts, etc on the query. This allows a user to search more intelligently on a query, and provides individuals as well as companies to keep up with what the entire web is talking about at that moment in time.

Here is a video explaining Google Realtime:

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Uh-oh, its Lorem Ipsum

By Brian Yoder

“Lorem Ipsum.” Seeing those two words in the beginning of any copy block on a design comp, wireframe or prototype means only one thing:

Don’t need to read anything — the content for this project hasn’t been figured out yet.

But the reality is that content is the foundational piece of any interactive experience. Content is the driving factor on why individuals use the Internet: to find relevant, informative and rewarding information.

So are we doing a disservice by putting in ambiguous content placeholders when designing UX deliverables for any experience?

The answer: For 95% of the time, yes. So here are some tips to help define what the content should be:

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