23 Musings

The BBC have launched their much blogged about, widget based, drag & drop homepage this week.

I gave it a once over while still in beta and my opinion hasn't changed. I love it!

It's a fantastic design job and so easy to use. It's obviously had a usability agency all over it to ensure it meets the needs of as many users as possible too.

Oh dear, I keep seeing stories like this warning of the inherent security risks in web 2.0 sites.

Yes, Facebook etc can be used to launch attacks or lure unsuspecting users to pages which contain malicious code but the stories I'm seeing keep talking about companies being put off implementing their own web 2.0 features by this.

Don't let it put you off; architect it properly, monitor it and input to the conversation so you know whats going on and you should keep abreast of any issues.

If you're planning another Facebook though then maybe try putting security at the heart of it ;-)

Hat tip to Joe Buhler (who's excellent blog is here) for the heads up about this excellent article on Travel 2.0 from Booz, Allen & Hamilton.

It gets straight to the point of the matter by identifying that travel providers need to adapt to give their users a personalised buying experience that gives all the reassurance of speaking face to face with a travel agent while at the same time securing the best revenues for inventory. The ability to size up a website visitor and instantly offer them a tailored experience which meets their needs and offers them products they will be attracted to is seen as a kind of holy grail in the e-commerce world. Travel could be the industry to get that right as most companies have a wealth of data and understanding of their consumers which can be used to segment and target their offering more effectively. CRM based e-commerce is the way forwards (in my opinion), have a relationship with your visitors and let them know that so they feel special (and more inclined to buy with you).

A tough task, but the article goes on to rightly hint that the technology is now in place to allow this.

Another salient point from the article is that the large players operate pretty much on price alone with very little to differentiate them otherwise. Consumers are getting pickier now and this kind of approach won't work for much longer unless you have the user experience to match.

In my opinion the only thing holding the industry back from breaking this new customer focused way of selling is a lack of foresight and a nervousness which prevents them going the extra mile to offer the all out personalised, segmented buying experience. It won't be long though until someone breaks the mould and comes up with something truly engaging which also ticks all the commercial boxes.

Throw in semantic technologies and you will have a ground breaking web experience to offer...

Great article! Go give it a read!

Oh, please tell me this isn't a real blog post from the BBC discussing how you should say Web 2.0...

It is? My, some people have far too much time on their hands... However, if language interests you at all then this may actually be of interest.

Hat tip to Josh at Read Write Web for his write up regarding this link that I'd never come across before. It's a demo of an analytics tool aimed at web 2.0 and AJAX websites.

With the death of the page view as the all important metric of the analyst there has appeared a need to be able to measure users engagement with a website rather than just how many pages they viewed.

The rise of AJAX has been a major player in this with whole websites sometimes being a single screen which makes many calls to databases and servers in order to refresh itself multiple times in a users visit. Thus devaluing the page view completely.

The demo shows a novel way to gauge a users engagement by measuring in time how long segments of the page stay in the browser viewing pane. This isn't perfect by a long way but it's a sign of how analytics tools will have to work in the future as websites get more difficult to measure and marketeers and management get more demanding in their hunt for data to help understand their users.

Also really interesting is the demo of a tool to measure users engagement with a banner advert. I can't wait till metrics like this exist as they may help marketers see that throwing money into display advertising is not the way forward anymore.

What I'd really like to see is mouse interaction data on pages as well. It surely is possible to collect the data on the X and Y coordinates and it's a good hint as to what area of the screen a user is actually focused on (users tend to hover the mouse over what interests them). It's great to know that the item you're interested in is within view but how do you know that users are actually looking at it? Short of installing eyetracking as defacto in PC's we may never answer questions like that!

Most interesting as ever as Trendsspotting goes out to ask some of the web's bloggers, influencers and experts to name their upcoming trends of 2008.

Surprised to see no mention of knowledge exchange, I (personally) think that with the rise of the knowledge worker the next logical step is a rise in services that enable and enhance the share of knowledge and intellectual resources, perhaps the birth of the oft mused about (real) knowledge networks... Also very surprised only one person mentioned semantic web as 'in' for 2008...

Yes it's an awful term (web 2.0) but this is quite interesting from Travelocity CTO Barry Vandevier as they are one of the more forward thinking online travel agents.

Transcript here.

Video interview here.

Great post from Jakob Nielsen on the dangers of going web 2.0 crazy from a usability point of view!

Highly poingant as we're implementing a lot of AJAX at the moment. Overkill is deadly and could trash your conversion rate. Keep it minimal, useful, effective (AJAX is great for some things, pointless for others), simple, usable and give clear instructions where needed.

I agree with his pitch on user generated content as well. Pointless if your audience/customers aren't ready for it or if you have nothing interesting for them to talk about (that said, great in an emotive environment such as online travel if used wisely).

The BBC have released a beta of their homepage featuring Netvibe/Google'esque personal homepage features and loads of AJAX.

I like it. Very clean, well laid out, intuitive to navigate, the AJAX drag and drop is really easy to use. It's very web 2.0 in looks though and they may have taken that style a little too far but it is a vast improvement and looks extremely usable. Good job BBC!

Sometimes it's good to sit back and have a laugh at the industry you are in. This one made me chuckle!

A great presentation from Elliot Jay Stocks at the Future of Web Design the other day:

Travelocity has launched their latest tool to help customers plan their perfect holiday. The latest addition (I blogged about one of their others here) to the stable of user friendly trip planning tools is the Road Trip Wizard.


The Road Trip Wizard is aimed at users seeking a way to build up a road trip itinerary online. It's much closer to the kind of trip planning tools I've always thought were the next logical step for the online travel arena (more on that in a post coming soon). It's really flexible, allows multi destination plans to be made and is a definite move away from the normal route of having to specify dates and destinations before getting any results (or even content in some cases) back from the website your querying. This is a very good thing! It's actually fairly unintuitive for users to be asked such specifics when they first hit a website. Imagine the scenario of the travel agents, never are the first questions you're asked 'what date, how long, where, how many people', it's more likely to be 'what kind of holiday, what kind of weather, what kind of experience' this is where we need to get to in online.

The wizard allows you to select a starting point and then search around it for places to stay and things to do (and you can of course book them), then you can select a next point for your journey and do the same again. It will then plot a route on a map and warn you if it thinks you're driving too far in a day etc. You can specify more details about yourself and the party, even down to the reason for the trip, and it gets even more clever based on the personas you've created. The intelligent engine behind the wizard scours a database of over 5 million points of interest making it extremely powerful.

At the end of it all you have a very detailed plan of where to stay, what to do and the driving directions to get you from point to point.

The Road Trip Wizard is a piece of technology created by a company called LeisureLogix, Travelocity is the first to launch an application using the platform. There are obvious aplications for UK tour operators as well, it could quite nicely be applied to the (currently very popular) flydrive holidays that are often sold to the east and west coast U.S. This would allow a UK tour operator to sell a flight into Orlando for instance and then allow a user to book a car and a range of hotels across the country, flying back via a west coast airport such as San Francisco. Integrating this technology with a dynamic packaging engine would be incredibly powerful! I'd also like to see it ported over to cover South Africa as well, it would be a great way to plan a Garden Route road trip. Tools like this are a definite step in the right direction for online travel.

I got a bit confused when I hit the Expedia homepage this morning...

I don't visit Expedia very often, I usually find better prices elsewhere and book my flights on industry rates so don't find a great deal of use for the online travel agent. However, it is a great site and one which all in online travel could learn something from. They merchandise products like no-one else and have some great usability features that make it easy to find good prices and products.

Over a year ago they built the Inspirator, a tool which allowed users a more human friendly way to get some inspiration into their holiday research process. It allowed users to choose two themes (eg. romantic, beaches, nightlife) and then choose a desired type of weather (warm, hot or 'I don't mind) and then how far they want to fly and where from. The Inspirator then presents the user with some information on matching destinations along with some relevant offers. It's not the most inspiring piece of functionality and anyone with a good command of a Google search will find they can research better there, but for the majority of web users it serves a good purpose.

Now, Expedia have launched another take on this kind of guided navigation/research, the Inspiroscope. The Inspiroscope is similar but it's basically a homage to Web 2.0, travel style. This is essentially a tag cloud presented in Flash format which users can click on a word from and be presented with five matching destinations. It works, it looks quite nice and again, for someone not proficient in using the internet or really inexperienced at travel it's probably fine. But for anyone more experienced it's really limiting! Google presents far better results if you have any skill in web searching at all, or maybe try Tripadvisor...

Maybe I'm being a little harsh, theses types of functionality serve a purpose for Expedia. They're more engaging than a normal availability search, provide insight into destinations and are a value add for users. They also provide opportunities to build the brand and engage users while acquiring new CRM opportunities. So it's not all bad!

They could be done better though! For example, merge this functionality with Opodo's Escape Map and you make it even more engaging, allow users to explore as well as guiding them and you will engage them further. Link the results to Google Earth to allow users to view the area more closely. Allow users to add in restrictions on price & dates and they become much more valuable. Integrate hotel ratings and allow the process to proceed beyond the destinations to the selection of a property and you will really turn these tools into conversion enhancers (rather than just nice features).

As an aside, it's been brought to my attention that Expedia and Opodo have left some of this functionality rather open. Expedia have left access open to an XML file which contains all the tag words in their Inspiroscope and also contains the number of votes for each word. Great if you want to get an idea of how to tag your own content... Opodo meanwhile have left a backdoor in their Escape Map which allows users to pass a query string which will return XML data of the offers that can be displayed on the map. Great for anybody wanting to scrape a load of offers from their site (or compare prices)...

Edit: To link to Alex Bainbridge's original article...

Mark Zuckerberg has announced a new rewards system for Facebook developers. They are offering up to $250,000 for new, innovative apps built on the Facebook platform. There's been a huge rush to build apps resulting in over 4,000 currently (a lot of which are less than impressive), this should see the hype continue in the developer community and maybe tease out some more valuable applications. Anyone can submit their app and they'll be judged as to their worth with some receiving a cash injection.

In other Facebook news, they've announced that they're brand of JavaScript, the catchily named Facebook Javascript (FBJS), is now out of beta and into version 1.0. This should give developers more hooks into the platform and enable creation of seamless 'web 2.0' style applications to embed into users profiles.

So now developers have more tools at hand to try to win a reward for their apps. How long till the platform hits 10,000 apps? I reckon about three months at this rate!

This study has been released showing the amount invested in Web 2.0 properties this year so far.

Here's some highlights via E-Consultancy:

• $464.4m was invested into 101 Web 2.0 deals in the six months, with $357m (£179m) going into 67 US deals, a similar figure to the same period in 2006.
• $52m (£26m) was invested in 20 European Web 2.0 deals, the same number of deals as for the whole of last year.
• The UK accounted for seven of the European deals and an investment of $22m (£11m). In 2006, five Web 2.0 deals involved UK companies, worth a total of $23.4m (£11.9m).
• Investment in French companies has also increased, with five deals worth $16m (£8m) so far this year. Last year a total of $39m (£20m) was invested in France.
• Investment in China seems to have dropped slightly, just nine Web 2.0 deals, worth a total of $41m (£20.5m) down from 12 deals during the same time last year.
  

The one question that remains to be asked is quite how they categorise these deals as Web 2.0? On investigation quite a few don't share any of the common web 2.0 criteria. Also, if this is Web 2.0 deals, what about VC deals with other web apps and companies? I'm sure the figures for that would bump this up to a much higher amount of investment than last year. Maybe it's time to stop segregating the web into 1.0 and 2.0. At the end of the day it's all web based sites, services and applications. Applying a label of 2.0 to some of them may end up being detrimental to the rest or at the very least confusing to the VC's who don't really understand the technical ramifications.

All your favourite web 2.0 apps flashing before your eyes...

Tired of having to code an API to get a Google map into your web page? Well now you don't have to (at least for a basic map).

Google have announced the release of the widely anticipated embed feature for their maps tool. It's really easy to use and means anyone with a business can now put a location map on their site. Here's my example below of the places I stayed in Cuba earlier this year, took a whole 5 minutes to create and embed.

Is quite a rare thing. Usually the innovations that we see in travel websites is fairly conservative and not really pushing the boundaries of what is possible online. Take Opodo's new EscapeMap^TM for instance, while extremely useful it's hardly groundbreaking and far more sophisticated mash-ups have been produced for other industries by kids working on their home PC's.

Online travel is such a massive vertical on the web that it always amazes me that we're not at the cutting edge of web production and innovation. From a booking point of view of course we are fairly sophisticated, and yes travel companies are early adopters of Web 2.0 and social networking ideas, but they rarely deliver all that much value and are often just to prove they can do it (basically gratuitous).

However, STA Travel are storming ahead with their new set of widgets which are an excellent addition to their really rather good website. The widgets are available for PC, Mac dashboard, Google desktop and even Facebook. And they're really useful and compelling little tools that fit with their target demographic very well.

Good work STA Travel! Now come on all you tour operators and online travel agents, let's see something a little more innovative than a Google Earth layer!

There's a lot of talk about Web 3.0 and what exactly that may mean for the online industry. Here's a take on it from Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Succinct and to the point, it gets my vote. Although he has completely missed the idea of semantic web out which has got to be one of the concepts that leads the way as we move to Web 3.0.

Food for thought though; but I still stick to my adage that we're actually only in Web 1.1 at the moment and the next evolution will still only be scratching the surface of whats possible!

The Guardian has published an interesting list and insight into what they pitch as the top ten dot coms to watch. They're all great companies who've been included and I'd find it hard to disagree with any of them being featured although there are some other start-ups that deserve to be featured too. So maybe a top ten is a bit short and a top twenty would have been better to include the other rising stars.

The list is as follows:

1. Dopplr
   Social networking for frequent travellers.
   
   
2. Extate
   Intelligent search of property websites.
   
   
3. Garlik
   Online identity management.
   
   
4. MindCandy
   Alternate reality gaming.
   
   
5. Moo
   Print on demand: cards, notes and stickers.
   
   
6. OnOneMap
   Map-based property search.
   
   
7. Touch Local
   Local directory services.
   
   
8. Trusted Places
   User-created local information.
   
   
9. Zopa
   Peer to peer lending.
   
   
10. Zubka
    Recruitment 2.0.