What will Twitter do to Web Design?

For many people, Social Media (particularly Twitter and Facebook) is the way they find lots of new and interesting sites and experiences on the Internet. This can be friends posting links to interesting info, celebrities promoting sites, columnists pushing up their readership numbers or increasingly businesses using SM to promote their goods and services. 
 
Many ways now exist for websites to generate Twitter or Facebook links directly from their pages. This enables the public to quickly and easily share their discoveries without faffing around with link shorteners and separate SM logins etc. This can generate significant traffic and hopefully business for websites as they are effectively co-opting their readers into being free Publicity and Marketing agents for them. 
 
So what does this mean for webdesign? 
 
When I first started in the Internet business, web sites had to be designed to suit the lowest common denominator of viewer. This meant 640*480 screens 16000 (or even 256) colours and designs that could be transmitted over a 9.6kbit/s phone connection. Now websites can be stuffed with millions of colours, huge screen resolutions flash animation and need Megabit sized broadband speeds to download acceptably. 
 
This, of course, assumes everyone is sitting in front of a high spec, large screen PC able to run all this stuff when in fact many people will be viewing sites via iPhones, Blackberries other smartphones or iPads each with their own capabilities and limitations. Anyone trying to view websites on a tiny Blackberry screen using GPRS will understand what a limitation this imposes and what a struggle it can be. 
 
This represents both a challenge and an opportunity for web designers. They need to use the opportunity of having viewers promote content via SM to increase their readership, but also recognize the audience out there using mobile devices and offer lighter, simpler and smaller web experiences that can be used on these devices. 
 
This could be via intelligent systems which recognize these devices and deliver adapted content (the bbc site is a notable one for this) or perhaps the use of specific micro-sites able to deliver cut-down content. 
 
Either way designers will need to adapt to the changing landscape of delivery systems and networks. 
 
Those designers brought up in the first generation of web design may have a lot to teach the new mobile, SM aware Internet. 
 
Karl Meyer
www.spice.co.uk
------------------

Will Twitter split in two?

Previously I posted on how twitter can start to make money from its increasingly popular service
 
http://rand-musing.blogspot.com/2010_07_01_archive.html
 
and all those ways still apply but now it seems possible that the best way for twitter to become profitable is to divide itself into two separate businesses.
 
This might seem strange when the history of IT in general and the Internet in particular has been one of endless mergers and acquisitions resulting in gigantic businesses like Microsoft, Google etc but I really think that Twitter may be an exception to this rule and for a number of reasons
 
Twitter is structurally very different from every other Social Media site around and different in its model to every other website that I can think of in that its website is largely irrelevant. If you scan through your own twitter feed you'll find that the vast majority of posts aren't coming from twitter.com they're emerging from iphones, blackberrys, literally dozens of third party applications, APIs from news providers etc etc etc.  In my own (unscientific) stream I would guess that no more than 10% of the content I read on twitter actually originates via twitter.com.
 
Myself, if I'm watching The Apprentice or Xfactor (under protest in the later case I hasten to add) I'll be reading twitter not on my laptop but on my blackberry and will post comments via that device simply because its easier to use and doesn't burn my lap in the process!
 
The key conclusion from this is that Twitter(ing) the service is much much more popular than twitter.com the website and so the two can, and should, be considered separately.
 
If you then start to look at revenue opportunities it becomes clear that some of the existing revenue plans that have emerged within twitter are therefore not likely to produce the expected returns.
 
Promoted trending topics will only be seen by around 10% of twitter users and therefore could be seen are being worth only 10% of what they would based on twitter user numbers  certainly the click-through numbers will be dramatically lower - even less than 10% of expected if the .com site users are the less active portion of the twitter membership.
 
Any site based advertising will therefore be viewed by a smaller and potentially less active sub set of the whole membership making it much less attractive (or lucrative).
 
On the other hand in service revenues could be extremely attractive - either paid for insertions (tricky to square with the audience), or pay per view subscriptions (an area I think has lots of legs).
 
Twitter, the service provider, could also offer its services into closed user groups (either Business to Business or Intra Company) to provide rapid messaging delivery inside a company.  This could provide a very interesting revenue stream and earn cash to fund future developments.
 
Based in this I would expect to see some announcements regarding  Twitter's business structure very soon..
 
Karl Meyer
www.SPICE.co.uk

Why Car Manufacturer Websites are rubbish

Having just been through the hell that is buying a new car I feel compelled to vent my frustration at their useless websites.
 
If you haven't been to one recently then I suggest giving them a go - they are all the same so pick anyone you fancy.  But first get a large mug of tea and a few valium ready first.
 
The biggest gripe is their obsession with using flashy flash animations to do virtually everything. The amount of time spent watching a little circular "loading" icon going round and round and round is just endless.  You go on their home page and unlike every other web site around which loads pretty instantly (even on a 500kbit/s 'broadband') they sit there loading endless widgets and slidey animations and active controls for this that and the other.  The processing power to advertise a Fiesta must be 20 times that required to launch a shuttle.
 
And it doesn't end with the home page.  Every separate vehicle has its own animation sequence (or three) with revolving cars, zoomy in and out pictures of the interior and the ability to paint each car in any of the colours available.  Why this can't be done with a range of static image galleries and some fancy navigation I don't know.
 
Then once you've done all this you can go to the "configurator" where you can add options to your vehicle and get a price.  Now forget tick boxes or radio buttons - this has to be done with custom animations and graphics. 
 
Not to mention huge abuse of the mouse-over function which makes trying to do any of this virtually impossible if your mousepad is a bit oversensitive  (as an aside http://www.Royalmail.com is another big villian in the mouseover abuse stakes and as I use that site daily I know!)
 
I realise that car firms spend millions on fancy brochures and TV ads but trying to replicate these experiences on the Internet simply isn't the way that its done and they need to consider the Internet to be a separate distinctive media.
 
For any examples of the villany try  www.citroen.co.uk  www.ford.co.uk  as some of the worst of the bunch
 
Karl Meyer
Associate ww.Spice.co.uk