By adopting these four points, you can effectively compare & contrast any online destination in an effort to make sound judgments on user experience.

Great website usability is much more than pretty page graphics. As you’re developing your online presence, be it a website or some sort of advanced engineering application, understanding what positively affects the user experience will pay dividends to your company as well as for your users.

In order to consider the most important factors, there are 4 points you’ll want to review with whatever you are creating. The effective analysis of these 4 distinct areas should allow you to pit what you are building with that of your competition. Even if your competition fails to add up to what you’re hoping to build, simply knowing where you need to focus can mean the difference between failure and success.

First up: Branding. If you’re not effectively expressing who you are, and the company’s primary message, you might fail directly out of the gate. The user’s experience will need to be memorable and engaging, or else you risk losing their attention span in a massive sea of sameness. read more

Unlike Squarespace who was very upfront regarding how much cash they were able to raise from investors, the micro blogging company is being rather quiet regarding the size of their latest investment.

Tumblr has raised a “very big and competitive” round of financing from top Silicon Valley VC firm Sequoia Capital, we’ve learned. [...]

The NYC-based blogging startup’s founder David Karp and president John Maloney went out to the Valley looking for money last month, and it sounds like they came back winners. (Business Insider)

Despite lacking a strong business model (outside of premium themes and listings that is), Tumblr’s interest from investors is probably due to the micro blogging site’s skyrocketing rise (at the expense of Typepad nonetheless).

The company also boasts a high retention rate for users (up to 80%), with the site is quickly gaining the attention of celebrities, one who (more or less) ditched Twitter and asked his followers to embrace Tumblr instead.

Tumblr thus far has declined to publicly disclose the size of the investment (although we will update the post if we hear any figures), although whatever the figure it should be enough to keep the lights on long enough for the company to figure out a way to become profitable in the not so distant future.

Twitter is moving quite fast this week, On Thursday morning we reported that Ping Integration was coming to the social network and later than afternoon they were already showing off the new feature which brings iTunes song previews to Twitter.com.

The new video demonstration of the integration shows how Twitter can now be used as a forum for music discovery.

Unfortunately the video demo is more of an ad than an actual product demonstration of the Ping, Twitter relationship. Although the sleek design and what appears to be an easy to navigate interface shows that Twitter is taking the partnership serious. read more

Following the footsteps of WP.com (which is owned by Automattic), it looks like WordPress core developers will be releasing version 3.1 which will allow self hosted fans everywhere to create mini tumblr blogs without having to purchase (or download) a custom theme.

The current list of post formats is on the Codex page: http://codex.wordpress.org/Post_Formats.

aside – Typically styled without a title. Similar to a Facebook status update.
chat – A chat transcript.
gallery – A gallery of images.
link – A link to another site.
image – A single image.
quote – A quotation.
status – A short status update, usually limited to 140 characters. Similar to a Twitter status update.
video – A single video.

There has been suggestion of an “audio” format, which makes sense given the other multimedia posts. Another one recently suggested to me was a “code” format, which I could get behind. (WordPress Development Updates)

Core developers are scheduled to release version 3.1 of WordPress by December of 2010, although it is probably safe to assume that they will release the latest version before the holidays (as very few people enjoy working over the break). read more

It looks like Ping (a music social network from Apple) has a new best friend, as Twitter has just announced that Ping users (not to be confused with Ping.fm or Ping.com) can now connect their accounts with the micro blogging social network.

Starting today Ping, iTunes’ new social network for music, and Twitter are making it even easier for people to share music discoveries with their friends by putting Ping activity, song previews and links to purchase and download music from the iTunes Store right in their Tweets on Twitter.com. [...]

Once you’ve linked the accounts, whenever you Post, Like, Review, or tell your friends why you purchased a song or album on Ping, this activity will also be tweeted to your Twitter followers – complete with playable song previews and links to purchase and download music from iTunes. (Official Twitter Blog)

Users who connect their Twitter accounts to Ping will be able to find Twitter friends (or rather people they follow) who also use Ping, which should help make the service easier for new comers to adopt (as very few people enjoy using social networks without their friends).

This partnership is obviously a big win for Apple, as the company previously tried (and failed) to establish a similar relationship with Facebook.

Although its still unclear whether Apple will make a second attempt to pursue a similar relationship with Facebook, we may see the music giant reach out to other social networks in the future (with the exception of Google Me of course).

Farmville might be the most played game on Facebook with 16 million daily users, but some visitors might be interested to know that the 2nd most popular application isn’t a popular game or gift sending app, it’s Microsoft’s Windows Live Messenger Facebook application.

ReadWriteWeb reports that 9 million Live Messenger users are currently logging into Facebook and then chatting to their friends through the application, rather than using Facebook’s own chat application.

The application is a smart move for Microsoft who may be able to etch out a name for themselves by providing the type of chat functions users fail to love on Facebook.  It could be a great way for Microsoft to introduce their own users to Facebook, while possibly rolling out new features that could provide a further social network reach for the company. read more

After the social networking giant unveiled Facebook Places for iPhone and iPod Touch users, it looks like Blackberry fans will now be able to utilize the social location feature without having to purchase an iOS device.

With that being said, I’m pleased to announce that Facebook Places is now available on BlackBerry smartphones. The final release of Facebook for BlackBerry smartphones v1.9 will be available for download in BlackBerry App World™ (North America only) within the next 24 hours!

Facebook Places uses cell tower triangulation and the GPS technology on your BlackBerry smartphone to find places of interest close to your location. You can view the location of a Facebook Place on a map to see exactly where it is and check out the surrounding area. You can also get directions to and from a Facebook Place simply by clicking on the map image, which will seamlessly launch the BlackBerry® Maps application. (Inside Blackberry)

Unlike the Facebook iOS and Android Apps, Facebook for Blackberry is maintained by Research In Motion (aka RIM) and not the social networking giant (who like Twitter doesn’t devote corporate resources to the device).

Unfortunately there still isn’t any word on when RIM will expand the feature beyond the continental borders of America, although that may have more to do with Facebook beta testing in Europe than RIM itself.

While Facebook Places is a welcome addition to the Blackberry smartphone, hopefully the company will be able to add a few additional features like Facebook Deals in the near future (the latter which is available to iOS users).

It’s a good time to be Mark Zuckerberg, sure The Social Network made fun of him, but director David Fincher isn’t controlling 23% of all display ad impressions on the internet now is he?

Internet reporting firm ComScore provided that staggering number this week, while adding that Facebook has provided advertisers during the last quarter with more than 297 billion display ad impressions.

The 23.1% share is up from 9.2% during the same quarter one year prior and the company’s 16.2% share during the last quarter.

read more

It’s very much a cliché, same as the old saying ‘Content Is King’, but unfortunately, they still ring very true in the ears of SEO gurus.

When you write online, there is more to think about than just the words on the page. Whether you like it or not, people get bored, and they get bored quickly. With the instant-gratification world we now live in, people (especially internet users) don’t have the patience to give anything a chance without some visual stimulation.

With the rise of the finger-fast technology that supports all super-dooper games, images and other visually appealing programs, it is easy to see why people need flashing images and pretty fonts to grab their attention; anything less than this is not worth their time.

The success of many blogs lies in how they present themselves. First impressions are everything (another cliché I know) and it is worthwhile thinking about how people perceive your blog before they add another notch on your bounce rate statistic. How colorful is it? What is the navigation like? And most importantly, what images can they look at?

In some respects, images are what draw anybody to anything. Visual appeal should not be underestimated, and the different images used attract a variety of audiences; but how does this work?

Well firstly, let’s establish what type of images there are… read more