bits·done

Making PicFog safer for work Just think about the proposition:...

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 16:13:28 +0000

Making PicFog safer for work

Just think about the proposition: PicFog shows pictures from twitter as they’re posted. Anything smells funny? Sure it does, if you have more than two months of internet experience. If we show every single picture from twitter, some of the pictures will be very likely inappropriate, disturbing, disgusting or just not pleasing to the eye.

What does it mean in practice?

In practice, it means that roughly a minute after you open up the site in the live flow mode, you will see something ugly. I can almost guarantee.

On the other hand, if you’re searching for a keyword or location, you’re getting what you’re searching for - if you’re searching for nice and pretty things, you’ll get nice and pretty results.

But the issue is, whenever you want to start to picfog for nice and pretty things, you first have to type in PicFog.com - which shows all the pictures from twitter as they’re uploaded. After a minute: bang, a genital. Not nice, not pretty.

So here’s the solution to make PicFog a workplace-friendlier site.

From now on, whenever someone first visits picfog.com, they’ll be welcomed with this screen. Two options - if you don’t mind seeing ugly pictures for the experience of keeping your finger on the pulse of the universe, you can do that. But if you are a bit fainter-hearted, you have the option to see just the search box - and get results for exactly what you’re searching for, without the occasional cock on your screen.

Photo

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 10:13:50 +0000

lijzer: So I was picfogging again, checking out Santiago and...

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 13:34:46 +0000

lijzer:

So I was picfogging again, checking out Santiago and Chile in general… no fun :( I love this website though.

jswtf: This is a fun one with type coercion. It comes from John...

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 00:38:04 +0000

jswtf:

This is a fun one with type coercion. It comes from John Resig’s explanation here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1154338

Better location search on PicFog From now on, you can search for...

Sat, 27 Feb 2010 17:27:00 +0000

Better location search on PicFog

From now on, you can search for location and keyword at the same time. For example you can see what are cabs like in New York at the moment (snowy at the moment). Or you can have a look at the news in London. To boarden the search, you can change the radius or remove the keyword (or the location) criterium by clicking at the little x next to it.

szajmon: tumblr edit post bookmarklet

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 22:17:16 +0000

szajmon: tumblr edit post bookmarklet:

javascript:window.open(‘http://www.tumblr.com/edit/’ + (document.location + ”).split(‘/’)[4] + ‘?redirect_to=/dashboard’);

EDIT TUMBLR POST « drag this link to your bookmark bar

Effects of a breaking news event on PicFog follower numbers

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 20:03:23 +0000

Effects of a breaking news event on PicFog follower numbers

ustwo: inkstrumental™ is now within touching distance. The...

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 15:31:53 +0000

ustwo:

inkstrumental™ is now within touching distance. The studio that brought you PositionApp™ now brings you the ultimate contradiction. Watch the inkstrumental™ Trailer here and follow inkstrumental™ twitter here for all the news that you’d ever never want to use.

Kublax goes into administration

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 11:52:29 +0000

“Dear Kublax Customer

It is with great regret that we announce the closure of our service as we have been forced to take the business into administration. Over the course of the last 6 months we have been trying hard to raise funding which would have allowed us to launch our enhanced new product and develop our offering further. Unfortunately we now have to admit defeat.

We are sorry that we have not been able to repay your trust in Kublax and particularly disappointed not to be able to launch the new enhanced version of the service which was being shaped to a very large extent by your Feedback on the current service.

Kublax’s partner, Yodlee, will be deleting all user data, including online banking details from its servers. Once deleted no further information will be gathered and stored for Kublax customers. Your transactional data will also be completely erased from our servers by close of business on Friday 19th February. We will not pass your data on to any third parties.

If you wish to contact Sridhar or I you can reach us at the following email address - kublaxenquiry@googlemail.com

Many thanks again for your support and we hope that Kublax was able to help you make slightly better sense of your finances over the last year or so.

Tom and Sridhan”

Please help yourself.

Mon, 15 Feb 2010 15:56:00 +0000

Please help yourself.

Twitpic still reigns the twitter picture landscape - is it about...

Sat, 13 Feb 2010 01:37:00 +0000

Twitpic still reigns the twitter picture landscape - is it about to change?

PicFog aggregates pictures from several different picture hosting sites - I’m trying to include the ones that deliver measurable percentage of the pictures. This chart shows data from last November to today, roughly 3.5 months, very sampled and I can’t guarantee for statistical precision. Interesting findings:

The three biggest contenders are TwitPic (2/3), TweetPhoto (1/4) and YFrog (1/9). Two thirds of the market belongs to TwitPic.
TweetPhoto used a link shortening domain pic.gd but for some reason they stopped using it towards the end of November. (It appears they still have the domain)
Beginning in mid January something made the chart very flat and consistent. I’m not sure if it’s my data or Christmas was finally over.
TwitPic still the obvious leader, but it can be a warning sign for them that during this short period they lost 4% of their market share.

As a bonus, it’s fun to see the twitter stream of @twitpic and @tweetphoto. @twitpic looked almost dead until very recently, @tweetphoto is (and has been always) crazy active.

(more than just) slideshow in PicFog

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 19:54:19 +0000

Slideshow was around in PicFog for a while, but I was never happy with it. But now, let me present you, the amazing, the fantastic, the unforgettable:

spacebar!

Just open PicFog and if you want to view high resolution pictures, one after an other, hit the spacebar. And then again. And then again. You’ll find some of the pictures amazing / beautiful / impressive, some disturbing / disgusting / boring, but if the case is the latter, just hit space again. And then again.

You can also use the spacebar when you’ve entered a search keyword (for example when you want to track what’s going on with the snow in Dallas), so you don’t have to look at the small thumbnails.

If you’re really lazy, there’s also an option to start auto slideshow - it will load new pictures for you automatically.

(via dorka)

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 22:37:59 +0000

(via dorka)

Postie.

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 15:21:00 +0000

Postie.

Postie this bag is wrong

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 16:53:48 +0000

Postie this bag is wrong

Snow (雪) on PicFog.

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 16:51:33 +0000

Snow (雪) on PicFog.

Which date format makes the most sense for you?

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 12:43:11 +0000

Which date format makes the most sense for you?

I thought long and hard how to name my little real-time image...

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 10:43:24 +0000

I thought long and hard how to name my little real-time image search service. Here’s 5 things to consider when coining a name for a service (might be oldskool, sorry, tumblr)

Should be short (5-6-7 characters preferably)
Pronunciation should be as unambiguous as possible (would you be comfortable telling your websites’ name over the phone?)
…even in foreign languages. If you can say it in English and Hungarian as well, you’re in the win.
Great if predictive magic doesn’t screw it up when typed on cellphones.
Think about your first letter. When one starts typing g into your browser, it’ll say google. When you type y, it’s going to be youtube.

Still - PicFog is a simple, short name which is relative easy to spell and tells a bit about the service, I’m getting considerable amount of search traffic for the keyword PicFrog. Did you mean PicFog?

The joys of corporate web analytics

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 10:12:30 +0000

webmuesli:

“Sit down with the owner of the top ten pages to the site and look at them. I mean really look at them and ask this question: “What the heck are we trying to do with each page?” Make sure there is a clear answer.”

Source: http://www.kaushik.net/

I’m truly sorry but I could hardly stop laughing. These advices are just so far from reality.

Just as a quick exercise I try to map out the reality that goes on and on under the name of web analytics.

It seems something like this:

1. “Sit down with the owner”

There is no owner. Full stop. I have been looking for it believe me - most of my emails were laughed at. The most helpful response I received was something like this:

There are marketing teams and activation teams and online sales teams and web developers and digital online marketing sales salad dressing makers (on a global, country and regional level) and creatives and so on. There is a huge ppt presentation slide show somewhere on the shared drive that no one ever seen (except me) about how this website looks and feels officially and what it should contain. None of the 83 slides of any of the websites says: who is responsible for it.

I tried to sit down with 3 of the above mentioned teams from which 4 said: but what do you want from me? I’m not responsible! And then they look baffled.

There is no one to sit down with. Or maybe there is: everyone.

[I carry on investigating who would be the best person to sit down with. But carry on reading. There wouldn’t be able to get much out of it at the end.]

2. “the top ten pages”

Right. A web analyst (at all of the companies I worked for) is responsible for 15-50-83 URLs that mostly contain (well in my case) about a couple of hundred sites.

All URLs represent a different reporting suite in Omniture. To find the top 10 worst performing pages I would go through 83 report suits and run the bouncing rate report and then compare them.

Do I have time for this?

Well, once I’ve done it with 10 countries.

As the home page is the most visited that lead the list in each and every country. Not a surprise.

Then the next 9 pages were the 9 mostly visited pages, no surprise again but not with extremely high bounce. And these 9s are different from week to week.

Fix it.

To find the 10 different country’s responsible person would be a month-long quest. And then telling him/her that the homepage has the highest bounce rate would that lead them to..? What conclusion would they come to? No-one can change the standard company homepage just because it has the largest traffic and obviously because of this the highest bounce rate. (Between 10% and 25% to be accurate. The homepage is the same in every country.)

Obviously it would be great to look at more countries and finding out what are the differences in bounce rates. Would the company change drastically the face of it’s online presence? Would they investigate this problem further? Well they hardly have time to die not to mention the millions of visitors who come every day. 90-80% of them still stays. To change this page 83 groups working behind these pages would be notified and 83 marketing teams with 83 ppt presentaitons in 80 languages and with 83 teams of creatives with 83000 pencils.

3. “What the heck are we trying to do with each page?”

I ask this question every day (because I read it in Avinash Kaushik’s blog and I try to be a clever web analyst.)

And now please help me. Really. The answer I get is the following:

“You are asking the right question.” Full stop. Then a confused look and: “The customer journey is leading them to the shop” and ooommm “visitors click on the main banner” and “perhaps they go shopping”.

Then lead them there and make it easy for them to shop - would be my conclusion. Again company policy rules are above us and nothing can be changed without being signed off from above. Who’s above? No one knows. We’ve never seen them. If we ask: we ask the right question.

(Honestly, I’m not native English. Is this “You are asking the right question” some sort of fob off? I don’t get it. Is this an answer?”)

True that sometimes they are able to answer the question: what is the purpose of the page. Let’s say: selling something. Then I realize there’s no downstream traffic to the shop page at all from this site. Why? Because … and then the answer again: the page is not tagged correctly. Well - how am I supposed to jump into conclusions if the data I’m looking at is not correct? Maybe in reality all of the customers went to the shop. Maybe not. (I can’t check the shop’s upstream traffic for some strange reasons.)

Getting clear answers is almost impossible even asking face to face from the right person. Being responsible for only 1 URL and optimizing one page? A holiday with cocktails. This is what it would be.

Companies like looking at whole bunch of similar pages, let’s say a product page in all countries (different reporting suits, different languages, different time ranges) and talk about them “in general”. One does not grab their attention. Two neither. They always want to talk about 100 or more.

The best I can do is to narrow down cases into one example and following my silly questioning until I get a reasonable answer. It has taken already a couple of months and I’m starting to be tired.

Conclusion is: it is extremely difficult to find the responsible person and then again hardly possible to achieve change based on data that…is not really correct.

Any thoughts?

Apple Hungary is looking for analyst with… Excel skills.

Thu, 14 Jan 2010 23:37:07 +0000

Apple Hungary is looking for analyst with… Excel skills.