Web 2.0 Watch

What ails newspapers: shrinking subscriptions or Website bloat?

Media Websites that use to be a pleasure to read are being ruined by indiscriminate use of Web 2.0.  For instance take the revamped "The Wall Street Journal" site. It definitely rates high in eye candy and offers more widgets than Facebook.  But it is utterly painful to sit there and wait for pages (or more precisely, the thousand and one objects) to load.

Below is a test I ran with KITE, Keynote's free instant Web testing tool, from 5 cities. 

More than 8 seconds to load is no one's idea of cutting edge performance. And often it takes longer. Forget it if you're in Hong Kong (maybe they went out for Saturday morning dim sum and forgot to turn the servers on). 

Oh did I mention the page size? >1MB! 

Being at the bleeding edge has it's price: customer experience or how about just customers?

At the risk of not keeping up with the times I did a similar test on some other sites such as "The New York Times" but didn't see the same bloat infecting their pages.

If you're interested in the data behind this chart click here.

Cloud Applications available on LinkedIn

Great minds think alike. :-)

No, this is not poor effort to kiss up to my esteemed colleague either. It so happens that I have been a occasional user of SlideShare myself via LinkedIn.com

Which leads me to my subject of the day, namely how LinkedIn is expanding their reach by making SlideShare available to their user base.

In the last few months, LinkedIn has allowed users the ability to add several cloud applications to their profile. One of them is SlideShare, allowing users to share presentations. I'll avoid redundancy by simply referring to Vik's blog post.

However, if you want a different spin on presentations, there is Google Presentation. This is an add-on that allows you post documents via your Google account, then upload to your profile. From my examinations, SlideShare supports four formats (ppt, doc, odp, and pdf), while Google Presentations supports the above plus StarOffice, HTML, csv, Excel, and Open Documents. I will continue using both and reporting with the results.

But wait, there's more...

The application BlogLink is a nifty tool (powered by TypePad) that allows a LinkedIn user to automatically download the most recent blog posts from people in your network. In case you can't go to each individual blog, BlogLink turns a portion of your profile page into a clearing house for new blog posts. Of course with one click, you can visit the blog site. Among the many sites that BlogLink supports are Blogger, TypePad, Vox, WordPress, and LiveJournal. The only downside is that if you have a lot of contacts (and blogs), this may take up to 20 seconds to load.

Unlike the aforementioned applications, Company Buzz is an application built by LinkedIn. Company Buzz that provides a LinkedIn user the ability to monitor the twitter activty that is going on with your companies or groups. Managing it can be a bit tricky, because if the keywords aren't chosen with care - well, imagine drinking from a firehose. Just far too much information and some of it probably isn't very suitable for a professional profile, hence I would recommend using with care. The Trends function is a pretty nice option for tracking purposes.

I'll review a few other applications from LinkedIn at a later date.

Web Performance Presentations on Slideshare.Net

One of my favorite websites is Slideshare.net. It's like Powerpoint genetically crossed with Facebook - the power of presentations with social networking. There are a number of Web Performance presentations that are very interesting:

High Performance Websites Lalit Patel

Speed Of Ajax

Performance Improvements in Browsers

7 Stages of Scaling Web Applications

High Performance Web Pages - 20 new best practices

High performance web sites

Web 2.0 Expo: Even Faster Web Sites

Full Stack Web Application Performance Tuning

Keynote Systems 5 New Year's Resolutions 2009 (written by Corinna Krueger from Keynote)

They are all written by various experts in the field of Web Performance Testing and Optimization. Starting with Steve Souders of Google, to the CTO of Rackspace, to German performance expert Fabian Lange.

Fabian and I swapped email recently, after I stumbled upon his presentation on Slideshare.net - Full Stack Web Application Performance Tuning. It's a short presentation on web optimization tricks and tips. He wrote to me that his company Codecentric is a consulting company that focuses on Java and performance related issues and solutions. They deploy web performance and profiling solutions like JMeter, JProfiler, Dynatrace, YSlow and KITE to support their clients.

I hope you enjoy reading these presentations on web performance!

 

Merging Social Networks

A post to "slashdot" by SoulSkill brought me back to the origins of the name of this blog: social networks. 

Social networks have mushroomed and there is one for every profession, school, and hobby.  The mushrooming is the result of the same person having a profile on multiple networks that serve a different purpose. For example, keeping professional affiliations separate from say hobbies or political affiliations is pretty commonplace. It's not dissimilar to all those free email accounts - same person, different handle and presumably different purpose too. 

SoulSkill stumbled on a paper in which 3 researchers argue that social networks may not be as mutually separate as people think.   The reason, to paraphrase the study, is 2 fold: 1) human nature and 2) data mining techniques.

I think the first is the most interesting.  The researchers say that a user's privacy can be compromised by "feeding unanticipated events into their activity stream, or exposing their activity stream to an unanticipated  audience".  Younger net-denizens have less qualm's about what information is shared online. This is a generational trend.  And it is because of this evolution of attitudes about online behavior that Web 2.0 has flourished.  While users may not be aware of the workings of socials networks, which the researchers argue should be made more explicit, they are certainly aware of the public nature of what they are sharing. (Are they not?)

The researchers argue that more user controls should be considered to alleviate the merging of social graphs or personae in different social networks.  But of the controls that exist today to guard privacy online, how many users take the time to use them, let alone learn and keep up with them?  It's not for a lack of caring about security and privacy, it's more the trade-off between time spent learning the issues and the belief that a high enough probability exists that something awful will happen. For example how many people take measures to prevent their personal identity from being stolen?

So are the researchers being disingenuous in proposing new protections knowing that net users will not use the controls? Probably not, but beyond research and even new user controls being developed surely they can't expect to put the cat back into the bag.  Web 2.0 or widespread social networking now defines our online world and from our alma mater to our favorite search engine the sharing of personal information on the Web becomes easier and more unavoidable everyday.

BTW, the 3 researchers are all from Google and their paper, "(Under)mining Privacy in Social Networks" is well worth a read if just to learn about how your own online personas are merging into one.