Get Roused!

Facebook are launching a Foursquare-style app that allows Facebook users to “check-in” to physical locations, sometimes automatically. The feature will allow friends to see where you are wit the intention being to develop a range of games or social apps that take advantage of location-based information. For example, advertisers can provide discounts for check-ins against products and services. You can also imagine check-in parties given Facebook’s past with spontaneous party organisers. 

My prediction around Facebook Places is that it will be a massive success. Geo-location is the next big thing around mobile apps, a market that’s already set to surpass the desktop for web-browsing activity. 2010 is the year all about the app and people will be attracted to the cleverness of geolocation.

It will take some pretty horrific horror stories about Places privacy going wrong to really derail Facebook’s growth in this area. The operation is already more than aware how damaging privacy concerns can be following recent media coverage and subsequent changes to the usability of privacy settings.

As a Facebook user you will have control about what geolocation information you share and you really must be a grade-A idiot if you share your location with the entire world and then wonder why you were burgled whilst you were checked in at work or are being followed by weird stalkers.

What does Facebook Places mean for politics? Watch this space. I’m thinking campaign-trail based apps, surgery check-ins, protests and demos.

Roused Orange
H:15 S:83 B:94
R: 240 G:90 B:40
L: 59 A:57 B:58
C:0 M:80 Y:95 K:0
#F05A28

Roused Royal Purple
H:244 S:65 B:38
R:38 G:34 B:97
L:17 A:18 B:-38
C:100 M:100 Y:31 K:22
#262261

In our experience when you’ve got a popular site running on WordPress it’s possible for it to start crumbling unless you pay careful attention to it.

In our old way of working we simply installed websites, but did not put any ongoing maintenance agreements in place. Any future needs were done somewhat casually.

Now we’ve had a casualty of that way of working that strengthens and justifies our new method. A client’s blog is crumbling and we now need to take action.

• Introduce Subversion Control (SVN) to allow rollbacks and deployments to development, staging and production environments. Tighter control of the WordPress code.
• Introduce files to a Content Distribution Network (CDN) to seperate content files (images, pictures, stylesheets, etc) and scripts, which in turn improves page loading time and reduces strain on the server.
• Replace the current backup regime with our new methods, which we’re not sharing as they’re commercially sensitive and need to be kept secure.
• Introduce automated alerting of future problems by performing regular ‘heartbeat’ checks on the site.

We’re also going to refine the code and make things a bit slicker. Once complete the client will be part of “Roused” and say goodbye to the “Rouse Media” way of working.

To get to the new nirvana we’re going to rebuild the WordPress installation from scratch - using latest methods and cloud deployment techniques. Once that’s done we’ll port the template, images and audio files over. Lastly, we’ll drop in the database of content after scanning it for problems.

It was back in October 2009 when HootSuite first appeared on our radar and was an instant must-have, must-recommend, must-support tool.

It seems that in the UK political ‘bubble’ most folk have taken to TweetDeck, which though a fine bit of software requires to have the Adobe AIR service installed on your machine. HootSuite, however, runs entirely in your web browser meaning you can have all your custom columns on multiple machines wherever you go.

What’s even better about it is the ability to add team members to your HootSuite account and assign them access to your corporate Twitter account so they can post tweets and interact. No more worries about giving out the Twitter account password - it’s all protected.

Plus: They’ve got stats, scheduling, search tools for monitoring, media uploads, URL shortening and more.

• Visit HootSuite and find out more…

We’re not on commission, but probably should be! We are, however, delighted to support HootSuite with a big fat Roused sealed of approval and declare it our Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn management tool of choice for all our clients across politics, law and finance.

PS: They have iPhone and Android apps.

* ‘only better’ is our subjective viewpoint.

As you can see at the top of this post there’s a “like” button for Facebook that allows you to tag this post as something you’ve enjoyed reading and share it on your Facebook profile for your friends to see. The idea is to enable websites to connect into the Facebook platform to allow them to tap in to the vast traffic potential it could offer.

We’re also social beings who tend to remain friends with people who have similar interests - the chances are if you see that your friend has ‘liked’ something you are probably going to be interested in it too.

Dropping this kind of functionality in to a blog is easy. You need to pop this code somewhere before the closing </body> HTML tag in your post template:

<div id="fb-root"></div>
<script>
  window.fbAsyncInit = function() {
    FB.init({appId: 'your app id', status: true, cookie: true,
             xfbml: true});
  };
  (function() {
    var e = document.createElement('script'); e.async = true;
    e.src = document.location.protocol +
      '//connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js';
    document.getElementById('fb-root').appendChild(e);
  }());
</script>

Then you can utilise a wizard over on Facebook to customise your ‘like’ button and adjust it’s width and other settings. Be careful to put the right value in the URL field to make sure that users will ‘like’ the permalink to your post and not the URL to your home page instead.

Once you generate the code it will look something like this:

<fb:like href="{Permalink}" font="trebuchet ms"></fb:like>

You can paste this in to the spot in your post template where you want the functionality to appear. In our case it’s just after the title of the blog post.

That covers the basics, but you will want to find out some stats about this ‘like’ button especially if you don’t want to have to manually check your pages for responses.

Go to Facebook again and register for Insights for your Domain to enable some basic reporting. You will need to add some meta code to your blog template to confirm ownership, but once done you’ll be able to see what links on your site have been ‘liked’ and shared between Facebook users.

Image: Like/Dislike Stamps from Nation.

PS: The above technique is provided without warranty. We can support, however, if you get stuck. Drop us a line.

Mashable is reporting that RIM could be releasing a BlackBerry tablet device as early as November 2010. They cite Bloomberg.

Features could include a front-facing camera for video calls, however it’s been suggested that it would not have 3G connectivity built-in but would instead allow you to tether the device to your BlackBerry handset. Whilst that may sound cumbersome it does mean users will keep their existing telephone number rather than having a tablet-specific number for video calls.

No word yet as to a physical keyboard, which would certainly set it apart from Apple’s iPad and what we’ve been hearing about a Windows7 tablet.

Would you buy a BlackBerry tablet?

With conference seasons fast approaching in the political world we’d like to look at how to make a Twitter feed appear on a large TV screen or projector. It could follow a certain hashtag or certain key people at a conference.

The first step is to create a single feed - decide if you want a hashtag for your event and agree what it is going to be. Alternatively you can provide a list of Twitter accounts that will make up the feed. We’ll then mash it all together.

Using Adobe Flex we’ll create a high quality visual design that will pull in the feed and present it on the screen. It could incorporate a brand name, brand colours and we can even pull other content in to the screen such as timings for sessions and lectures.

You then simply hook the large screen or projector up to a computer, run the Flash file and enjoy. You’ll need it to be connected to the internet, of course, which can be a problem at some venues. We can help with this too by providing a 3G wireless solution for example.

Don’t just take our word for it - see an example of a Twitter feed in action by Contrive Digital: http://www.contrivedigital.com/clients/netmag/

The short answer is no, not any more. The battle between web designers and places with IE6 installed is nearly over and I’m delighted to report that the web designers are the assumed victors.

Approximately 2-4% of users in the UK now browse websites using Internet Explorer 6 with the rest either using version 7, 8 or Firefox. Google Chrome is making great strides in market share.

Here at Roused we dropped all but basic support for IE6 some time ago and will not design specifically for this platform. With figures showing such a small user base hopefully there will be even less pressure to accommodate it.

Recently we’ve been working on a landing page for a website that will be visited by millions of UK users and for the first time we faced no resistance from the client to only offer basic IE6 support. Surprising, especially as they have IE6 installed on their entire estate.

Don’t just take our word for it that IE6 is dead, check out these sources:

• StatCounter (Measures all sites that have StatCounter embedded)
• W3Schools (Measures browsers that visit their site)
• BBC Blogs