Monthly Archives: April 2008

The implicit back link

Posted by on April 14, 2008 No comments

A little while back I was chatting to someone about SEO and the power of outgoing links. In the bad old days your client would ask you to build a web site that had no links leaving the site or put some horrible confirmation page asking you that you are leaving!

Whats interesting here is that by not having any external links you are reducing your interconnections with other sites, and so reducing your ranking in search engines. Not only do most search engines allow you to search for linked pages but each additional connection in either direction will increase the weighting that matching symbols (words) in those documents have the same implied semantics. This is just like a neural network where each additional connection re-enforces the bond further increasing the chance of a pattern match.

Add to the fact that incoming links, trackbacks and pingbacks are very common on blogs and other modern publishing tools and those implicit back links become explicit.

So if you want people to link to you, you should link to them.

Plaxo revisited

Posted by on April 13, 2008 1 comment

So I got some helpful feedback on my last post from John McCrea who is VP of Marketing for Plaxo. So I logged back into Plaxo and had a little hunt around and after about 5-10 minutes found my addresses.

My initial reaction was Doh! what an idiot I was, but then after a few minutes reflection I started to think about user interface design and intuitive learning. When I showcase new functionality to my users, they will often give feedback about how easy a feature is to use or find. Often as developers or familiar users of a system we don’t see that something might not be named or located in the most natural place.

So I though I might also give some feedback to Plaxo that might help improve the user interface.

This is where the confusion started for me:

Plaxo options

Option 1 leads you to the old Plaxo address book system

Option 2 leads you to an import wizard to get your address book from Outlook, GMail etc

Option 3 doesn’t contain any of your old address book “connections”

So these are my thoughts:

  • Links with nearly the same names but going to total different actions is confusing
  • Option 3: The domain language seems confused, surely the people I have already shared my address book with are already “connected” in someway. Maybe that connection only allows address book features and not all the new features.
  • Option 2 doesn’t seem to support importing from option 1 (You wouldn’t need this option if they were already connected)
  • Option 1 feels like a skinned version of old app and not really integrated into the whole experience

Early morning rant…

Posted by on April 9, 2008 2 comments

I’ve been an occasional user of Plaxo (just the address book) for the last 3 years, using it to keep a few important addresses up to date. Anyway today was the first time I had used it since they launched Pulse, and guess what all my contacts have gone!

Now that’s not very clever for a social networking site and reminds me what Duncan Cragg would say about Web 2.0 and making sure all you data is public, readable in some open format and ideally distributed over the interweb. If fact this really goes back to why “data bases” were created in the first place: data lives longer than applications: well not in Plaxo’s case.

Gave my first public presentation…

Posted by on April 4, 2008 1 comment

Well Kiran and I both gave our first public presentations at the OverTheAir mobile conference at the Imperial College.

Kiran talked about Agile & Mobile development and I talked about Progressive Enhancement