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Seeing as the website for Microsoft’s new social focussed mobile - the “Kin” - is very media rich, you might have assumed it would be delivered using Silverlight, Microsoft’s own rich media technology. It’s a bit surprising therefore to find that it’s a Flash site. Surely there must be an internal directive somewhere in Microsoft that states that any rich-media microsite delivered internally or externally should be built in Silverlight rather than Flash? To be honest, we’ve done nothing with Silverlight as yet and I don’t expect us to in the near future, not least because Flash is continuing to make strides into other platforms [despite the current gripe with Apple], but if even Microsoft aren’t pushing their own technology then how’s it going to make any dent in Flash’s dominance?

With such a mammoth audience, Facebook are probably one of the few to be able to shake Google’s dominance in the online advertising market and some of their recent changes are focused on tackling Google Head-On. From an advertisers perspective, with potentially greater or more obvious targeting potential in some scenarios on Facebook combined with significant if not completely comparable audience size, it’s conceivable that some ad spend may be drawn away from Google and moved to Facebook.

Er, yeah. I didn’t know what FCrDNS was either… Forward Confirmed Reverse DNS. [And if you don't know what DNS is then you might want to go read something else because this will bore you rigid]. In a nutshell…

• DNS: Maps a domain name to an IP address e.g. commonagency.com -> 94.136.61.118
  This is fundamental to every day use of the web in that it ensures when someone enters a domain name they get routed to the server from which that domain is served.
• Reverse DNS: Maps an IP address to a domain name e.g. 94.136.61.118 -> commonagency.com
  This is frequently used by email servers to validate that emails received from another email server IP address can be matched with a domain name that appears to correlate with the sender’s address [that's actually not exactly true but it's a simplistic explanation].
• FCrDNS: RDNS lookup followed by a DNS lookup e.g. 94.136.61.118 -> commonagency.com -> 94.136.61.118
  This is apparently the best approach and is now used by many email servers.

Why care? Well hopefully you won’t ever need to, but when a client calls to say that they can’t get emails through to one of their customers, these are the kind of things you learn. Usually you’ll have set-up your DNS/RDNS in such a way that FCrDNS works by default, and if not you can usually do it quite quickly. There’s a great tool at http://ipadmin.junkemailfilter.com/rdns.php which helps with testing. Basically, if you know that your RDNS is set-up correctly and that you’ve got some appropriate SPF records set-up too but you’re still finding some emails get blocked, check out your FCrDNS. And if nothing else, it’s another acronym that you didn’t know you didn’t know, but now do.

There’s so much noise at the moment about which circumstances social networks should be considered a relevant customer communication channel that it’s nice to come across really successful executions as examples. The IKEA Facebook campaign to promote their new Malmo store is one such example, developed by Swedish agency Forsman & Bodenfors. By encouraging user’s to share pictures from the profile page of the Malmo IKEA Store Manager, user’s are effectively personally endorsing the IKEA products to their network of friends.

Two totally different new websites came to my attention today…

Javari.co.uk is Amazon’s attack on the shoe market. I understand it’s been running in the US for a while and has already made a massive dent in the traditional shoe retail business. Amazon have tried to remove the barriers to online shoe [and presumably clothing] purchase by offering free one-day delivery, free 365-day returns and a fantastic product preview experience including high-res ‘exploratitive’ zooming of multiple product photos. It’s not the same as trying on a shoe and walking round the shop but if the price is right then it’s got to be tempting.

Jimcarrey.com on the other hand is a totally different approach. As rich Flash portfolios go, this one is going to be hard to beat. You can see the creators were basically given a blank sheet of paper, probably a blank cheque and certainly told not to hold back on the bells and whistles. Every possible effect and embellishment has been used but, along with a slightly eclectic and twisted creative direction, it completely fits with what we know of Jim Carrey. Great execution all-round and a worthy use of 10-minutes spare time.

Those folks at Google continue to be pretty busy, although if you look closely it’s not hard to see much of their activity [Docs, Apps, Wave, OS, etc] coming together behind the common thread that is their web browser, Chrome. Chrome is a very fine browser already, despite it’s present shortcomings such as not being available [properly] for the Mac. However, one issue that Google face in their drive to offer everything the mass-market computer user needs through a humble browser is to educate people as to what exactly a browser is. Of course, we in web development [and to some extent our clients who run web and mobile sites] use multiple browsers and often understand the pros and cons of each, but to the average computer user a browser is at best a means of saving bookmarks and at worst is “The Internet”.

Google’s answer? Create a website that explains exactly what a browser is, how it’s role will increase in our day-to-day activity and, without too much disguise, why therefore you should choose Chrome for your browser.

One of the most prominent utilities that we now take for granted on the web [and to a lesser extent on mobile] is that of URL Shorteners. These services create a short url that redirect a user to the original destination whenever visited, sometimes with additional services inbetween such as collecting traffic statistics. The first well known service was tinyurl.com, but there are a range of other choices now including bit.ly and is.gd. Unfortunately tr.im - one of the relatively prominent services recently - has just announced that is to discontinue it’s service, and this has raised some debate about a potential over-reliance on URL Shorteners and indeed the risks of relying on web startup services on the whole. E-consultancy have a good summary of the debate - What’s bad for tr.im is good for bit.ly, recognising amongst other things that Bit.ly’s relationship with Twitter as it’s default URL Shortener has allowed Bit.ly to become the market leader and potentially the safest bet for the future.

From a user experience perspective there are also growing concerns that using URL shortening is a poor approach anyway. For example, Webmonkey suggested in April that, at the very least, one of the problems with shortened URLs is that you have no idea where they go. Additionally, as in the case of tr.im, if a URL shortening service closes down then [soon after] so all their links, because the cost of the bandwidth in redirecting all those URLs is one of the major overheads for such services. In an age of web semantics, better url schemas and a stronger focus on user experience, it does seem that the future for URL shorteners isn’t completely safe.

I’ve been suffering a little lately from the information overload swell that occasionally comes upon us all. Hence, blogging, tweeting, FBing, etc has all taken a back seat whilst I reorganise. In doing so I thought I might share a couple of handy Twitter tools I used in the process. ReFollow is an excellent system for managing your Twitter account - allowing for really obvious features such as “show me people that follow me but that I’m not following”. It also allows you to see who’s following any twitter username and instantly follow all of them too… handy for immediately following all of your competitors, a fair number of whom will probably respond by following you and hence giving you a dialogue with your competitors customers! TweetLater is a set of power tools all of it’s own, overlapping in some ways with ReFollow but also adding functionality such as timed Tweets. Some of this functionality is available in various Twitter clients but both the above services added at least some features that helped me get my Twitlife back on track!

We’re running another installation of Five Trees Forest - our RFID/SMS  interactive mobile story this week at the Showcomotion Conference in Sheffield. Created with Blink, we’ve had to redevelop the mobile interaction this time round so that the game is played purely by SMS rather than RFID due to there being up to 400 players potentially taking part! It’ll be interesting to see how the story develops amidst the context of a conference and whether the players are as engaged using SMS as they have been with the physical interaction of using RFID.

There’s been a fair bit of fuss recently about the launch of a new Facebook feature which by all accounts is a standard part of pretty much every other well known web service [Myspace, Flickr, Twitter, etc]. From tomorrow [June 12th] Facebook will be allowing users to create usernames, and hence a more friendly url to their page. For instance, where a facebook page used to be accessed at facebook.com/profile.php?id=xxxxx it will now be accessible at facebook.com/username. This is clearly of high value to the increasing number of businesses and marketeers using Facebook as a primary communication channel, and is also a much nicer method for those of us used to one identity online. Recognising the issues of squatting and trademarking by introducing such a feature after launch, Facebook have also taken steps to add trade mark protection, further acknowledging the growing value of Facebook as a commercial tool.

Looking forward to seeing whether the Adobe® BrowserLab cross browser testing solution works in real-time. Browsershots is an excellent tool for final browser checks before roll-out but tends to be a “last minute check” due to the time delay before seeing the results. BrowserLab could potentially fill this gap if it’s real time.

The Google I/O conference this week in San Francisco is a chance for the outside world to see some of the exciting stuff that Google has on the horizon. Google’s reach is so broad that there will be something to excite everyone, but two notable developments that caught our eye are Google Wave and Google’s increasing support for HTML5.

Google Wave is an attempt to unify communication and collaboration on the web, and has been created by the original team behind Google Maps, as described in this Mashable article.

HTML5 on the other hand is clearly not a Google product but something that’s been on the horizon for web developers for sometime. Personally I’d prioritise cross-browser support for CSS3 over implementation of HTML5 support, but it’s clear that HTML5 does offer greater flexibility and power to web developers. The current example demo’ed by Google is the use of HTML5 to render video directly in the browser using the new <pre><video></pre> tag as opposed to needing an intermediary plugin [usually Flash]. You’ll need an HTML 5 capable browser to get the full benefit of this demo page on Youtube, though viewing the source [in any browser] demonstrates the different approach of using HTML5 markup.

Finally, a music service that feels like it’s actually geared towards online usage rather than merely trying to shoehorn an offline model into a web-shaped box. I’ve only been using Spotify a few days and I’m already convinced that it’s way better than Napster [my existing music subscription service]. Spotify has got quite a bit of ground to make up but news that it is to launch a new API this week shows what a serious challenger it will very quickly become.

Though not a surprise,  Twitter has now revealed that it plans to add paid-for services sooner than expected. It is almost certain that the services will be in the form of a premium account targetted at businesses.

This Econsultancy article about how Amazon made $2.7bn with one small tweak offers an excellent insight and short analysis of the value of constantly fine-tuning user experience to make the best of your content. This is particularly pertinent to user generated content which can vary hugely in it’s quality and value to other users. The article also demonstrates that content requirements change over time. In this case, as the number of comments grow they initially become useful but then after a certain amount it becomes difficult for a user to know which ones are valuable. Other similar scenarios may be to promote proven “respected” reviewers over others or to recognise that some products change over time too and therefore the respective reviews may have differing value.

In our latest Flash game you can overcome the current financial doom and gloom by helping Gordon save the banks. And if that doesn’t work you might just be able to raise yourself a few quid by selling your old phones back to Fonebank.com. This topical  Flash game builds on a simple “grab the object” game concept and adds topical sound bites and jokes. Developed completely in Actionscript 3 and including a physics engine for realistic effects, after playing the game you can share the game easily using social networks and bookmarking tools, challenge a friend by email to beat your score or value your old phones at Fonebank.com.

I was only recently introduced to the wondrous suite of visual/design online applications at Aviary.com. Having had a brief explore, I’m sure Adobe aren’t worried just yet but as a demonstration of how usually complex graphics applications can be delivered online using Flash they’re an amazing showcase. As with Google’s online application suite, the opportunities for such applications are best maximised either by focussing on the 10% of an applications features that are used by 90% of it’s users or when they deliver features that couldn’t be delivered with offline software. In Aviary’s case this might mean being able to quickly alter a photo before posting to a blog or photo-sharing site or being able to collaboratively edit a visual in real-time with other users.

Nothing is sacred these days. Not that Wikipedia should ever be considered sacred by any means but it’s bad news when the Conservative party leader David Cameron apologises over Wikipedia change because of a deliberate change just to win an argument.

I know ‘modern’ web developers are meant to have this deeply ingrained in their pysche by now but I sometimes still find it helpful to refer to the W3 page on CSS selectors occasionally and invariably when I do it reminds me that there is always more than one way to do something [the unconsidered option so often being better too].

We’ve been exploring the options for easily adding code examples to a forthcoming new section on commonagency.com and CodeColorer definitely seems the most complete of all the available ones. We required a means of presenting various languages including AS3 and PHP, syntax colouring, line numbering, minimal admin effort and decent markup in the output, all in a plugin that must still be in active development but not in alpha/beta! Nearly all the examples tested used the Geshi underlying code but CodeColorer seems to be the best solution so far.

• CodeColorer - our preferred option so far.
• Chili Code Highlighter [still in beta]
• CodeHighlighter [seems good but couldn't tell if it supports AS3]
• FV Code Highlighter [didn't appear to support AS3 and not tested with v.2.7]
• Code Snippet [seems to be one of the original options but no longer in active development]
• Dojox Wordpress Syntax Highlighter [sounds quite good but limited documentation and not in English!]

…and lots more on wordpress.org.

This is a cute idea. FutureMe.org lets you enter the details of an email and have it delivered to yourself anytime up to 30 years from now. Tell yourself how you were feeling, remind yourself of [potentially unfulfilled] dreams or have a go at yourself for being an oldie! Shame it doesn’t work the other way round of course else I could have done that Back To The Future sports almanac trick.

Whilst it’s not usually an issue, sometimes the dotted outline that is applied to links in their active state [e.g. the point when they're clicked] looks visually untidy - especially if you’re also using lots of padding or text-indent tricks to hide HTML text. The following article about removing the dotted outline is a great summary of how to overwrite this behaviour whilst also maintaining accessibility [a key reason for the active state in the first place].

Well, I say apologise. It’s not exactly a “grovelling on your knees” apology by any means. In fact, in Google’s apology for Gmail being down for two and half hours they are actually “sorry that it disrupted your working day”. I guess that’s why Google Apps comes in two flavours - free and premium - though from what I can understand the premium version was also affected.

OK, so Sweden brought us IKEA but Norway knows how to deliver what we [as web developers] really want… the death of IE6! What started out as a series of Norwegian websites declaring war on IE 6 has begun to spread a lot further, even gaining support from Microsoft itself. Now there’s just the n million machines on backward corporate IT networks to crack.

Font-replacement methods for substituting text on-the-fly with a non web-safe font are widely used now. However, having had a few run-ins with the very popular Flash-based SIFR recently - either due to small glitches [especially Mac related] or simply due to it’s limitations in certain contexts [especially when used over backgrounds that are not solid colour] - we’ve been looking at other options. As a lightweight solution, PCDTR seems to be one of the best image-based alternatives due to it being purely PHP and CSS based [e.g. no Javascript] and we’ll be putting this through it’s paces in a forthcoming project.

OK, quite possibly my finest ever “sandwich short of a picnic” moment but I’ve just realised how easy it is to schedule future posts in Wordpress. If sometimes, like me, you blog in bursts and then save some of your posts as drafts to publish at a later date, but then inevitably keep forgetting to go back to the drafts folder, then scheduled posts are for you. Or of course if you’re in the habit of writing posts such as press releases that have a specific release date. That would be a far more obvious example! Anyway, just write the post as usual but change the publish date to a future one and, in Wordpress 2.7+ at least, the ‘Publish. button will miraculously change to read ‘Schedule’ and your post will not be shown until the specified time. I’m sure I’m pretty much the last person ever to cotton on to this but I find it very useful.

The rather well thought of ‘Future Of Web Apps’ conferences are on tour this year and are coming our way [e.g. up to Leeds] in May, whilst also visiting Cambridge, Edinburgh and Bristol.

I had a quick need to try some CSS styled bar charts to demonstrate a very rough prototype idea and this article on 8 CSS Techniques for Charting Data came in very handy. I can’t vouch for the long-term effectiveness, robustness or flexibility of any of the techniques but as a starting point for your own methods it’s a helpful start [if not rocket science by any means].

It will be interesting to observe whether O2’s forthcoming venture to run a branded version of Bebo is a success. Apparently an earlier trial saw traffic grow by 60% so whereas on the one hand one might assume that any brand - particularly mobile operators and ISPs - would be viewed cynically by “the yoof” as trying to own their social network, it may be a sign that the mobile operators are finally gaining acceptance as credible providers and partners in such web services as opposed to merely becoming back-end enablers. Or it may just be that the tariff is good.

Twitter led me to notice this article about five cool ways to support the W3C, and it made me think that perhaps the W3C isn’t this ‘far off’ organisation that we as a small agency may feel it to be. Perhaps the issue, as the article suggests, is that the wider and in particular lower level web design/development community don’t get involved enough other than [hopefully] using the excellent validation tools.

Amusing viral from the Labour Party featuring the WebCabinet (Shadow version).

Robert Scoble, well known technology blogger and commentator, suggested nine ways Twitter could make money. And it turns out of course that, with Twitter being one of the biggest albeit tech-focussed successes of 2008, a lot of other people had some ideas too.

No, that’s not the latest Wii accessory but a reference to the apparent requirement for every man and his dog to predict the big technology issues for 2009. I don’t think anyone ever comes back to these things and says, “Hey, you were miles off!”, but if you miraculously haven’t come across such articles earlier then have a read about robotics and business in Silicon Valley, the big steps in gaming, more robotics and music players.

Instead of predicting what might be big in ‘09, Wired magazine looks back at ‘08 and offers an excellent summary of the top 6 technologies to get into if you haven’t already.

Last week saw around 1500 job losses in the Yahoo offices. Valleywag investigates what this could mean for the future of favoured photo-community Flickr.

This simple CSS Shorthand Guide produced by Dustin Diaz is an invaluable resource and makes for good practice in streamlining your CSS code.

MooTools is our preferred JavaScript effects/extension library, not least because of it’s easy extensibility - as demonstrated by a wealth of 3rd party extension scripts that are available. We haven’t used all these but this round-up is a handy starter.

BBC One and BBC Two are now available to watch live [as Three and Four have been for a while]. Not all programmes are broadcast [e.g. films, some sport, etc] but most are now available to watch as they’re broadcast live.

Discussion is underway regarding how the future of the NHS will utilise new technologies not only in treatments but also in how the service is accessed. Consultation by email, SMS and video might all play a role, as well as virtual hospital environments instead of physical buildings.

The UK VAT reduction on Monday 1st December caused the ‘biggest ever online shopping day’ as it recorded the UK’s largest ever online shopping volumes, though overall the small spike did little to significantly impact the generally reduced consumer spend.

It’s not the first Twitter app and it won’t be the last but the simplicity of the twistori site is very pleasing to use and almost always returns interesting content within the first few lines. Choose from one of six feelings to filter Twitter messages [tweets] such as ‘think’ or ‘wish’.

Thank goodness for Google. Looks like they’re doing their bit to monitor and prevent the spreading of flu by using related search terms to map which US States are most affected by flu!

Currently, many businesses choose not to offer direct communication methods such as telephone or have an online contact form with an answer period of 24 or 48 hours. However, this might have to change as Out-law.com reports in a recent case. The European Court of Justice ruled that companies must provide a contact method on their website that is answerable within 60 minutes such as a telephone number or a contact form. Currently, the UK regulation is less specific but requires that a website must offer “the details of the service provider, including his electronic mail address, which make it possible to contact him rapidly and communicate with him in a direct and effective manner”.