April Newsletter

18Apr 2011 by Leon

Welcome to the April 2011 edition of the 18INT newsletter!

Add Open Graph Tags

Have you added Open Graph tags to all of your content? I haven’t either, but it feels like it’s time because Facebook is beginning to leverage the tags to enhance how the links appear in users’ news streams. Despite a recent report from Forrester that content on Facebook is not not driving eCommerce sales, being present on Facebook remains imperative. We just haven’t figured out the formula yet. I know this because I’ve seen Google ads drive people to a microsite that accomplished increasing offline sales.

How a link to Rand-o-Matic appears in the Facebook news stream.

I’m sure we can agree that controlling how links to our content appear in the Facebook stream supports the greater branding effort. If you share links on Facebook, you know how Facebook makes a best effort to suggest images and text for the title and description areas of the post. If you decorate your pages with Open Graph tags, you can set the exact values. As you can see in the screenshot, I’ve linked to the Rand-o-Matic widget. Facebook has placed the description I want to appear rather than whatever text appears early in the document.

The Open Graph tags are nothing more than custom HTML tags that Facebook parses and otherwise render invisibly in browsers. Adding them is a logistical rather than technological challenge. Incidentally, I made that graphic with the appropriately-named Awesome Screenshot, a free browser extension available for Chrome.

Social Today, HTML5 Tomorrow

So far this year, I’ve been to GDC, Web 2.0 Expo, and ad:tech. The idea of being social permeated all topics. And by social, I mean Facebook, which has more than 500 million active users! There’s no doubt every business must have a strategy for how they use Facebook. But while this is today’s topic of conversation, I’d like to offer some insight into what we’ll be talking about next year: HTML5.

To be clear, a strict definition of HTML5 may be the newest standard for HTML, but the moniker is coming to mean this plus CSS3 plus Javascript plus Web services. This combines to form an alternative to native apps coded in tools we’ve been using for years. You may hear work being called HTML5 merely because it uses the new video tag or even that it uses Ajax. The key aspect of the HTML5 approach is the integration of all available tools to create event-driven code. Javascript is at the core of this approach.

Out on the bleeding edge, the conversation is about how Javascript may be the right tool on the server side, too. It’s possible we’re tipping into a new age of Web development where coding is oriented on events. Node.js is looking like a good solution for this direction.

Another appealing aspect of developing in HTML5 is the ease with which a Web app can retarget to various devices. I have been experimenting with building Web apps that render well on phones. Thanks to Open Source project PhoneGap, Web apps can easily become self-contained native apps that run on Android and iOS devices.

Recent Work

In the past month, the game I was helping AltEgo build has launched. The game is called Hollywood Magic. Players run a movie studio, buying script and casting actors. The movie plays out in cartoony 3/4 view as you try to match props to script genre to maximize your score. The primary game experience is through a Flash interface. I wrote many REST services used by Flash as well as several HTML pages and admin forms that helped designers create content for the game.

I also built a small widget for MindPosts.com that generates random quotes as if spoken by Ayn Rand characters. This was an amusing technical hack. Users can drop in a few lines of javascript. Functionally is pulled from my own site, similar to the approach used by Google Analytics.

In April, I started working for two new clients, Clorox Creative Services and INSZoom. I am helping the Clorox team with several projects, acting as a technical lead. INSZoom hired me to build browser extensions for Firefox, Chrome and Safari with the aim to extend support for their Web application to OSX. This project should have a high fun factor.

 

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Thanks!

 

Leon Atkinson

Eighteen Intelligence