There’s a ton of functionality here.  There are Lost Pet Alerts, discussion forums, free classified ads, and a directory of local dog and pet business and resources from dog trainers and vets to shelters and rescues.  The entire site is 100% free.  I do have a few ads running, but I don’t really expect to make any money.  I just wanted to create a useful resource for local dog lovers.

Do you love dogs and live in the Research Triangle area of North Carolina?  If so, check out Triangle Dog Forum.

Newsletter Contents

• And now for something completely different…

This month I resolved to exclude Google from the newsletter.  I was going to talk about customer retention strategies.  It’s all the rage these days, what with the economy and all.

Then I watched a video on YouTube. This video blew my mind. It was the first announcement of a new Google product that will change the world, and how we communicate. So, I’ve decided to depart from my usual format and tell you about what I saw.

Google’s developer conference, Google I/O 09, took place May 27 and 28, this past Wednesday and Thursday.  Thursday evening I saw on twitter that the Google Wave Developer Preview from the conference was available on YouTube.  Wow.

Google Wave is now being tested and extended by all the conference attendees, with the first accounts outside Google.  It is a ‘communication and collaboration tool’ to be released later this year.  It integrates the functionality of e-mail, instant messaging, collaborative authoring, media sharing, and discussion forums into a single interface using a single protocol.  The whole thing, server, protocol, interface, is free and open.

Okay, honestly, you have to see it.  It’s such a paradigm shift that I can’t just write up an explanation that will truly impress upon you what Google Wave is.  I’ll do my best though, as the video is geared toward a tech-literate audience, and is an hour twenty minutes long.  If you want to dive in, they start showing Wave itself at about 7:30 in the video.

Watch it on YouTube

Here’s the interface to Google Wave:

This all happens inside a web browser.  On the left are your folders and contacts.  In the center is your in-box on the right is a Wave.  A Wave is very versatile.  It can be an instant messaging conversation, an e-mail, a photo gallery, a collaboratively authored document, or even a game of chess.  Basically it can carry out any type of communication we do on the internet.

All these varied forms of communication have a unified in-box.  If you send someone an e-mail, and they open it while you have it open you’ll see their response in real-time.  If someone adds photos to a shared gallery the gallery pops up in your in-box.  The Wave adapts to any usage as needed.

Each user on a Wave can edit the Wave.  You could post a list of action items for your team, add the team as users, and everyone could add, comment on, and assign items.  You would see each others changes in real-time, with colored markers showing where others are editing in the document.  You and your spouse could label your vacation pictures together from any two computers before embedding the Wave on a website for your friends to see.

Of course, with everyone editing something you need a way to fix things, and see who did what.  So each Wave has a time line.  You can rewind, and play back all the changes to a Wave.  If you and a friend are playing chess on a Wave you can rewind and see the whole game history, move by move.

Sounds pretty amazing, but I for one would be frustrated that all my data lived on Google’s servers.  Remember how I said Google Wave was free and open?  All the specifications and software will be freely available.  Your company can run its own Wave server on your own domain name.  Wave accounts on your server will be compatible with any other Wave account and you can send Waves to anyone.  However, any waves that are only sent between your internal users will never leave your server.

You’ll be able to have complete control over your data.  That’s what will allow Google Wave to change the world.  If they made it proprietary and kept everyone’s data on their own servers then it would never achieve worldwide use.

One feature that is particularly amazing is real-time translation.  If I speak English and Pierre speaks French, we can type to each other in our native languages and Wave will translate our messages in real-time.  It can handle 40 languages.  It’s amazing.  I was awestruck when I saw it.  It’s at 1:12:00 in the video.

Okay, I’m going on pretty long here, so I’ll wrap up with some highlights and further reading links for those interested.

• contextual spell checking – It doesn’t check spelling against a dictionary, but within the context of how you use the word.  So, if you write ‘their’ when you meant ‘they’re’ it will catch it.  It’s so good that often it is so confident that it will automatically correct your spelling.  If you type ‘Icland is an icland.”  It will automatically be changed to ‘Iceland is an island.’
• drag and drop instant sharing – drag some photos from your computer into a wave and your recipient will see thumbnails before you’ve even finished uploading.
• extensible – anyone can create new gadgets and features, like surveys, integration with other websites, or polls and surveys.
• embeddable – Waves can be embedded in websites and comments made on the website will appear in the wave, while comments added to the wave show up on the web.

You can learn more at wave.google.com or check out a good article at CIO.com

Cheers,

Peter

Images courtesy of

The April 2009 issue of my e-mail newsletter covered Google Analytics and it’s importance in online success.  You can read it online and sign up to get the next issue as soon as it hits the net.  The new Google Analytics API has been made publicly available, so I’ve been playing with that using PHP.

Besides creating better websites and enhancing visibility for my clients I’ve gotten myself onto twitter.  (Twitter is a micro-blogging / social networking / social media site.)  You can “follow me on twitter“, and I’m sure I’ll have a widget on the sidebar here before long to display my latest tweets. (A tweet is a micro-blog-post on twitter.)

There are also some rumors that Apple may be buying twitter.  I hope not, I like the independent nature of it now.  Of course, with over 25 million users it’s a very lucrative property right now.

On a side note, this really applies to the yellow pages.  If you’re spending half as much money on yellow page ads as your website, give me a call and I’ll help your business make the transition into the digital age.  I didn’t own a copy of the yellow pages until a month ago when I fished one out of recycling to look for local businesses who might be able to profit from my services.

Without further ado, here are screenshots of major news websites just after they announced the winner of the presidential election, Barack Obama.

There’s a lot to be learned about marketing on the internet, website design, and user interface design just from studying these screenshots.  I suppose there’s also some historical value, so feel free to save these for posterity.

It is my understanding that this posting of screenshots falls under fair use, if I’m wrong feel free to let me know.

If your interested in seeing more website and marketing critiques in the future you might consider bookmarking my site or subscribing to my RSS feed.  You’ll be sure to pick up great tips that can help your offline business grow online if you sign up for my email newsletter or keep reading this website!

Have a wonderful day!

PS: Yes, I’d be doing this website showcase if the election had gone the other way.

I took screenshots of many many major news websites’ front pages, interesting to see that the NY Times changed their headline after about five minutes.  That’s one of the great things about publishing on the internet.  You can make a change instantly.

North Carolina still can’t be called, but Obama leads by a fraction of a percent.  Indiana is the other really close one.  Figures, the Grandstaff side of my family lives in Indiana, and my folks and I live in North Carolina.

It is always exciting to see Democracy in action, and the world wide web has brought us a lot of amazing technologies to watch it all unfold.  Stay tuned and I’ll post some screen shots with web design critiques in the next few days.

Now it’s time for me to watch an episode of something funny over on Hulu.com and retire for the night.

a good example of displaying data on a website

Politico is doing a good job with clear easy to navigate data.  Their numbers are a little more conservative than Google, but still a bit higher than the NY Times.  They cite the Associated Press as their source of data, but have deployed a great web interface to that data.  There’s a scrolling list of battleground states and their latest numbers along with the traditional map.  They have tabs to see different races, and a concise summary including total popular vote.  Of course they have a bevy of live bloggers churning out blog entries as fast as they can.

The Huffington Post has a webpage devoted to embedded widgets from other websites.  It’s a great webpage to compare the numbers that different sources are reporting.  They have already declared Obama President elect, but they do tend to be a little bit biased towards the left.

On the other end of the biased media spectrum Fox News seems to be having technical difficulties with their AJAX map, but the headline declares “President Obama”

North Caroina is still too close to call at all.  It’s been very exciting to live in Hillsborough, NC during this election.  North Carolina has been a solid republican state in every election in my lifetime.  I was born in Alamance county, NC.  I’ve lived in Durham, Chapel Hill, Carrboro, and Hillsborough as well.  I’ve never seen so much election activity and focus before.

Over in the UK The Guardian has something I haven’t seen elsewhere.  There is a tab on their map that lets you see a map where each state is drawn such that its area is proportionate to the number of electoral votes it represents, very cool.  Additionally they offer three shades of coloring on the map to indicate varying degrees of leads in addition to wins.  Very nice web design and programming!

Current NY Times count, Obama: 159 electoral votes and McCain 49.  Google and The Guardian agree on 202 for Obama and 80 for McCain.  Blue is up 3 seats in both the house and senate.

Congrats to Fox News, their online map now shows color on states, but just one shade.   Strange thing is that they are showing zero electoral votes for either candidate.  Looks like they should put some more money and talent into their web development team.

I’ve got to start off by giving kudos to Fox News for having the most useless election coverage I’ve found so far.  As is customary they give a US map, but where you expect to see color coding based on current reporting there is but one color to the whole nation.  You have to move your mouse over a state to see the results.

So far I think I’m most impressed with the NY Times site, you get great color coding of states and counties with light coloring indicating a lead and dark coloring indicating a “victory.”  Of course, these are victories being called by the news media based on the polling results as they trickle in.  The NY Times site also gives you all the local info you could want by letting you zoom in to state level.  This is a great example of a quality web application.

Tonight, there are a wide variety of very high tech approaches to covering the election on the web. I’ll be posting as I come across things as I work here in my Situation Room. I’ve got two computers running three monitors all displaying something different. At the moment, I have the New York Times on my secondary monitor. I’m surfing on my primary monitor, and I’m using my laptop to blog here.

At the moment, Obama has 87 electoral votes to McCain’s 8. The democrats have gained a seat in the House, and three in the Senate.

Here in North Carolina it looks like Kay Hagan has beaten out the incumbent Elizabeth Dole. In my district David Price has beaten Lawson. The North Carolina gubernatorial race is still too close to call, but Bev Perdue has a slight lead.

Here’s the nicest looking widget I’ve found so far for those of you keeping score at home:

I started using Google as my primary search engine early on.  It was still in the beta testing phase.  You’ll notice some Google features have a ‘beta’ indicator in the upper left by their logo.  This means they are not considered a final product, or release quality, yet.  Final testing is being carried out to work out the last of the bugs.  All quality software products, and web applications go through this process.

But Beta versions don’t come out of thin air.  Google is kind enough to offer us an easy way to explore the latest search and web technologies they are working on.  If you dig deep enough, you’ll find it: Google Labs – http://labs.google.com .  From the main Google Search web page you have to click “More” then “Even More” then “Google Labs” will show up.

The Google Labs website lets you try out experimental web-based features before they make it into the official Google lineup.  You can explore the surface of Mars using the Google Maps interface.  There’s a search engine for the visually impaired.  Web developers and programmers of all sorts can search vast quantities of source code.  There’s also a list of Google Labs Graduates, which includes most Google features.

So, what inspired me to babble about this on the internet, for the world to see?  I just checked out Google Labs and found two new features…

There is an audio search tool that lets you search for web video where politicians have discussed your search terms.  You can type in any topic or issue and get relevant video of presidential candidates making statements on that topic.  It even marks on the seek bar of the video where your search terms are spoken.

The other new feature is also useful during an election.  It is a quotation search and comparison tool.  You can pick two politicians (guess who the defaults are) and type in some issues and Google will find you quotations from each person on each issue.  You can look at them side by side, and they are presented with cited source and link to full article.  There’s even a spin button to get another pair of statements.

Have fun with Google Labs.  If you’re still making up your mind on the elections, check out these new tools.  If you’ve made up your mind, then get out there and vote.  Early voting is the way to go, and here in North Carolina it has already started.  To find out details you can visit your local Board of Elections office.  Statewide information can be found by searching for “NC sboe” (replace NC with your state name) and your local early voting information can be found on your county BoE website, so search for “orange county, NC boe” or substitute your county.

Hope you have a great day!