NOTE: I'm writing a blog entry about what's beyond the blogs...not to argue against the existence of one.

The top story of the current issue of Business Week is entitled "Beyond Blogs: What Your Business Needs to Know." The four page article discusses blogs three years ago and how they have evolved over the years and what lies beyond the blogs. Business Week writes "According to a recent study from Forrester Research (FORR), only a quarter of the U.S. adult online population even bothers to read a blog once a month." So what are they reading and what social media tools are they using? Here are a couple:

• Twitter (a blog service limited to 140 characters) - used by Dell, H&R Block
• MySpace
• FaceBook
• Wikipedia - now becoming widely used by companies worldwide, including Flightpath

It's important to harness and allow social influencing, so have your business experiment with them all. Over time see which ones are most effective and continue to use it.

Check out the following:
Beyond Blogs: What Your Business Needs to Know
Business Week Beyond Blogs

Think of the inbox as being the "In" crowd in high school and you, the teen desperate for inclusion. And like the "In" crowd, reputation and content are key.

According to Lyris' Q2 2007 E-mail Advisory Report Card, permission based e-mails are only reaching consumer inboxes about 75% of the time. That means as many as 25% of all permission based e-mails are banished to the land of unseen e-mails, social outcasts if you will. How can you better ensure 100% deliverability or that coveted title of High School royalty? Below are a few tips.

1) Only mail to people who have explicitly opted in to receive your e-mails. Some companies have even gone the extra step to ensure permission by implementing a double opt-in. This requires people to confirm their subscription through an e-mail delivered to them upon receipt of their initial request. Mail people who haven't opted in and you run the risk of them complaining to their ISPs (hitting the spam button). That's as sure fire a way of ruining your reputation and that of your IP address as wearing white before Labor Day. Be wary of purchased lists, especially outdated ones.

2) Remove unsubscribed addresses immediately and definitely within 90 days. It's not only good practice, in some cases, it's the law.

3) Suppress bounces from future mailings or remove them. Continuing to mail them can negatively affect your reputation. High bounce rates are just as damaging, which is all the more reason to only mail people who have explicitly opted in, and recently. For those who use an e-mail service provider, there are some that will put you on notice if your bounce rate hits 25% or even put your account on hold if it hits 50%. If you are mailing an older list, do a test and mail a smaller portion of the list to determine if it poses a problem.

4) Be aware of complaints. Some ISPs including AOL have feedback loops that allow you to monitor the number of complaints against you. Take advantage of them. If you are receiving complaints, try to find some patterns in mailings that may speak to a source or sources. If you find one, discontinue that practice. It could be based on the types of content or frequency.

5) Clearly identify yourself using the from field and even in the subject line. Subscribers not recognizing you could be the reason for them complaining.

6) Set the expectations of your subscriptions early on and deliver on those promises. Fail to and you might lose them or even worse feel the wrath of their complaints to ISPs. Make sure the e-mails you do send are relevant.

7) Don't mail them too often. You'll find a balance over time. Letting them declare frequency preferences during sign-up or at the point of them unsubscribing would be even better. The latter might prevent them from unsubscribing altogether.

8) Use e-mail authentication. SPF or Sender Policy Framework is one such solution that provides an open-standard, technical method for preventing address forgery. According to Lyris' Q2 2007 E-mail Advisory Report Card, "Failing an SPF check carries a heavy penalty - nearly 2.4 points from the current SpamAssassin test, on a Bayesian scale that identifies a message as spam when it reaches 3.0 points or higher."

9) Be clear and forthcoming with your subject lines. Being deceitful will only anger your subscribers and leave them feeling duped. If people aren't responding to the actual offer, you might want to reconsider it instead of disguising it. Also, do NOT use all caps and limit the use of punctuation.

10) First and foremost, if you are not using an e-mail service provider and an already whitelisted IP address (shared or not) in good standing, have a company like Habeas run what's called a reputation check. They will be able to determine if your IP address is in good standing with the various ISPs and not on any public blacklists (the "Burn Book" of ISPs). If your IP is not in good standing, these companies can work with you to improve its reputation, better ensuring deliverability.

Hopefully this will get you started on your quest for inbox immortality. Happy coronation high school royalty!

Picture it:
It’s a perfectly fine morning, and you’re on your way to work. You’ve beaten the odds in your daily challenge of toddler managing and gotten out of the house in under the estimated 40 minutes, and now you’re heading to the subway. You get to the station, only to find out that “due to necessary maintenance work, the train will be rerouted through Queens….” Anyone who has gone through this and hasn’t cursed under their breath must have the patience of a saint.

More on subways…for the last few weeks the escalator at the subway stop nearest my daughter’s preschool has been out for maintenance work. This must be one of the deeper underground subway stops in New York City, because without that escalator there are 50 (yes, we’ve counted them) steps we climb before we can even get to the turnstile. Then there’s another 27 before we get to the street. I should be grateful for the extra exercise, but with a space cadet three-year-old who likes to twirl and jump around the steps, my trip up those extra 50 can sometimes be a harrowing experience.

Then I started reading the book titled “To Engineer is Human, The Role of Failure in Successful Design”, by Henry Petroski, and it helped me get a different perspective on those things that seem like annoying hassles of everyday life. The book discusses the tragedies and near-tragedies of bridges, towers, and airplanes that have been poorly designed or maintained. Sometimes the failure is caused by designers trying too hard to have the most lightweight and graceful structure, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge is a perfect example that probably anyone who’s taken a high school physics course is familiar with.

Sometimes the failure is due to engineers & construction crew deciding that the elements of the original design are too difficult to construct to exact specifications and decide to take some short cuts, as in the  Kansas City Hyatt Regency Hotel Skywalks collapse in 1981.

In other cases the failure is due to crucial elements in the structure malfunctioning under extreme weather conditions, the horrible disaster of the Challenger Space shuttle in 1986 is an unfortunate example. 

Structural failure can also come from fatigue, from a crucial element of the tower, bridge, plane, subway car or escalator that has suffered enough fatigue and can no longer perform to its specifications. But these accidents can be prevented by routine maintenance, close checking of all critical elements to ensure that they can perform properly. The maintenance work being done on the train we’re taking or the escalator we wanted to ride is going to help ensure that we will be able to continue to ride safely and comfortably in the future. It’s not something that’s easy to accept when your commute is doubled, but better to be safe than sorry.

So, how does this relate to website applications and web servers? It’s definitely possible for programmers, designers, quality control (and yes even project managers) to take shortcuts, which can sometimes result in failure of an application or website. Taking on a risky project without being fully prepared for those risks can also sometimes result in failure. Or, subjecting your system to conditions that it wasn’t designed for can cause failure. Of course, failure in web servers and web applications is nowhere near as tragic as failure of a bridge or the space shuttle (but of course with computers controlling so much of our lives these days, the calculations made by computers can sometimes have a direct impact on structural success or failure).

What about fatigue? Do websites and web servers suffer from fatigue in the same way a bridge, plane or tower can? Well, maybe not exactly the same, it seems unlikely that a web server will have a crack or a tear in its outer casing that will cause failure of the system (although, lose connections between cables, network cards, etc. can definitely cause instability). Web servers need to be rebooted, patched and monitored to ensure that all critical systems are operating properly. Web Applications need to be scaled or redesigned when the demands on the application grow beyond what was originally planned for. Can this be a hassle to the people who use those systems? Of course! Nobody likes their website going down for system maintenance, e-mail unavailable, etc. We rely so much on the internet that once it’s taken away our productivity is at a stand still. This is a necessary fact of life of using technology and we should all remind ourselves that it’s better that the proactive maintenance is done and potential issues resolved early before they become bigger problems.

The book doesn’t only talk about failures. It also details amazing successes of structural design, and discusses how many engineering successes come from learning from the mistakes of the past. We need to follow this same practice in the software world, to accept and learn from the failures of the past and use them to build our new successes, and make sure that the health of our websites and servers are among our top priorities.

Believe it or not, I've never really been one to watch soap operas and it seems that I'm not alone.  According to a fascinating article in yesterday's New York Times, all of the soaps have been shedding audiences for years, with one exception... It appears that over the past seven months, the CBS drama “As the World Turns,” which has been chronicling the ecstasies and miseries of life in the fictitious town of Oakdale, Ill., for 52 years has actually picked up viewers between the ages of 18 and 34.

How could this be?  Well, since its introduction of a gay-theme story line last summer, many younger viewers have tuned into ATWT, apparently after they were hipped to the story line via clips posted by fans to YouTube.  This is a fascinating example of the power of viral media to breathe life into one of the most old-school types of communication.  And speaking of old, let's not forget that CBS/Viacom's 85 year old chief Sumner Redstone, is one of the most prominent media execs beating the drum against YouTube's business model.  Clearly, he's missing a valuable lesson in this case. 

- Jon Fox

Like the rise and fall of great empires before us, it looks like even the mighty Facebook is not immune to its community deserters. 

According to a report from 20bit entitled The State of the Facebook Platform, the number of active users within the Facebook developer community has declined 27% since January, while the number of highly active users has plummeted 47%.

In the article 20bit argues that there are four main reasons why activity within the Facebook developer community has fallen.  

- Facebook’s proprietary platform pigeonholes developers into an either-or proposition. Bebo and MySpace use OpenSocial, which allows developers to create a product that can cross multiple social networking environments and audiences. This makes developing on OpenSocial a more financially lucrative solution than Facebook.

- Developers are consolidating together, which may have had an impact on the number of users within the Facebook developer’s forum. With an increase in competition, developers are less likely to help one another out.

- Facebook is taking action to limit the spammy aspects of applications, which has had a negative effect their “viralness.” For instance amount of people you can send the application invitation has been limited to 5, news feeds and alerts have also been restricted.

- Increasing competition from other social networking platforms like Hi5, MySpace, Friendster, and Bebo has taken a bite out of theFacebook populous.

All of the statistical data is interesting and does confirm the author’s hunch of some sort of ebb in the activity of Facebook application development. It seems likely that developers are not going to exclusively develop applications for the Facebook platform. It is too risky to become dependent on one social networking platform.

What is also interesting is Facebook applications are predominantly games or “just for fun” applications as defined in a report by Flowing Data, entitled A Breakdown of Facebook Applications. You can actually track the analytics of Facebook applications from a website called Adonomics.

It still is a bit of a wild west out in the land of social networking applications. Developing a lucrative and successful Facebook application is still an uncertain path. There is no doubt that social networking is here to stay, and developing for it will be worth it at some point. However the last standing platform may not be in Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, Hi5, or even Bebo down the road. 

Early in a project, so many of the specific details of the nature of the software being built, specific requirements, project plan and staffing details are all very unclear. Because there are so many variables early on in the project, it is crucial to include a large degree of uncertainty or variability in the project estimate. This is not about being purposely misleading or avoiding commitment to an exact number with your stakeholders, this is about accepting the reality of software projects that leave so much to be defined early on. To commit to an exact number at the very beginning would be misleading yourself and your stakeholders and presenting a false sense of confidence in something that still has so much yet to be defined.

Steve McConnell, CEO and Chief Software Engineer at Construx Software, presents the idea of a “Cone of Uncertainty” in his book “Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art (2006)”.

The horizontal axis shows significant project milestones. The vertical axis shows the degree of error that has been found in estimates created by skilled estimators at various points in the project. What is obvious from the diagram is that estimates created early on in the project are subject to a high degree of error (from .25x lower to 4x higher). As the details of the project become defined and understood, the cone narrows. Obviously the most accurate estimate is made at the very end of the project development, but the challenge in the software world is to find somewhere in between where we know enough about the project to make the best estimate possible while still allowing major stakeholders to plan financially. More about the Cone of Uncertainty, and other estimation resources can be found here:
http://www.construx.com/Page.aspx?hid=1648

In his book Steve McConnell explains several different techniques used in making software estimates. He also made a very interesting and entertaining blog post recently, where he shared similarities between building a fort in his backyard and problems people run into with software estimates. The general idea here, and very humorously explained, is that in the beginning of a project it’s easy for us to assume that everything will go as planned and the project will proceed smoothly and in a timely manner, but it’s very common for things to take longer than expected. In his case, it was the little construction project in his backyard.

I haven’t built any forts lately, but I’ve managed many projects at Flightpath, and some that have taken longer than the original estimate, for one reason or another. But I also see this concept clearly illustrated in my day to day life outside of Flightpath. I find that it’s almost impossible to make any type of time or schedule commitment when a toddler is involved. I’m fortunate to be the mother (or project manager) of two little girls, and have the pleasure of bringing the older one to preschool every morning. What should take only 15 minutes, can sometimes take up to 40…and this is why:

1. The 2nd and 3rd bowl of cereal (6 mins)
2. Trip to the potty before leaving home, which can sometimes include the mandatory reading of the Dr. Seuss book while waiting for the potty business to complete. (8 mins)
3. Sneakers that get taken off and put back on again, only to get taken off one more time (and of course put back on again) before the final trip out the door. (2 mins)
4. Unexpected meltdown about which jacket to wear, and wanting to wear rain boots and bring umbrella on a perfectly sunny day. (6 mins)

You catch my drift…

So, I’m learning more about how to properly include uncertainty in my estimates at the appropriate times in the project development, both in the projects I manage at Flightpath and the mini-projects I manage at home every morning. It’s a good thing that our preschool allows us a 30 minute window for morning dropping off!

A new Gartner study called “Consumers' Value Perception of the Internet” surveyed 4,779 internet users in 18 countries and presents some significant, actionable, insights… Amongst other findings, it pretty much says that almost all people, across every demographic are using the internet to do the same the things:
 
1. Email
2. Search
3. Online Banking (somewhat surprising)
4. Sharing photos, videos, and files
5. Using geographic navigation services
6. Shopping
 
This behavior holds true for everyone except the 13 – 18 year-olds.  Their online activities are somewhat different…

Email is still #1 but music downloading is #2 (more bad news for the record industry, of course) and IM’ing, social networking, TV watching, blogs, chat rooms, dating, and message boards all follow closely behind.   For these young, early adopters, their internet activities (via computers or mobile devices) are a wholly acceptable companion/substitute/complement to their real-life activities.

Bearing that info in mind, it’s reasonable to presume that the overall evolution in digital applications will be moving in this direction in the years to come, as this demo matures.

Elroy Jopling, research director at Gartner and author of the study explains that “a new 'trickle down' phenomenon, where teenagers lead the evolution of consumer Internet applications, heralds a new era where Internet applications will mimic life -- communicating, entertaining, socializing, informing, transactional, either in a fixed location or on the move." 

You can purchase the whole Gartner report here: http://www.gartner.com/ or read more about it here: http://news.moneycentral.msn.com

- Jon Fox

Ever feel like you are making the right call but the client won’t buy it? Leverage what they have already told you about the target audience.  At Flightpath we do a thorough discovery process for all major engagements. One of the key components of this discovery centers on who the users of the website will be.

So when it comes to how to phrase a question in a registration path, what colors to use in a design, or even where to put a step in the registration process, why go in circles debating it with your partners on the client side from the corporate tower. If you know who the people are, why not just ask them what they think?

We recently used our knowledge of a target audience to poll friends, family, peers and acquaintances who met the target criteria for feedback on mood boards and a preliminary design that will inform the formal design phase.  If you set up a simple enough survey most people will take 5-10 minutes to do it. My guess is it’s a nice change of pace for the average working folk.

To do this, we leveraged a free service at Wufoo.com to post artifacts and ask some open ended questions in a basic survey. There are other free services we have used in the past like surveymonkey.com.  Then we sent out an email to our colleagues to explain the demographic we were looking for and basically said, “Please send this survey link along to people you know who fit into this very specific demographic.”  In just 2 days we had about 45 responses at no extra cost. The whole process of creating the survey  and sending out the email took less than an hour.

We will analyze that survey which includes both qualitative and quantitative data and discuss the results with the client during the design phase.