Leeds SEO

A couple of weeks back I had the pleasure of attending “Future Of Web Apps” in London. The event was extremely well organised and very good value. I thought the selection of speakers was very good, although I would have liked to see a few more Brits in the line-up. As this is a blog mostly about SEO I will focus less on the technical aspects of the conference, although I’ll put some techy bits towards then end.

First up was Kevin Rose from Digg. He had a bunch of tips for gaining popularity:

• When building features find ways that they can increase the users self-worth or stroke their ego using emotional and visible rewards (leaderboards, highlighting profiles against top contributions)
• Stop over building features, pick 2-3 things to focus on and always ask yourself “is there anything I can take away from this feature?”
• Stop thinking you understand your users – learn from what they’re actually doing on your site. Decide on what you’re going to build and build it (avoid analysis paralysis). Keep iterating.
• When launching features think about using invite-only systems to deliberately limit the number of people. Hand out invites to influential bloggers/press and see the buzz build.
• Connect with your community: start a podcast, throw launch parties and quarterly/yearly events.
• Look for a hook to get people involved (e.g. with Farmville on Facebook they send notifications – three of you friends helped you out – repay the favour).

Also Kevin gave some good answers to questions asked from the audience:

• Dealing with people trying to game the system: Be careful about banning people – don’t do it visually – some users might do stuff that looks like gaming without realising – create a user on-boarding process that takes them through positive steps to help them understand what then need to do.
• Did Digg ever pay for marketing? Digg never did, everything was basically word of mouth, they never paid for traditional advertising, PPC, etc.
• What’s next with Digg? Digg will doing less on just the homepage and also looking at promoting the other vertical landing pages.

Video of Kevin’s presentation:

Taking your Site from One to One Million Users by Kevin Rose from Carsonified on Vimeo.

Mike McDerment from Freshbooks gave some advice on “socks and underwear” (boring but essential) things you should be doing to analyse your site.

• You need to understand the funnel of how your users convert. This is not always simple if you run sites with different options, such as freemium (give users a free account then encourage them to upgrade). The conversion to paying user could take many months.
• For tracking users you need to ensure that your marketing information (referrer, keyword, landing page, etc) is stored with the user’s account. This way you can see how different marketing strategies convert over a period of time.
• Build a simple reporting interface that allows your marketing team to run simple ad-hoc queries across the user data so, as a developer, you are not constantly bugged with requests.

David Prager from Revision3 described three steps to building a great web app:

• Get niche – find the absolute core of your demographic and build around that community (apparently “niche” is really pronounced “nitch” – who knew?)
• Get rich – create the best quality and depth of content on your niche
• Go mainstream – take your niche and find new communities

An example of this was a specialist rock-climbing site that creating great content around that subject and then branched out to other extreme sports. Digg also did the same thing with tech news and then expanding into other verticals like entertainment.

Osama Bedier from Paypal discussed the way in which legacy infrastructure hurts innovation. He gave a wonderful example of why the space shuttle (one of the most advanced forms of transport) has limitations based on legacy infrastructure. Although I can’t entirely remember it all, essentially the space shuttle is limited in terms of the distance it can fly by the amount of fuel it can hold in it’s solid rocket boosters. The solid rocket boosters are built in Utah and are transported by train to the space centre in Florida by train. On the journey, the train must fit through a narrow tunnel that is just big enough to fit the width of the tracks (and hence the solid rock boosters can be no bigger than this). The width of the tracks is 4 foot 8.4 inches.

The reason the tracks are this width is because the American railroads we built using the same equipment to build railways in England. The railways were built the same width as tramways, which in turn were build to fit the grooves created by wagon wheels in dirt tracks. The distance between wagon wheels dates back to Roman war chariots pulled by horses. The wheels on those chariots were positioned to essentially be the width of two horses arses. And so, the reason why the shuttle cannot fly long distances into space is due to the width of two horses arses.

Osama also described an analogy of the internet being a little like electricity, in that for a very long time electricity was limited by the fact that appliances had to fit light fitting (as lighting was the first killer application for electricity). Many appliances failed to be safe until the socket (and switch) was invented so you could easily unplug. His point was that to enable innovation you need to remove friction. Coming from PayPal his main point was “cash is dead” and we need to move to entirely electronic payment systems. There are some barriers to this, such as allowing money to move in real-time (not days) and allow for micro-payments to work efficiently. This is the aim of PayPal moving forward and why they have launched their PayPalX platform to open up their API for using in innovation.

Chris Abad from Spymaster (the Twitter game that invited you and your friends to start conspiracy theories and interrogate captured agents). The application around two weeks to build (one week to plan, one to execute). They had great success in building buzz around the application (the first TechCrunch article was written within an hour of launching the closed beta). The things that worked for them where

• Build a great product
• Build a passionate community of raving fans
• Empower your users to market for you (they used the #spymaster hashtag along with a link to play the game)
• Incentivise your users to market for you – notification preferences (tweets) – recruit you friend – take non-playing people and turn them into players to give you more power
• Find key viral channels to maximise exposure – choose things that get attention – tag it with your brand so people know it’s you and trend
• Target influential people when you launch

Aza Raskin from Mozilla described their vision of browsers:

• You Centric – The browser knows who you are, it can be an identity broker, for example let the browser authorise payment
• Social – your friends are too important for any one company own it – the browser could store all you friends scrapped from twitter, facebook, etc and then know which networks to use when you want to communicate with them
• Secure – as the web gets more and more sophisticated the barrier between what we store on desktop and what we store on the web. Traditional web applications are prevented from accessing local resources such as your hard drive. To allow barriers to be broken down we need security.
• Make the web revolve around you – one of the big problems Firefox faces is that of two many toolbars. Tasks are disjointed (to translate a section of a page takes many actions to achieve). Browsers should become task-centric and allow you to use natural language to achieve the task you want to do (here he demo’ed some cool tech allowing you to select some text and type “translate to English” and it replaced the text inline). Your train of thought is key – the technology should allow you to think about what you want to do, not how to do it.

Video or Aza Raskin

You-Centric: The Future of Browsing from Carsonified on Vimeo.

Here are some slightly more techy snippets that I enjoyed:

• Dustin Diaz – Twitter
  • jQuery is like cocaine – one line can get you hooked
  • A framework is something that frames the way you work – if you use one make sure you pick one the allows you to work the way you want to
• Chris Lea
  • Scalability and efficiency are different things. Pretty much every app eventually becomes I/O bound (CPU,DB,Disk,Network,etc). A scalable system is a system where overcoming I/O obstacles can be expressed in financial terms. An efficient system is one where the costs of scaling are considered small. Working on scaling problems is almost always beneficial. Working on efficiency is sometimes beneficial.
• Addison  Berry – Lullabot
  • On the ethos of open source: Code is just a tool. Products are the things that make money. Sony uses Drupal and puts their code back into the open source community – they don’t sell code, they sell music.
  • Also a lot of things about making good sh*t but not monkey sh*t, just crazy sh*t and how you need to kick ass or she’ll kick your ass.
• Francisco Tolmasky – 280 North
  • The line between desktop apps and web apps is blurring. Take a look at 280 Slides which is built using the Cappuccino web framework. And with 280 Atlas (released 15th Nov) you can build the applications using a really great interface builder and run them on the web or on the desktop.

  Video of Francisco’s presentation

  Introducing Atlas: A Visual Development Tool for creating Web Applications by Francisco Tolmasky from Carsonified on Vimeo.

• Robin Christopherson
  • 19.4% of US population have a disability. Adults with disabilities spending twice as much time online as adults without disabilities (25 hours compared to 10).
  • He gave a demo of how bad Facebook is from an accessibility point of view. Try using a screen-reader such as NVDA on your site to make sure you aren’t making the same blunders.
  • HTML5 offers some nice accessibility features, in particular the new <video> tag (which allows for plugin-less video embedding) can support fully screen-reader capable subtitles and audio description.
• Chris Thorpe – Guardian
  • The Guardian have launched some interesting applications they often require rapid development and have peak demand around a particular topic (for example http://mps-expenses.guardian.co.uk/). A big CMS good for big stuff but very slow to implement new things. This is where cloud computing comes in: they deployed on Amazon EC2 using Django framework with only 1 week dev, 2 days of design and 1 day of a sysadmin. They have also used Google App Engine to deploy similar applications.
• Bruce Lawson – Opera
  • If you want to style (using CSS) the new HTML5 <header>, <nav>, <article>, <footer> in Internet Explorer you currently have to use JavaScript document.createElement(‘header’), etc – WTF!

  Bruce’s presentation on video:

  The Future of HTML5 by Bruce Lawson from Carsonified on Vimeo.

• Simon Warldey
  • Simon gave a really entertaining talk about the future of cloud computing using over 100 slides. As the presentation is so visual so here is the video:

    The Future of the Cloud by Simon Wardley from Carsonified on Vimeo.

    I advise you to find an opportunity to see him speak sometime.

• Dave McClure
  • Had a great quote with reference to your web site: “Some sucks. Find it. Kill it.”

Anyways, that’s all from me. In the words of Ryan Carson…  preciate it.