Jerome's TOT

Status Competition Monthly user engagement at 40%!

2008-08-08T19:18:31-04:00:00

Facebook has recently updated their application metrics measurements from Daily Active Users (DAU) to Monthly Active Users (MAU).

This change has been really enlightening in respect to user engagement. For Status Competition, the application I developed with the help of Kim Vallee, here are the latest numbers:

We are quite impressed with our results! Before, the DAU could fluctuate between 200 and 400 depending on the day of the week. Note that I have 164 friends that are users of the application. Because of this, I viewed the DAU counts with a grain of salt. I agree with Facebook’s move as the MAU gives a much clearer picture of user engagement.

At 2,895 MAU out of 7,005 users, we learn that 41% of our users use the application at least once a month. Keep in mind that this has been reached with near zero advertising. We launched the application in January.

In the last months, we gained an average of 1,000 net users per month. Facebook Insights’ statistics tell us that we had 2,499 MAU a month ago. Because we had about 6,000 users at that time, it translates to 42%. Since the MAU fluctuates on a daily basis, our user engagement rate seems to be pretty stable at about 40%.

I can only hope that with our future (and long overdue) update, things will get even better.

Montreal’s new geek police

2008-07-25T12:19:25-04:00:00

Just took this picture this morning of Montreal’s new geek police. The perfect occasion to make use of my new iPhone 3G and upload to Facebook.

Let me tell you that I wasn’t the only person taking pictures of the policeman. I wonder, as a friend asked: “Are these made by Segway”? Another friend thought that if he would get arrested by this policeman, he would be laughing and searching for the hidden cameras.

Anyway, if you are looking for the chic geek look, you surely can’t go wrong with this contraption.

Thinking of using Graffiti CMS

2008-06-28T19:03:46-04:00:00

I am looking to refresh my company’s Web site, ParadiVision, which has not been updated in quite a while. It does not showcase what I really have been working in for the last two years.

Yesterday, I discovered Grafitti CMS and it looks like just what I need:

SEO optimized
Dead simple
Easy to customize the design
Easy to add plug-ins for
.Net engine

Since most of the content is outdated and I want the new Web site to be dead simple, I will probably start from scratch with new content. Since we have our own servers on W2K 2003 and IIS and that I’m fluent with C# and .Net, the new engine will be easy to expand or write widget for if the need arise.

For the transition, I will also be using ISAPI_Rewrite, which is an Apache mod_rewrite compatible ISAPI module for IIS. I will use it to do redirects for outdated URLs. Also, I will take the time to make sure all variant of the fully qualified domain name will be properly redirected.

Status of my wife's migration to OS X and a question

2008-05-29T11:27:30-04:00:00

Since a week or so, Kim Vallée, my wife is now the happy owner of a MacBook Pro. She used to be on Windows XP and I'm happy to report that she made the transition to OS X without too much problem. The fact that her new laptop is a lot more powerful that her previous one might have helped a bit.

Granted, since her primary occupation is writing, specially for her blog At Home with Kim Vallée, her computing and software needs are not really constrained by the operating system.

Software

1) HyperSnap DX

On Windows, Kim loved HyperSnap (v.3), swore it was the best and she was afraid of not finding a snapshot software on par with it. Well, she now swears by OS X's integrating snapshot keyboard shortcuts which are as capable for her need... plus you don't have to start a snapshot software, it's always available.

2) Microsoft Office 2008 & others

Between Pages and Word, she came back to Word. She liked Pages, but I suppose she prefers Word. In any case, the transition from Windows to Mac is not really a problem when you are using the pretty much the same software. The same goes for other applications available on both operation systems. Bonus to Microsoft for having the Home and Students edition, which makes the repurchase very affordable.

3) Windows Live Writer

Kim's killer application for blogging is Windows Live Writer. It makes writing posts a breeze, it supports almost any blogging platform and allows you to write offline and publish when you want. She hasn't found an acceptable software alternative yet for her Mac. During dinner yesterday evening, our friend Jon Husband pointed us to Qumana. It almost can do the job perfectly for Kim, but she depends on Live Writer's automatic photo-paper effect that get applied to pictures that get uploaded in preview and higher resolution mode.

4) VMware Fusion

To support Windows Live Writer, I installed VMware Fusion on her MacBook. It is quite impressive how well Windows runs on it. It also supports drag-and-drop and copy-and-paste to and from OS X. As a bonus, she'll probably use it to connect to our remote VPN when she needs to modify her blog's design. Windows Live Writer installation solved!

Hardware

On the hardware side, the MacBook Pro's is fast, the DVD drive is silent enough, the battery life is acceptable, the keyboard is incredibly comfortable and silent and the Multi-Touch trackpad is quite responsive and useful.

The only few gripes are due to Apple's obsession with minimalism. The Delete key, in reality, is a backspace and there's no delete key. You also notice that you depend a lot on the mouse's right button which is absent. Both problems a remedied quickly enough with the use of the function key and you get used to it quickly enough. For the mouse, you can always plug an external mouse too.

Getting used to OS X

Overall, OS X is a great operating system.

However, there's a single thing I really do not like on OS X and its applications menu. This is more my opinion than Kim's because she does not depend that much on application menus.

Having the applications' menus always at the top of the screen is quite inefficient, and, in my opinion archaic. It dates back to the first Mac and was never changed. I could see the rationale this design choice when all we had were tiny Mac monitors. But with higher resolutions and secondary monitors, it becomes an annoyance. When you add an external monitor, the menu still stays at the top of the primary screen so if you drag an application on the second monitor, you have to navigate your mouse back and forth from one monitor to the other to get to the menu bar and back to the application. On Windows, menus follow your applications' windows. It is much more practical and ergonomic.

Copy-and-paste Problem - Call to help

There's only one thing that's still nagging Kim and disrupting her workflow. It's funny how, without realizing it, you get used to tiny details.

In Windows, if you highlight some hyperlinked text from a Web page in any Web browser and then copy and paste this in Microsoft Word, it copies the text and the hyperlink at the same time. So the work flow is:

Highlight hyperlinked text in browser
Copy
Switch to Word
Paste

In Mac OS X, doing the same thing from Firefox or Safari results in only the selected text being copied in Word (or Pages). Since Kim first writes her article in Word and includes a lot of hyperlinks in her posts, the workflow becomes:

Highlight hyperlinked text in browser
Copy
Switch to Word
Paste
Switch to browser
Right-click on highlighted text - Copy URL
Switch to Word
Select text
Open hyperlink window
Paste URL
Close hyperlink window

So, Mac professionals or enthusiasts, is there a solution?

Is there a way, a configuration, a hack, anything, that can enable Kim to copy-and-paste both the text and the hyperlink at the same time when highlighting text with an hyperlink on a Web page?

UPDATE: On Twitter, Nini, suggested to click-drag the hyperlink into Word. This drags the URL only. If you highlight the hyperlinked text and drag it, it still copies only the URL. If you highlight a phrase or paragraph that includes some hyperlinks it copies only the text! On Windows, drag-dropping hyperlinks also copies only the URL but drag-dropping a blend of non-hyperlinked text copies the formatting including the hyperlinked text.

Conclusion

Even with an annoyance or two, the Kim's migration is a success and I do not think she would like to go back.

Learn what's the buzz on wall discussions with Facebook Lexicon

2008-04-15T23:49:40-04:00:00

Facebook Lexicon, a new utility that Facebook just announced can help you learn how certain words are used on discussions taking places on wall posts.

With that knowledge in hand, let's see what's the buzz on the Habs right now as the buzz in Montreal is increasing week after week.

We see a neat increase before the end of the regular season and a huge spike of discussions with the playoffs now taking place. Makes sense! Click on the above picture to see the most recent stats on wall discussions about the Habs.

It's pretty neat, but I would really like to see some numbers. Maybe they only use samples? In any case, I think the idea is more to compare tendencies.

So, without wasting time, let's compare between the Habs and the Bruins:

Ahhh! That's better. No wonder the tickets for the series in Montreal sold in minutes and they were still tickets available in Boston at the first day of the playoffs...

UPDATE: you need to be logged in Facebook before clicking on the images to see the latest stats.

Facebook targets FriendFeed

2008-04-15T23:37:11-04:00:00

With the popularity of FriendFeed and many others playing the life streaming aggregation game, it was only a matter of time for Facebook to react.

Facebook announces you can now import your feeds in your mini-feed and therefore, in your feed.

ReadWriteWeb does not see much there while allfacebook thinks that Facebook might become a real menace to FriendFeed if they open up their API for mini-feed importation. I agree with ReadWriteWeb that it would be great if Facebook began to open their API the other way around too. As they note the two won't really compete without commenting features and without support for more sites.

If Facebook do add commenting features, I think the viral aspects of Facebook might give commenting feeds a leg up and allow content to disseminate through the social graph. It might be a good way to discover content from friends of friends.

Will PIM data portability finally come of age?

2008-03-25T11:49:45-05:00:00

The big news ~~today~~ this morning: Microsoft Partners with Top Social Networks to Put Users at the Center of their Data.

Microsoft announced the Windows Live Contacts API and partnerships with Facebook, Bebo, LinkedIn and Tagged to access contacts and friends from different social networks. At the same time, they are launching http://www.invite2messenger.net to invite friends on other social networks to join them in Windows Live Messenger.

Even if Microsoft is participating in the Data Portability Workgroup, this is a separate endeavour. It does not look really selfless.

In any case, if you weren't already convinced, it means Microsoft is seriously trying to make its Web 2.0 place by aggressively tackling social networks. It should not be underestimated by it's competitors. I hope the market will continue embrace the challenge so that we end up more rapidly with true data portability.

Many startups are tackling the PIM portability problem. My favorite, for the moment, is Plaxo. While not perfect (it had a rough start when they had invites spamming people over and over), it has grown to become my data portability manager for contacts and calendaring. It syncs well with Google Calendar and Outlook which syncs well with my Blackberry. It's much better than my previous solution, but because of screen scraping it still has some glitches. Some of these glitches are with LinkedIn sync. Also, it does not sync Facebook events, probably because of term of use.

It's already hard to find something that works well for syncing basic contacts and calendaring information between Outlook and Google. I am still amazed that a company like Google cannot even get syncing from Google Calendar to Outlook or Google Calendar to Blackberry right.

Managing different social networks has become a pain. Syncing and sharing data across social network has it's own challenges like privacy and security. Robert Scoble who was temporarily banned from Facebook knows something about it.

It's interesting that Microsoft links the Live Contacts API announcement with Live Messenger. I believe that integrating information and interactions we have in social networks should follow us more closely. Who knows, maybe with Messenger I would find a bunch of social network friends that are also on XBox Live and I don't know about it? It hope. It should.

In my case, its also important that the PIM information follows me offline. It's the Blackberry's fault! Whenever I subscribe to an event online, it should easily follow me offline. Same thing for a connection with someone I trust.

I hope a real standard will be widely adopted and implemented soon by the different social networks (specially Facebook).

Update: The space is heating up yet again: Yahoo! Supports OpenSocial; Yahoo!, MySpace and Google to Form Non-Profit OpenSocial Foundation

Google Calendar Sync for Outlook: Almost good enough

2008-03-06T17:10:48-05:00:00

The Problem

Recently, I have been struggling to find a workable solution to synchronize Google Calendar with Microsoft Outlook in order to keep my Blackberry's events in sync with Outlook and Google Calendar.

The goal is simple:

If I enter an event in my Blackberry, I want it to show up in Outlook and Google Calendar.
Entering an event in Outlook should show up in my Blackberry and Google Calendar
Entering an event in Google Calendar should show up in Outlook and the Blackberry

Why use Outlook? It's my primary offline storage facility. I mainly use gMail, but my emails are also backed up offline in Outlook when I'm in the office. I want to do the same thing for Google Calendar: to back up events in Outlook. An added advantage is that I use Outlook to synchronize events with the Blackberry as their Desktop Synchronization has never failed me. Also, when I'm in the office, I find that an offline application like Outlook is a bit faster to enter new contacts or events or the send emails (specially with attachments). Outside the office, I use gMail and I now want to use Google Calendar. But, it needs to be synced with the rest!

I first tried Google Sync for Blackberry. Once installed in my Blackberry, it would simply not synchronize events entered manually in my Blackberry and upload these to Google Calendar. Of course, my old Desktop Manager for my new Blackberry continued to do the job and synchronize Outlook but I was left with Google Calendar being not up to date. Events synced with Outlook wouldn't sync back up to Google Calendar through Google Sync. So no go! De-installed Google Sync.

Enter Google Calendar Sync

Now, Google has announced Google Calendar Sync. It is used to synchronize to Microsoft Outlook. Exactly the missing link I need! If first saw it announced here.

It will only sync Outlook with your primary Google Calendar. For me it's OK, I never created additional calendars. The sync options are simple enough:

2-way
1 way: Google Calendar to Microsoft Outlook
1 way: Microsoft Outlook to Google Calendar

I excitedly installed the application ASAP and did a 2 way sync. Fair enough, my Outlook calendar events appeared in Google Calendar (some days now were in bold). I my hurry, I first thought it had created duplicated, because the day I was checking had the event twice! False alert, I remembered I had entered this event in both calendars. I entered new events and Google Calendar and did a manual sync through the app in the tray and my events appeared in Outlook. Great!

Google Calendar Events with guests do not sync!

Then, last night I created an event in Google Calendar for Third Tuesday's next event. It's on March 18 at 6pm at the Lolita Lounge (96 Sherbrooke West). Through Google Calendar, I also invited my wife as I know she wants to go.

After a few hours of work at the office today, I checked Outlook's calendar for March 18th, expecting my new event to magically appear but it didn't!

After some testing and trial and error, I came to the conclusion that events with guests will not be synced to Outlook. Be deleting the guests (sorry Kim!), I was able to make the event sync. Since inviting guests was a Google Calendar feature I had never used, it seems like I will refrain from using it for the time being. But what would happen if someone sent me an event invitation I accepted? I suspect it wouldn't sync either. I'll probably have to recreate it then.

Since then, I found comments of people having the same problem.

Conclusion

Does not work exactly as advertised. To their credit, they are still showing the "Beta" tag beside the name of the app. But then again, like gMail, will it be in Beta status for years?

In any case, knowing about its caveats should make it a good enough solution for me.

Use with caution.

Facebook finally doing something against forced invites

2008-02-13T12:23:00-05:00:00

As a developer, if there's something I hate in Facebook, it is all these "What the ____ are you?" or "What's your ____ personality?" applications that force people to spam their friends before showing them the results. These applications have rapid growth from day one and monopolize the most active application directory listings while bringing zero value except user fatigue against applications and invites. This is not what Facebook applications should be like.

Last week, I was at the FacebookCampToronto3 event and Dave Morin, Facebook's senior platform manager was a guest speaker. After his presentation, I got to ask the first question and I asked him if they are going to do something against forced invites. He answered that they were always looking to improve the experience for the users and that they do not like forced invites neither.

Our wish may soon be granted as it seems Facebook is finally doing something against forced invites!

The platform policy page has been updated. Now as per their policy, an application cannot:

Present a user with a subsequent friend invite page if the user has already clicked a Facebook-rendered Skip, Cancel, or Skip This Step button, unless the user explicitly selects to invite friends from a page that offers more than just the friend invite option. If the application presents the user with a friend invite page that does not include a Facebook-rendered Skip, Cancel, or Skip This Step button, the application must offer some navigation option to leave the friend invite process, and the application must not present the user with a subsequent friend invite page unless the user explicitly selects to invite friends from a page that offers more than that single option.

More information is available here:

Facebook bans 'forced invites' in apps

Forced Invites Get Shutdown

Facebook upgrades application about pages and statistics

2008-01-24T19:49:44-05:00:00

Today, new improvements have been pushed by Facebook for applications. The About pages are now promoted to the functionality of Facebook Pages and developers get improved statistics with graphs.

About Page

Since the About Pages now work like Facebook Pages, the About Page has gain new features:

The Review section has been converted to The Wall
A new Review section now uses the Reviews widget so that users can write reviews giving 1 to 5 stars to the application with a textual review. As the Wall was previously used by users for everything and anything except reviews, Facebook has answered developers complaints with a separate review space.
It is now easier to promote an application through advertising
Users can now become fans and developers can send updates to their fans
The developer's view is different: developers cannot write reviews and they have additional buttons to edit the application, view statistics, send updates to fans and other management facilities
Since it is now a Facebook Page, developers can add applications to their About page

To see an example of the new About page, I invite you to visit my application's about page: Status Competition.

Improved Statistics

The new statistics page, now called Insights displays nice-looking graphs:

For the graph, you can select different statistics:

Canvas Page Views
Unique Canvas Page Views
Average HTTP Request Time on Canvas Pages
Average FBML Render Time on Canvas Pages
Unique Adds
Unique Removes
Unique Blocks
Unique Unblocks
API Calls
Unique API Calls

As previously, the statistics are still compiled daily from midnight to midnight Pacific time so you cannot see statistics for the current day.

On another tab, you still get a sample of HTTP Request Statistics and on yet another tab you get the previous Add/Remove Referrer Statistics.

What's unclear for me, since my first public application, Status Competition, was only published 20 days or so weeks ago is that I only can see the last 2 weeks of statistics. I hope statistics are not limited to only the previous 2 weeks. One thing I think is missing is the ability to export the statistics for spreadsheet mashing.

For more information on the changes to the About Page and the statistics reports, you can read "Changes to the Application About Page".