Jerome's TOTs

Because of my wife’s blog, I discovered the Pushing Daisies Touch of Wonder Tour microsite. It’s about a tour they are making across the States to promote the new season that will begin in October.

I love the Pushing Daisies TV show, but please, this Flash site is so yesterday. The concept of their Touch of Wonder Tour is quite interesting. However, the Web implementation begs for a Web 2.0 / social media approach through better usage of Web standards. At the end of the day (or the tour), they would get a better bang for their bucks.

First, maybe if I already knew about this site, I would have found it through a Google search:

The people (probably paid generously) who made this Flash site at least knew how to add a URL to the Google index. As you see in the search result above, they are first before Kim’s blog (my wife). Strangely, they did not bother to enter a title to their site:

A quick look at the HTML source tells us there’s really nothing there for SEO:

As of this day, it’s not even XHTML 1.0 compliant but at this point, no wonder.

Anyway, let’s take a tour of their Web site.

It’s your standard Flash microsite for the entertainment business with some animations, a few annoying sounds and Icons/Buttons for different features/sections of the site:

• Touch of Wonder Tour: brief description of the tour and calendar
• Daisy Diary: small bios of the tour team, Pushing Daisy Blog, Photos and Videos of the tour
• Tour Stops: map of the cities where the tour stops with pop-overs giving the dates and locations
• Ned’s Pie Recipes: recipes for 3 different pies
• Show Info: Brief description of the show
• Send a Daisy: send to friend feature

That’s all nice and dandy. Let’s see what sucks and how leveraging Web 2.0, social media and HTML standards would bring more pie to the table. Here are my recommendations to people who create such sites:

1. Evidently, textual content in HTML with actual meta tags would be more search engine friendly.
2. There’s nothing prohibiting having a nice XHTML/CSS and edgy graphical look for the “Touch of Wonder Tour” section as well as the rest of the site.
3. The calendar’s location could be linked to a Google map and replace the Tour Stops. It would easily allow visitors to get and print driving directions.
4. The Daisy Diary section shows a pseudo blog, without RSS subscription and is a victim of the dreaded Flash scrollbar syndrome that hides most of the textual content and makes you scroll and scroll to read stuff. This section begs for a standard blog engine that supports Atom/RSS. Start conversations with your fans through comments. Tour participants could even comment about their experience.
5. The Daisy Diary Videos are so tiny they are almost unwatchable. These begs for Youtube videos imbedded in blog posts. Gain the advantage that videos might go viral through bloggers reposting them. You could post these videos in your Facebook fan page, send updates to your fans so that videos can go viral through the social graph. You still gain comments from viewers and get ideas for improvements for the tour’s video sessions.
6. As for videos, the tour pictures would benefit from being imbedded in blog posts. Why not even use Flickr? It encourages bloggers to repost their favorite photos. Show me you value my time by losing the slow loading photo gallery.
7. Why can’t I print your recipes in Ned Pie Recipes section? You either need to spend more bucks to add the feature, but HTML gives you the feature for free. Do your pies taste so bad you don’t want people to try them out?
8. Because of an artistic trip, the Show Info text is barely readable. HTML anyone?
9. The funny thing about the Send a Daisy feature is that it opens a separate HTML page, probably because the artists didn’t know how to program this in Flash. As of this point, if you followed my advice, the rest of the site is already in HTML, so it’s a no brainer. At the same time, why not leverage Facebook, Twitter and other social networks? For example, a post to Facebook link/widget is free, quick and much more efficient for fans to spread to word to many friends.
10. You could go a step further and create Facebook events for the different tour stops in the calendar so that friends can invite friends to participate on the tour.
11. If you are a bit crazy, you could appear really edgy by supporting microformats for calendar dates and locations. Lots of my tech friends are Pushing Daisies fans and would be quite surprised! Google also loves microformats.

Instead of building yet another usability deficient Flash site in the entertainment business, wouldn’t be more efficient to leverage what makes the Web really work? Wouldn’t be more efficient to invest your budget in knowing more about your fans, in helping your fans spread the word? The cost savings will allow you to invest in the social media specialist you desperately need in the first place. You will even have a margin left in your budget to advertise through social networks and blog sites that cater to your target audience.

EDIT 2008-08-12: Looks like they are on Twitter and on Flickr at least since September 5. Just received this message on Twitter:

ABCPieHole @JeromeParadis Looks like you had some trouble finding us, but we’re here! Read your post as well. Do check out our Flickr: http://bit.ly/pd

Since I wrote this article on September 6, I must have missed their presence. I am glad to see their recent involvement in social media. It proves to show that when you are active elsewhere, your main Web site should reflect your social media presence. In any case am looking forward to read ABCPieHole’s Twitter updates!

EDIT 2 2008-08-12: They are having great conversations through Twitter. If you love the show, follow them! I am glad to see they are listening and taking note of my recommendations:

Yesterday evening, through Scoble’s blog, I learned that Microsoft released their Photosynth technology to the public.

Photosynth is an impressive piece of technology now out of Microsoft Live Labs. It allows to stitch together a series of pictures from a scene to generate a pseudo-3D view of the scene that users can navigate while being able to see the original pictures.

It’s not perfect yet as the plug-in required only works on Windows. They say they are working on Mac support.

I gave it a go using pictures from trip to Las Vegas I made with my wife this winter. We took an helicopter trip to the Grand Canyon. The pictures I uploaded to Photosynth were almost all taken from the ground where we landed. You can see the results here http://photosynth.net/view.aspx?cid=5b7540a5-f8b7-4a57-ae20-64db434c5eea

It took a little while to process and to upload with my old desktop at home. Once uploaded, it is apparent that you need to take pictures with overlapping sections to get the best results. There’s a little icon that allow you to see photos that Photosynth could not match to the set. Also, there’s one picture of the main set that’s strangely stitched.

Over all, I am impressed at the results! Next time I take picture of a scene, I will fire a lot of shots to make synths, that’s for sure!

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

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.

It’s not much, but it’s always nice to get a gift. Since I’ve been a member of XBox Live since it started (I was even in the beta), I received a little gift of 500 Microsoft points this morning in my Inbox.

It’s the thought that counts!