A lot has been written about Steve Jobs since his death. For PUSH, his legacy is simplicity and beauty. No person has championed these wonderful qualities more. Of course, the most obvious expression of these is the hardware and software that Apple creates. Without them PUSH would simply not exist. However, we often find ourselves using the Apple website as an exemplar of what a website should be. It’s often the perfect way to visualise our thinking to a client. It is the most successful ecommerce site on the planet, in dollar terms. Yet it is beguiling in its simplicity. And it’s beautiful. As Jobs said “Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it’s really how it works. The design of the Mac wasn’t what it looked like, although that was part of it. Primarily, it was how it worked. To design [...]

  We hear a lot about social media “experts”. We even get called it often. It’s not something that sits easy with us. It’s not something we think you could call anyone – yet. What we can live with is the idea that we are working hard to become experts. We might be a bit ahead of others but in the social space, knowledge gained yesterday can be redundant today. What was working yesterday might not work tomorrow. That’s what makes it the most fun you can have standing up. It keeps you young, that’s for sure. In this fog of uncertainty, it certainly helps to have been in the web game for a couple of decades. It also helps to be naturally social people. While the technology keeps changing and the big players keep fine-tuning their algorithms, the good news is that the fundamentals are only getting more certain. [...]

The big story this month has been the major changes to FaceBook. The change that has grabbed most attention is the introduction of the TimeLine to replace profiles. It’s a big change for sure. But the changes that will impact on corporate FaceBook use were less publicised. Broadly, it looks like there has been some major tweaking to the EdgeRank algorithm that will make it even harder to get noticed. It seems that FaceBook has taken a heavier hand on what displays in newsfeeds. The central concept of affinity appears to have been weighted up and the secondary concepts of time and weight have been put on steroids. We have started our testing in earnest and we have already discovered that newsfeed punishment can be swift and brutal. It’s a worry for corporates who might inadvertently be struck off newsfeeds for a very long time. The introduction of the new [...]