Disqus - Latest Comments for alistairc

Re: Proof that speeding up websites improves online business

christianbaymard — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 08:46:18 -0000

Superb, hopefully you will post your findings from the VP, here?

I know it might be hard to come up with exact figures, as you point out, e.g. it is browser dependent. But a relative browser dependent number is better than none.

I have a lot of upcoming conversion and usability testing right now, but I have written "curve on relation between load performance and conversion" on my long list of future conversion experiments. Lets see if you beat me to it :)

Re: Proof that speeding up websites improves online business

alistairc — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 07:29:10 -0000

My question too. The short answer is, I hope to find out more next week with their VP Products on a webinar (the link is in the body above) but the long answer is it depends. Strangeloop does a bunch of things to speed pages up -- many of them similar to the best practices Steve Souders recommends as part of ySlow -- automatically. There's also a bunch of secret sauce. But many of these depend on how recent the browser is, since newer browsers have more advanced functionality that can be taken advantage of to squeeze performance from them.

Ideally, we'd know exactly how much conversion improvement we got for different performance improvements, and fit them to a curve. Then calculating actual ROI would be easier.

Re: Proof that speeding up websites improves online business

alistairc — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 07:26:31 -0000

Chris/Adam,

Yeah, tagging was controlled in both groups (i.e. while improper tagging of pages is a bad thing, and moving the Javascript around can help load the page so the tags load in the background, it wasn't a reason for the differences in this experiment.)

While moving Javascript to the bottom of the page is often a best practice, for many sites that are dynamic, it's not an option -- the basic mechanics of the page require it. Also, browser enhancements in Chrome, Safari, and Firefox's latest Javascript engines have dramatically sped things up.

What does slow things down is the retrieval of external objects, particularly when they come from other sites whose URL must be resolved with a DNS lookup.

Re: phodroid | dkoffler

acroll — Sun, 24 May 2009 14:12:20 -0000

Looks strangely like Mike has his wolverine claws out and I should be terrified.

Re: MSFT and Yahoo: Nom nom nom

Alistairc — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 16:25:55 -0000

I'm gonna second that, Matthew. I hear rumblings from folks who should know about some sort of bastardized Yahoo/Facebook/Myspace frankenmerger, swirling around this week. Something's definitely in play -- and Icann is buying up Yahoo.

Facebook could do right by the ad platform (Overture) that Yahoo has built. Maybe the Three Gorillas will be Microsoft, Google, and Facemyhoo. Strange times call for strange measures.

Re: Does a Web Office hurt Google or MSFT?

mathewi — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 09:49:26 -0000

That's a good point, Alistair -- their approaches are very different.

Re: Does a Web Office hurt Google or MSFT?

Alistair Croll — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 09:19:04 -0000

I think my favorite line was the "Azure sky of death."

It's a bit disingenuous to say MS hasn't been focused on the cloud. They run MSN and Hotmail, as well as high-level programmable platforms like Popfly. They have 400M online users. They've also been using the hosted version of Office to demo it to prospective buyers in the US for some time now.

Perhaps a more accurate statement is that they haven't exposed the development platform to true development. Until now, it's been a tightly controlled set of tools, rather than one in which you can roll your own stuff.

I find it fascinating that Microsoft, whose early focus on developers as the driving force gave them desktop dominance, has only now reached out to those developers with an on-demand platform.

Put another way: Google wants to make everyone a hacker; Microsoft wants to make everyone a sysadmin; Apple wants to make everyone a media mogul. And their cloud strategies reflect this. Only Amazon, so far, wants to make everyone a developer.

Re: Nick Carr: Still wrong on Google, Part 2

Alistair Croll — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 07:50:37 -0000

Yeah, this is splitting hairs.

Google relies on links to find relevance. More links to more places means better data. Advantage O'Reilly.

But Google itself is just as useful whether I'm the only one using it, or whether the whole world is. It's not like a telephone, where having the only one is useless. Advantage Carr.

Ultimately, however, Google gets tremendous advantages from its use. Carr ignores things like navigational search, or the use of the Google toolbar. Why? Because those wily crawlers need to know what to crawl; so when someone types a URL into a search instead of an address (which they do 20 percent of the time) Google can use this to broaden the list of sites it crawls. Ditto for the toolbar.

Carr's right that the utility of the search box isn't itself more useful when more people use it. But Google has its fingers in so many pies that the response is disingenuous. Millions of people annotating Google maps data? A liquid market for relevance-based ad placement? A checkout model that allows the company to bill per transaction but bucket those transactions to pay less? The list goes on.

Re: Help, I’m clueless about Web Service scalability

Alistair — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 15:48:01 -0000

Robert,

Services are fascinating, for a couple of reasons. Sure, there are technical "service scaling" issues, which the other folks on the panel will know all about. Matt has great stories on the scaling of Akismet. But far more interesting are the human scaling issues. I always find more thoughtful discussions there.

First, there are terms-of-use issues. When you get to a certain size, you need to have policies for appropriate use. You wind up creating competitors, and an ecosystem emerges around your service. Look at Twitter, and the emergence of complementary products like Summize. Then look at what happened when Notchup exploited Linkedin to grab a bunch of users. How you monitor use and enforce terms of use is a big question, and it goes far beyond simple APIs and scaing.

Second, there's the fact that we're building human APIs. APIs and web services are typically focused on letting machines talk to one another. But by tying realtime activity feeds to our mobile devices, or location-based services that report our coordinates, we're plugging humans into applications, Amazon Turk style. As humans start to interact with applications via web services, through mobile devices and so on, a whole new set of scaling issues emerge.

Since you're the higher-level, human-angle participant on the panel, I'd elevate things beyond bits and bytes and into humans, policies, exploitation, and startup ecosystems.

Not sure that helps... sounds like it'll be a great panel!

A.

Re: No one actually “follows” 2,000 people

alistairc — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 17:19:40 -0000

Mutual following does allow the direct messaging function, so even if you're not following 2,000 you may be stating your willingness to let 2,000 people message you confidentially.

But I agree with your basic point, particularly with Twitter's search capabilities through Summize: If you were following 5,000 people you were probably filtering that output somehow to make sense for it, and you can just as easily filter with Summize or something similar.

A.

Re: Apple to iPhone users: No app for you

mathewi — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 11:46:01 -0000

I think you're right, Alistair. At the moment, Apple seems to be opting for the "vertically integrated" model, where it owns and controls the whole value chain from hardware to content. It certainly satisfies the company's legendary need for control, but I'm not sure it's the best way of generating longer term value for either Apple or its customers.

Re: Apple to iPhone users: No app for you

alistairc — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 11:08:43 -0000

Nice piece, Matthew. Got me thinking: This boils down to whether Apple wants to retain control of its vertical stack (from hardware to content) and the revenue that comes with it, or open up that stack (at the risk of cannibalizing revenues and making the iPhone less elegant) and go after Microsoft's client dominance.

A.

Re: 2008/03/09/microsoft-strategy/

Alistair Croll — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 06:44:13 -0000

Nice writeup. It was a challenge to get my head around the noise coming out of Mesh, and the three defenses seemed the best way to arrange it all. But as one comment made it clear -- my point wasn't that Microsoft will succeed in its defensive attempts, just that these are its postures. It's not clear, for example, that monopoly pressures will work again.

As for getting things to work together -- heck, Windows Mobile can't synch with the Vista calendar and contact manager using Microsoft's own Windows Mobile Sync for Vista app. So there's a long road ahead of the company.

Re: My Chumby is here (Scripting News)

Alistair — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 15:40:12 -0000

I wanna get one and try to install a Webot player on it. Having a Chumby that could remotely access all my music and pictures across all my machines would be amazing! Good writeup; thanks.