Author: Rob

Organic reach from all pages on Facebook is going to decrease significantly as a result of a change to the FB UI, where Page content will be split up from…

We typically think of apps as programs that run on your phone or computer, but increasingly often, apps are becoming an everyday part of our offline lives. That trend continues…

Search Engine traffic will often form a majority of your site traffic, so it's important that you understand what you can do to ensure that your site ranks high in…

The heat maps from eyetracking studies can show how users scan through your pages, showing patterns like the golden triangle and other  trends that can help you to optimize your design and curate content. Click patterns can also be useful for seeing trends on your website or emails. As you can see from this screenshot from Google Analytics “In Page Analytics“, heatmaps show where people are clicking, allowing you to then to maximize usability / ROI by adjusting your design accordingly.

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Apple’s recent patent application for making gym workouts a social networking activity was notable as a sign of the continuing evolution of social networking away from computers, and into what we typically think about as our off-line lives. It demonstrates how social activity if returning to its offline roots, transitioning from a technology-centered activity to become more deeply integrated in our daily lives.

Facebook, as the largest social network, provides a useful case study. Socializing on Facebook was initially restricted to activities conducted on their website, facebook.com. Activity was initially limited to the activities established by Facebook’s programmers, allowing you to update your status, and post comments and photos.

The site’s reach was then significantly expanded as they allowed outside developers to create games that people could play within the confines of facebook.com, such as mega-hit Farmville. Then in early 2010, Facebook made a change that let it go “viral”:  the like button. No longer were you limited in being able to use facebook on just their site, now every website on the internet became a potentially social venue.

The like button is allows a limited set of activities, allowing users to “like” or “recommend” individual pages on the web. Options for engagement expanded exponentially once websites gained the ability to automatically populate your facebook feed with activities conducted on their sites and software. Today, without any action by users, we alert our friends to  articles we read on the Washington Post, the music we listen to on Spotify, with an every-growing portion of our online activities becoming a part of our social feed.

Apple’s patent application for making workouts more social gym heralds the next phase in social networking’s expansion, as social networking moves offline. Your daily record of bench presses could potentially be added to your online persona without any action on your part, allowing for people to easily compete among their Facebook friends to see who works out the most frequently. No longer will you be required to use a computer or smartphone to engage in social networking activities, but instead it will become part of our everyday offline lives. (more…)