Twitter Cards: Engage!

// Just 6 days after my submission for inclusion on the #TwitterCards program, I got in and in the screenshot you can see the result: whenever someone tweets a URL of my blog, an "expanded view" will be available with a title, short description, thumbnail, my name and #Twitter handleIt also works on the mobile (iOS at least) app. See it live here http://bit.ly/t-cardtweet and read more about it here http://bit.ly/g-twitter-cards

Improve links to your site on Twitter with Twitter Cards

// Announced since last July, Twitter Cards is Twitter's equivalent (or "answer" if you like tech drama) to the Open Graph. By defining a set of #meta #tags in your #HTML code you can provide instructions to #Twitterin order to display an "expanded" preview of your page, when your page's URL is included in a tweet.Twitter Cards come in 3 types:
- summary: The default card, which includes a title, description, thumbnail image, and Twitter account attribution.
- photo: A Tweet sized photo card.
- player: A Tweet sized video/audio/media player card.

Basically, you can use the first for article pages (think of blogs), the second for pages where the main content is a photo (e.g. Instagram) and the third one for pages of videos (e.g. YouTube).

The structure of the meta tags are similar to #OpenGraph and you can read about it in the official documentation (http://bit.ly/twittercards). While Twitter re-invented the concept of meta tags for describing a page for social media consumption, they acknowledged that having duplicate meta tags is kind of silly, so if you already have the OG tags of title, image, url and description in your code, they will be recognised for their twitter equivalents (you still need to add a couple of twitter tags though).

The feature is still in development, simply adding the tags on your site will not do anything yet. You need to submit a form (http://bit.ly/t-cards-form) asking to be included in the beta.  Twitter promisses to respond to you in "a few weeks". Until then, you can try out your page on the preview tool (http://bit.ly/t-cards-preview). If you have a WordPress blog, you can use the Twitter Cards plugin (http://bit.ly/wp-twitter-cards) which does (almost all of) the job for you.

If you have gone through the process and can share some feedback on how this worked for you, post in the comments :)

Tracking shares before they happen (or even if they don't happen)?

// A tricky question poped up in my Quora home page: Is it possible to check, if somebody requested your site's #meta #tags ?The logic behind this is that you could track social shares even if the user doesn't complete the process (load's up the URL on Facebook or a sharing widget) and then quits.

My suggestion and response on Quora was that one can use the og:image tag. Declare a specific image that is only used on the og:image tag. Then check the Apache logs for requests to that image.

You will have when someone started the sharing process. You won't have when the shared page is shown in Facebook, because what is shown is a cached thumbnail that Facebook keeps. On that thought, you might want to have a dynamic URL for the image because the first time someone starts the sharing process, Facebook creates the cached copy (which is stored for some time)

Alternatively to the Apache logs part, you can set up some PHP/whatever script as the URL, allowing you to create a dynamic URL but also keep track of the requests in a database (easier than running analytics on Apache logs).

I haven't tried this, but I don't see why it wouldn't work, at least in part. It all comes down to Facebook/Twitter's cache systems and how often their cache is refreshed. It might also be worth looking into adding a random variable at the end of the og:url so that when someone tries to share the page (from a FB/Twitter button on the page for example) it would be a new URL and it would not be cached. Of course this would probably mess with share/like counts of the page.

That said, Twitter has their own set of  meta tags (because using the OG tags would be a discrace apparently), described here http://bit.ly/twittercards

Further thoughts on this are welcome :)

HTC cloned Jony Ive!

// The "evidence" :)
1) Video of Jony Ive on Apple's unibody process http://youtu.be/lJx6cF-H__I
2) Video of HTC's zero-gap process http://youtu.be/pDjfh5mFWUc

Quora, a Google+ blogging alternative?

// I generally detest article headlines that pose questions rather than provide a definite position, but I'm undecided on this one.Recently, #Quora upgraded their Boards feature, renaming the Blogs. The standard features include:
- a quora.com subdomain of your choice
- set a title, logo/avatar image and #blog description
- choice of set of basic categories that show up on the right side of the pages, acting as navigation links to your blog's archives
- categories are linked to Quora existing set of topics
- your blog posts can be linked to either your main categories or other Quora topics
- limited HTML editor for your posts
- statistics on views per post, with monthly archives, including which specific users viewed your posts
- multiple authors per blog allowed
- easy posting via the mobile app
- you can use your Quora credits to promote your posts
- your posts show up in the home pages of people who follow the topics of your posts
- up/down voting and comments on posts
- choice of 2 quite elegant themes (see the default one in the screenshot of my blog)

I've been using #Google + as a blogging platform, so here's how it compares:
- an existing audience: no need to build up a fellowship through Circles or join #Communities (to which you can't cross-post). Tagging to Quora's topics will give your posts a chance to being visible to hundreds if thousands of topics.
- a topic-based audience: the G+ experience is based on following people, while on Quora on following topics
- a different audience: while G+ tries to market itself as everything for everyone, it is mainly focused on images, from great photography to silly GIFs. Quora is focused on text and analysis (top currently trending topics are "smart people", "human behaviour" and "computer programming") which, as you can imagine, has implications on the topics that have the bigger audiences. Quora also has a small army of admins and reviewers who have created a culture of quality content. If you have such content, it should thrive on Quora
- a better editor: although limited ( no source editing), you have an actual HTML editor, can add multiple images anywhere in your post and can have actual links not just drop URLs in your text.
- social propagation: on G+ people can re-share your posts, increasing your audience. Comments and +1's though are mainly done on the copied posts. On Quora, there is no sharing feature (posts have Facebook and Twitter share buttons of course) but when someone follows your blog or a post (similar to subscribing to the comments) or comments to / votes up a post, a related "story" is shown on the user's followers home page as well as the user's profile page.
- statistics: on G+ you have no statistics on whether your posts where read at all. You can only get a total view count on your photos based on third-party sites that use the G+ API or through Picasa. On Quora you get a full listing of who viewed (if they have turned on the related privacy setting) each posts, and how many views you have today as well as per month.

So where do all that leave me with the original question? As you can guess from all of the above, I'm quite positive about it. Of course, I'm not replacing G+ with Quora, I'll be cross-posting though, you can find me (and see a live example of how the system works) here http://bit.ly/g-quora
In the end, I think there is indeed a big difference in the audiences of the two platforms, so there is no harm done from the "both" choice. What do you think? :)

How to create an infographic from your Google Analytics data

// Well, there's not much to say here. People love #infographics for visualising information and numbers in an easy to consume manner. People also love #GoogleAnalytics for an endless amount of #statisticsabout their website.Now you can combine both with a few clicks on the free tool by Visual.ly. The process is relatively simple, you connect +Visually with your GA account, select the website you want the report of, and you're done. You get a result for the last week, like the one shown on the screenshot (you get the typical long form, but I've re-arranged it to fit better on a page). You can also set to have a weekly report sent to your e-mail address.

Try it out here: http://bit.ly/visually-ga

Found via +Jules Stuifbergen

Does your company know what the internet is?

//_UPDATE_: The situation has been sorted out, the project is back online normally http://bit.ly/chartjs

// Yesterday I wrote (http://bit.ly/g-chartjs) about Chart.js, a new library for javascript/canvas-based charts. A day later, the site is down with a note shown in the screenshot, basically explaining how the developer's employer doesn't like the idea of #OpenSource.

Here's the outcome so far after a few hours:
- The code was removed from the original Github repository but of course has been copied (here http://bit.ly/chartjs-fork along with at least 92(!) forks) and it's not about to be ever deleted completely
- The angry commentators at Hacker News are already looking for the name of the company http://bit.ly/chartjs-hackernews

This is bound to get some press soon...

That said: this wasn't a ground-breaking piece of technology. There is no case that it was any kind of competitive advantage for the company (plus the whole IP issue is ambiguous as this was a university project of the developer). The company had nothing to lose with this being released as open source, only to gain from the publicity of one of their employees releasing a successful open source project.

But if you don't know what the internet is, you're bound to act like an idiot...