E-Biz Booster Blog

Since I have started using Google Wave a couple of weeks ago I keep a list of potential improvements that come to my mind while working with it.

You can find my original wave at the link below (requires a Google Wave account).



In the list below I omitted some minor issues.

Usability And Other Improvements For Google Wave

(1) Search panel: Selecting one wave or multiple waves with Shift+Click is unfamiliar. Shift+Click lets you select a range, but not single entries. There is no obvious wave to deselect one. A click without a Shift will open the wave and the Ctrl+Click will open the wave in a new panel.


(4) Right/Access Management: This will be essential to protect blips from being edited unauthorized and to keep conversations private.


(7) Privacy: A privacy feature for the “green presence dot” would be great. Like on Skype. Invisible, don’t disturb, away, online, chat with me, … Something like that.


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After my post Is Google Sidewiki Evil? I simply ignored the subject altogether and had disabled this function in my Google toolbar.

Yesterday, I noticed two very good posts with additional insights, good user comments, and I also added my mustard (as Germans would say) to the conversation and to the Google Help Forum as well.

But first things first.
Not many people are talking about this:

Google Sidewiki API

At least there is a documented API. All details about the Google Sidewiki API (↑) on Google's site. Here is what a developer can do with it.
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A very quick insider note.

The infamous NOFOLLOW attribute has been removed from this blog for the backlinks of all trackbacks.

I think, why not share some appreciation for (quality!) bloggers who write about my posts.

Right now this blog still does not accept PINGBACKS, but TRACKBACKS are highly welcome (quality only!). Regular comments are still not followed.

Now, it's up to me to write and distribute posts which are worth to be written about.

I think about upgrading and enabling PINGBACKS as well.
Let me think …

Of course, I will monitor, possibly moderate trackbacks, and update the comment policy accordingly shortly.

Yours
John W. Furst

A couple of thoughts about Google's new sidewiki.

There are already a lot of webmasters, advertising professionals, and business owners who are asking — actually demanding — an opt-out mechanism to block sidewiki from your site.

Now, Google points out two things:

• A webmaster can claim the first spot, the first comment that is shown on a page.
  
  
  

  Google sidewiki allows webmasters to claim the first comment
  
  
  
• They will algorithmically solve abuse problems.
  
  
• But you cannot opt-out.

Okay,let's see.

I follow the example which Google gives in their help pages and check their own webmaster's entry on their toolbar blog.

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It just comes to my mind that I am writing posts about web site development issues only when something bothers me. Like the DNS problems with my ISP that I had in July this year.

It might not only be me who has noticed that many “Social Media Rich Web Sites” and blogs load very slowly. Even in a modern browser on a new computer.

The first guess is:

“It's all the widgets and external components they load.”

But it is not only how much you load. It is also about in what order you load it … and from what servers … So what do we usually have to deal with:

• many images
• various CSS style sheets
• Javascript files for improved navigation and AJAX trickery within the site
• Javascript widgets and iframes for interaction with other sites
• Flash files
• Java applets
• … etc.

The browser has to request each file individually. Some files are cached in your browser and will be downloaded only once (if your web server is setup correctly).

Then there are other cases where your web server might have to wait for data from third party web sites before it can complete to build a dynamic web page and deliver it to the browser.

The richness of Web 2.0 doesn't make it necessarily easier to be a great webmaster. It's true that widgets can be dropped into a site and add substantial interactivity to it in matter of minutes, but optimizing a site for performance hasn't become much easier.

A lot of different elements to deal with.

Examples:

• affiliate banners or affiliate data feeds
• RSS news feeds
• embedded video and audio content
• Digg, Reddit, and other social media votes
• Twitter, Facebook and Disqus widgets
• User avatars like from myblogcatalog.com or gravatar.com
• etc.

The list is really endless.

And last but not least the HTML part of the page itself (this one single file) could be already pretty big by itself. Or don't you have 20+ comments on your average blog post?

And don't forget, if you are running a content management system like a blog all this content is created on the fly out of a database. (Or are you using Wordpress Super Cache already — or whatever it is called.)

You will notice the longer you have been working on your website the slower it usually gets.

Time to speed up your web site again

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I have heard and read about a lot of problems with the Domain Name Service (DNS-Service) on an almost global level. I am not sure—nor did I look deeper into it—if this is related to the allegedly committed cyber-attacks originating from North Korea.

Web surfers in the USA, in Europe, in Asia, and South America reported on Twitter that they are having troubles to reach specific web sites or any sites on the Internet in general.

I did not even notice those conversations unless I couldn’t reach my (this) blog all of a sudden. I realized very quickly that the site is up and running and as a matter of fact this is the very only domain I noticed that I have problems with.

The vast majority of my readers won’t even notice the outage. It’s related to a problem my local ISP Telefonica seems to have with their DNS-service.

In less technical terms:

A DNS service translated the domain name into an IP-address and tells the browser on what server the web pages you are trying to reach are hosted.

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