Disqus - Latest Comments for Ian McAllister

Re: AB Meta

Ian McAllister — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 13:17:07 -0000

Fred, have there been any derivative uses of the smartlinked content in your blog? Are those smartlinks clicked on more than other links?

Like you and many others I like the idea of microformats and other ways to embed metadata and structure, but am still waiting for a killer app that actually creates value from them. Do you have a position on what that killer app is, or at least what class of app? It seems like Google has to be part of the equation. I haven't heard much about Live Clipboard lately.

Re: Amazon's quest for global retail dominance (quietly) leaps ahead

Ian McAllister — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 21:03:02 -0000

Nice post, Chris. BTW: If you go to http://www.amazon.com/wishlist/universal you'll notice that Amazon now provides website owners with the ability to add Universal Wish List buttons to their own product pages. Many small-medium websites don't have the resources to build their own wish list solution, and by integrating with the Amazon Universal Wish List they can provide users with a way to return to their site and purchase the item from them at a later date. They may also benefit by attracting traffic to their site from others viewing that wish list.

Re: OpenSocial is half-baked and Google execs don’t seem to care

Ian McAllister — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 17:55:47 -0000

"align cross-platform Terms of Services agreements"

IMHO, success in aligning cross-platform ToS's that are fair in terms of data/content/IP ownership would be more valuable than the common API hooks.

Re: Should people in glass Facebook offices throw stones?

Ian McAllister — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 10:11:34 -0000

Tony, can you list your examples of the times "open-ness of data or knowledge generally trumps locked-down-sown-up0tight-"mine mine mine"- perspectives on data."? It would be good to have a discussion of those specific cases.

Ultimately, if you want walled gardens to open up you need to make a business case based on hard data and meaningful examples.

Re: omg I'm just a startup, I can't do those fancy analytics!

Ian McAllister — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 13:42:38 -0000

Great points. In my experience, if you're not watching a metric (e.g. content creation, unique users, service latency) it is probably going South, for a mature business, or at least not growing fast enough, for a startup. It also prevents you from noticing when specific changes you make have a positive or negative effect. You end up building new features just assuming the old ones are working as desired and miss out on opportunities to grow your business by fixing/improving existing ones.

Re: Social network death spiral: How Metcalfe’s Law can work against you

Ian McAllister — Mon, 19 May 2008 16:56:21 -0000

@Work Post: I'm not so sure the data Facebook possesses has meaningful value if it stops flowing in. Perhaps for a little while but it will decay rapidly.

I think there are great examples of authoritative sites where if people come, contribute and leave then they have still created value during their stay that lives on after they depart. Think wikipedia.

Re: Trying out the new Amazon Recommendations widget

Ian McAllister — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 10:17:11 -0000

You've got a lot of duplication in your title tags so unfortunately the recommended pages don't show much of the actual post title. May or may not help you from a SEO perspective but I'll make a suggestion to the team who built the Rec Pages widget that they allow users to filter out certain text from anchor text.

I actually got a really great rec for a book I hadn't heard of before, "Designing the Moment: Web Interface Design Concepts in Action". I went ahead and bought it.