I’m all for optimizing your website so that it is searchable; for example, from a development point of view you can do things like:

• “prettify” URLs
• create semantic page layouts
• create a sitemap to make pages easier to find by crawlers

That’s good practise, and that will always help your website; if not from a search perspective, doing things like URL prettifying will make more sense to your users, rather than loads of random text, numbers, question marks and ampersands spewed all over the address bar.

Selling a lie

But this kind of “optimization” is just a farce – a form of business which just goes to screw people over by charging them for the belief that they can be in the top 20 search results – something they’re not actually going to be able to achieve, and often in cases don’t deserve. Not because the content isn’t good (necessarily) but because there are a million other sites out there doing what they do, and a proportion of them are better than they are.

Jason Calacanis noted this on Episode #56 of the Stack Overflow podcast:

[Google] can’t tell you how to make a perfect result and how to get that top 10/20 ranking and so then everybody goes to the next best thing which is an SEO. And the SEO sells them the belief that they actually deserve it.

All about the content

The best thing you can do is focus on creating great content, and do some of the web development basics to make your pages semantically clear to search engines. Nothing comes for free, so if you want to be in the top results, you’d better make sure you have top content that is presented in an easy to digest manner. If your content is good, then people will start to like what you’re doing, which in turn will make you index better (through links, etc).

If you do that and invest your time and effort into your site, you don’t need a conman to sell you a lie.

350 million users. That’s a lot of people, but is the quoted total number of Facebook users that was announced last Wednesday.

Although objected to by many, Facebook has undergone a set of significant changes across the site over the past year, perhaps the most prominent being the real-time news feed built from activity by users on your friends list, which is updated as things happen.

This is really cool, but the problem lies in the way that the Facebook community works, or rather how human nature works, in that being connected with more people or being seen as “popular” is something desired.

The main consequence of having an ecosystem that promotes connecting with more and more users in this context is that it creates a huge scalability problem. Building feeds from data from lots of users is computationally expensive, and requiring more resources to do so becomes economically expensive. And this problem is only going to increase as time goes on, because no-one has the time nor inclination to be constantly tweaking their friends list to remove users they no longer communicate with, for the sake of a number on their profile.

But the real irony is that Facebook are shooting themselves in the foot in a sense, by building a community where having more users is promoted. This comes in the form of them actively tempting you to connect with other users, with “friend suggestions” or suggestions for joining groups that all your friends are joining.

Users being users, they’re going to join groups that they’re not even mildly passionate about, or connect with people even if they’re loose acquaintances because the cost is only one click, which only contributes to the problem.

Jason Calacanis noted the scalability problem on episode #56 of the Stack Overflow podcast:

Like Facebook with the social graph. I have 5,000 people on Facebook. When I log in, it takes 90 seconds for me to log in, if it works.
…
Because – it’s true! And I talked to Zuckerberg about it, I’ve talked to people about it, and they’re like “Yeah when you log on you realise like 18 servers have to go to work to like..” – when I log into Facebook I I think it would put about 20lbs of Carbon into the air
…

That’s building feeds from 5,000 users, which is fairly uncommon. But these kinds of problems have been noted by users with only close to 1,000 friends. And of course, why wouldn’t it? You’re trying to build a feed based on data from 1,000 users, for one user, in a few seconds.

Factor in 350 million users, and you have an extremely complex computational problem, that won’t go away.

Looks tacky.

In a web dominated by the Google monolith, advertising on the web is something of a norm, and an easy way to make money from an otherwise free service, especially with the prevalence of the “give it away for free and make money from ads” model which so many online services rely on to keep themselves running. But advertising can quickly degrade one’s otherwise professionally-clad website and turn it into a writhing mess of flashing colours and emphatic declarations in the imperative screaming manner of “buy this” and “pay for that”. It quickly becomes, frankly, ugly.

Alas, even Facebook had some integrity in this field several years ago, back in 2006:

Before it became awash with the sponsorships and advertising that it presents today. But why do websites do it? Because it works. Although not contextually relevant to what online advertising is today, George Orwell is purportedly quoted as saying:

Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.

And it does work; and what better place to advertise than the constantly evolving, easily accessible domain of the World Wide Web?

But there are better ways to advertise or make revenue rather than plastering your homepage with flash adverts that turn it into a fireworks display of cheap kitchenware:

1. Go text-based. Although perhaps not so eye-catching to the user as you’d like them to be, text-based adverts are much less of an eyesore than something which moves at 300 km/h across the screen in bright red and blue. In this way, users may even want to come back to your website. They are also much easier to fit in with the look and feel of the page, and, using stylesheets, can be integrated to make them work with your existing design.
2. Start free, offer premium. This isn’t applicable to all sites, but offering a free product or service that has a premium version which is paid-for is a great way to remove some or all of the advertising from your site, whilst generating revenue to support the product. This is much more common some may think; take for example:
   • Spotify – the peer-to-peer music streaming service which offers a free, unlimited service with some supporting ads. The premium service can be purchased either as a Day Pass (£0.99) for a day’s worth of music with no ads, or on a monthly basis for £9.99/month with no advertising and extra features.
   • Tweetie – a Twitter client, Tweetie is freely available for the Mac with occasional ads that appear in the Tweet feed. The premium version is $19.95 and removes the ads completely.
   • Wordpress.com – the blogging engine which is free to use with unlimited space for textual content and 3GB for media with adverts rarely displayed (I still have yet to see any). Services are offered to provide a premium experience such as space upgrades and custom stylesheets.

   The case made in these superlatives are often geared towards the advertising-free or advertising-reduced status; for example, with Spotify’s Day Pass it is tagged as being “ad-free”:

   

   which is seen as attractive to the user.

3. Advertise responsibly. This is what Stack Overflow try to accomplish: advertising responsibly by providing adverts that do are not animated, and do not look overly annoying. This method of approving adverts based on their content means that you can still generate revenue without selling your soul in the name of advertising. It also somewhat communicates to your users that you care about their experience.

In a world where the ethos of web development is putting the user experience first, annoying advertising just doesn’t cut it. Preserve your integrity by making generating revenue and providing a good experience to users something of a symbiosis.

(Sponsored by The Acme Corporation).

Tabbed Browsing

Opera has had tabbed-browsing for a substantially longer period of time than other comparable browsers; tabbed browsing were introduced in the other main browsers:

• Safari 0.9 (2003) [Source]
• IE 7 beta 1 (2005) [Source]
• Firefox 0.3 (2002) [Source]

Comparatively to this, Opera has provided tabbed browsing since version 4, released in 2000 [Source].

Internet Explorer 7’s implementation of tabbed-browsing was also rather poor, which caused Microsoft to load each tab into a separate process in IE8 to prevent one tab crashing from causing the rest of the browser to hang. I also particularly dislike the “You’ve opened a new tab” window, although I guess that’s down to personal taste..

Tab Previews

Also implemented in Opera are tab previews; when you hover your mouse over a tab, it shows a thumbnail of the page in that tab; this has been implemented since Opera 8, and is a quick and easy way to preview a tab whilst currently browsing in another tab; it’s also more useful when you have multiple tabs open for the same website, since the title for pages on most websites commonly starts with the name of the site itself, and the rest gets cut off due to the width of the tab, which makes it harder to differentiate between different tabs and their actual content.

Mouse Gestures

Another useful feature of the Opera browser is mouse gestures. These are actions you can perform with the mouse, to perform common actions – for example, right clicking and dragging the mouse to the left is the same as pressing the back button. Mouse gestures were introduced in Opera 5.1 (released in 2001) and has been a great, innovative feature in browsing.

Speed Dial

Speed Dial is a feature that was introduced in Opera 9.2. It allows a grid to be shown on newly opened tabs with spaces for web page thumbnails, containing screenshots of the pages; these can be accessed by clicking on the relevant item in the grid, or with Ctrl+1 to Ctrl+9 (Windows) or ⌘+1 to ⌘+9 (OS X) for pages 1-9 respectively. I particularly like these shortcuts, since I can quickly open my most commonly used pages when I start Opera with a few key presses.

With the release of Opera 10, there is a new maximum of 25 tabs, available in different arrangements of 2 x 2, 3 x 3, 4 x 3, 4 x 4, 5 x 4 and 5 x 5, to make the best use of space for both widescreen and standard displays – the 4 x 3 layout is particularly useful when using my MacBook, since it has a widescreen screen, and the “square” layouts mean that the thumbnails are rather small (since they scale to the size of the window).

With the recent release of Safari 4, Apple have implemented a similar feature to Speed Dial in their browser, called Top Sites.

Opera Turbo

Also released in Opera 10 is Opera Turbo. This is a “server-side optimization and compression technology” and compresses network traffic in order to decrease page loading times on slower networks, with the end result that the resolution of images in the page is much lower than normal. This not only decreases page loading times, but also reduces bandwidth consumption. A small icon is displayed in the left-hand side of the status bar, displaying the compression rate, and the amount of bandwidth that has been saved. It can also be set to automatic so that it is only enabled if Opera detects a slow network connection.

Not perfect

Although Opera is my favourite browser, it doesn’t cover every option; there is no concept of add-ons, unlike Firefox, for example, and being a web developer, the Firefox plugin Firebug is immensely useful in debugging web pages. Although Opera offers their own Dragonfly web development tool, I feel that it isn’t quite as good as Firebug.

But I have seen Opera Software to be revolutionary and innovative in implementing new features which are often later adopted by other web browsers, or have similar features implemented, and in this way I feel that Opera is a great influence to other browsers, and revolutionary in its own right.