SOPA / PIPA Overview

At a high level SOPA and PIPA are proposed legislation, in the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate respectively, that would require search engines, advertisers, ISPs and other internet entities to regulate content and be responsible to remove allegedly infringing content. In theory, the ideas behind both bills are important and are recognized by many to be necessary in the fight against piracy, but the current versions are very broad.

Online Protest

Other sites like Wikipedia, Craigslist, Wordpress, Flickr, and Reddit.com took similar stands and provided information on how to contact your local congressman or woman. Social media sites like Facebook and Twitter were flooded with the SOPA/PIPA related posts and were likely large contributing factors to the widespread movement that took place Wednesday.

Was the Protest a Success?

SOPA and PIPA related searches trended very high on Google all day. Below is the list of the top 20 trending searches from Wednesday, January 18th, and 6 of the top 20 relate to online piracy. If users did not immediately sign the petitions, at the very least, it sparked some interest to educate them about the proposed legislation. Google says more than 7 million people signed the anti-SOPA petition, while Twitter reported 2.4+ million SOPA-related Tweets in a 4 hour span. More than 162 million people saw the Wikipedia blackout page. It’s evident that the protest had a positive influence on the online and social media communities, but did the ‘decision makers’ get the message?

If you haven’t noticed already, Facebook has quietly introduced a new set of insight analytics for Facebook Page admins, which provides better detail on how well their stories engage their audience.

The update makes it easier for users to interpret the data and includes great visuals to display user interactions and total reach of the content.   One of the new data points ‘People Talking About This’, informs page admins the number of people who created a story about your page. 

Upon initial login, page admins will be alerted to take a 5 step tour of the new layout and get themselves familiar with the new data. If you have already “skipped” the tour or want to take it again it is always available to you from the settings dropdown in the top right corner.   

Below is a quick snapshot of some of the new data and graphs that Facebook provides.
When a page admin initially logs into Facebook Insights the ‘Important Metrics’ are displayed with a graphical representation below.

Like the old Insights, the basic metrics will continue to be displayed, but modified with cleaner and easy to comprehend graphs. New data and graphs include how many people are talking about your page and the viral reach that the content is creating.

Like in the previous version, users are still able to export their data, but only as far back as July 19th and users can only filter data for a span of 89 days. It’s still uncertain if the date range will expand going forward, but either way the updated reports are a nice feature to allow admins a way to verify their social media efforts are targeting the right audience.

If you have any stories or tips on using the new Insights, please share them in the comments section below.

We recently facilitated an on-site hackathon at a client's office, where the KeyLimeTie team came in and produced the event for them and served as facilitators while their employees developed their ideas. We decided to have a bit of fun with it, knowing that everyone needs a break after long hours of intensive coding and brainstorming.

What if Angry Birds were real?

Angry Birds has been called "the new Super Mario Bros." I'm hard pressed to find someone with a smartphone who hasn't played it. Since Rovio sells the plush Angry Bird characters, we decided to make the game a reality.

The setup is surprisingly simple, though it took me a little searching to get it right. Instead of building a slingshot, we opted for a three person water balloon launcher. To make the bricks, we first bought 1/2"-thick foamcore from a craft store, but it proved to be too flimsy when we put the relatively heavy plush pig on top of it. Since we wanted the game to be a bit of a challenge, we had to find something else.

While walking at the Yorktown Mall near our office, I found Brilliant Sky Toys & Books. They happened to carry exactly what I was looking for; Melissa & Doug Jumbo Cardboard Blocks. These blocks are similar to ones I remember in play areas when I was little.

These blocks are heavy enough to pose a challenge when struck by a plush bird launched from a distance. In addition to the difficulty of hitting a narrow target (you're essentially playing a 2D game in a 3D world), this means that our Angry Birds game isn't a walk in the park. It's more fun because of the challenge.

We set up the large Angry Birds course at the client, and for about an hour took turns hurling plush birds at plush pigs. A lot of shots missed, and the participants experimented with different techniques of holding the birds, different strengths on the slingshot, and other techniques. We even tried to spread out the target to make it wider, but that actually made the game more difficult. In the end it appears that it's easier to focus on one target than it is to have several in front of you.

Here's What You Need

Want to build your own Angry Birds game? Here are links to the products we used to assemble it.

• Plush Angry Birds & Pigs
• 90 Yard Water Balloon Launcher
• Melissa & Doug Jumbo Cardboard Blocks

Did you build your own? Tell us!

If you try this or another version of a physical Angry Birds game, we'd love to know! Tweet us at @KeyLimeTie or email us at info@keylimetie.com.

Chris Grove, CTO

This past weekend, I spoke at SocialDevCamp Chicago with developers about how to integrate social sign-in features into their webistes and apps. Here are some of the key points from the talk.

What is "social sign-in?"

Social sign-in features enable your website visitors to register for your website or application using an existing login of their choice, such as their Facebook, Google, or Twitter profile.  As a web developer, you can leverage a third party as an identity provider and at the same time you can reduce "login fatigue" for your users.

Some benefits of using social sign-in on your website include:

• Increased conversion rate
• Better contextual data as you gain access to the user's profile information
• Less effort to implement (do you really want to write Yet Another Authentication Service?)
• Increased security by leveraging the third-party provider's security features

As a website owner, you face the challenge of designing a compelling enough experience to make users want to register and dig deeper.  Just 25% of users are generally willing to complete a registration, and 76% give incorrect or incomplete information when signing up for a new service.  People are more willing to return to (and purchase from) sites that automatically recognize users.

Why Not Social Sign-In?

However, there are some cases in which you would not want to implement social sign-in.  You need to be comfortable handing off critical site functionality to a third party (if you are in a regulated industry, this may be prohibited due to security requirements).

When implementing social sign-in, there's a tradeoff: use a convenient service such as JanRain and you are charged once usage exceeds a certain threshhold, whereas if you implement yourself, your effor to implement (also a cost) increases.

Further, know that at any point, Identity Providers (IDPs) like Facebook and Google can change their API, breaking your site functionality and forcing you to immediately stop and adapt your code for the changes.  When you use social sign-in, you trade convenience for control and dependency on a third party's system.

Best Practices

To get the most out of social sign-in, you'll want to use the social network's branding, which lets your users know that the process of creating a new account will be quick, painless, and trusted.  Also, make sure to offer multiple identity providers (e.g. Google, Facebook, OpenID, Twitter) so the user can choose which service they prefer.  You can streamline your user's registration by pulling profile data from the third party service, and always give a clear indication of when registration is a success.

Providers and APIs

• Identity Providers include: Facebook, Twitter, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Yahoo, OpenID, MySpace, Flickr, etc.
• Stand-alone APIs include: HybridAuth (PHP), OmniAuth (Ruby), SocialAuth (Java, .NET)
• Service APIs include: JanRain, Gigya, Windsoc

Chris Grove, CTO

Chris Grove will be teaching developers how to build login sequences for applications using Twitter, Facebook, Google and other popular services. People suffer "login fatigue;" they've grown tired of being required to create a new username and password for each service they join. Grove's talk will show just how easy it is for developers to relieve their users' pain by giving them an option to use an existing account.

SocialDevCamp Chicago is a weekend conference for entrepreneurs and developers who build social web applications. Several KeyLimeTie employees are a part of the team that produces this annual event, which draws several hundred attendees and has featured speakers from companies including Google, Facebook, Groupon, and the W3C.

See Chris Grove and others at the event July 26-28. Visit the SocialDevCamp website for more information and to get your tickets.

We receive our fair share of questions regarding Search, SEO, and Google. How can we get our site to rank higher? What is the most important SEO factor? There are many ideas, opinions, and explanations of what factors into the algorithms.

View the full Periodic Table of SEO Elements on Search Engine Land

A couple of months ago, the guys over at Search Engine Land put together this Periodic Table of SEO Elements. It’s a high level overview highlighting the most important factors in Content, HTML, Architecture, Linking, Social, Trust, and Personal, and also notes things not to do to avoid negative consequences.

Instead of hard-and-fast lists of SEO "DOs" and "DO NOTs," this infographic assigns a weight to each element and breaks out the chart into multiple categories (On Site, Off Site, Violations, and Blocking) and sub categories (Content, HTML, Social, etc). This makes it easier to note the relative impact an action will have on your overall SEO rankings.

It also emphasizes that fresh, high quality, engaging content is among the leading drivers for the search engines and ultimately the user, which is just with what Google has been stressing in recent news and through the Google Panda update. The chart underscores that no single factor will guarantee results. Over 20 other factors go into search rankings (both positive and negative). Most “on page” factors, elements like Titles, Headers, Meta Tags, and URLs, have been common in the SEO industry for years. Whereas, some "off page" elements are new to the practice and might take some time to develop. Practitioners have been focusing efforts on elements like Shares, Social Media, and Reputation over the last 12 months.

Finally, there are elements that are usually associated with "black hat" tactics, such as Stuffing, Hidden tags, Link Spam, and of course thin content. These will result with a negative impact on the website.

This infographic is a great resource for both people new to the SEO world and people that work in the industry on a daily basis. It’s a great source to refer to when creating new content and web pages. Search Engine Land did a great job of simplifying how these complex concepts are communicated. The Periodic Table of SEO Elements makes it easier to both practice good SEO and communicate good SEO practices to clients.

It's a debate that's raged since the first smartphones hit the market: should you develop native mobile applications, or web sites that are optimized for mobile devices?  The answer seems as elusive as ever.  The fact that we're still having the debate is itself something of an answer though; both are viable solutions.

The debate is so often framed in either-or terms, however there's no reason you can't do both.  If you expect that you have customers who will download a mobile app, then you also have customers who will find your web site on a mobile browser.  A mobile-optimized web site is increasingly important for most businesses, and should be a starting point for anyone asking the question to begin with.

Ask the Right Question

But the real question, from a technology perspective, is how to expose more sophisticated functionality to your mobile customers.  Native apps will usually be more fluid, be able to access all of the features of the device, will conform to the experience the user expects for their specific device, and will usually perform better than web sites.  They will also usually cost more to develop and will be limited to just those devices on the selected platform (iOS, Android, etc.)

A web-based application, on the other hand, will run on any smartphone (more or less).  But, you won't get access to all of the hardware features of the device, and the interface will not look like the native apps that it will run alongside.  Another downfall that's often overlooked is that it is harder for potential users to discover web applications, as compared to browsing a centralized app store.  On the flip side, there are a lot more developers out there who can work with web technologies than with the native development environments, and they are often cheaper.

This is just touching the surface, and there are no hard and fast rules.  It might seem, for instance, that gaming is best done as a native app - and this is undoubtedly true for games that rely on high-framerate 3D graphics.  But games that are suitable for Flash or HTML5 may work very well as a mobile web app.  So spend some time up front, and ask some questions.

• What technologies are feasible?
• What are your potential users' expectations?
• How critical is performance?
• How will you market and distribute the app?

Every project is unique, so don't let anyone tell you there is only one answer.  Your project will drive the answer that's right for you.

Interested in your own mobile app?

If you are interested in developing an app, or extending an app you already have to multiple platforms to reach a wider range of users, contact KeyLimeTie at 630.598.9000 or sales@keylimetie.com.

We're thrilled that our CEO, Chris Pautsch, was quoted in two separate Crain's Chicago Buisness articles surrounding mobile apps. Crain's approached Chris to comment on what works about the business applications area CEOs such as Billy Dec of Rockit Ranch Productions, Helmut Jahn (Murphy/Jahn), and Justin Seidenberg (Kiqstart Music) swear by.

Here are the quotes, with links to articles:

"A (video chat) app like Skype provides an extra layer of interaction that helps reinforce your message. If you have to air a grievance or a concern, a visual rendering can carry a lot more weight," says Chris Pautsch, CEO of KeyLimeTie LLC." Quoted in: The apps: Skype, GoogDocs || The user: Justin Seidenberg, owner, Kiqstart Music.

"An app like that allows (Mr. Jahn) to work directly in the same digital medium he uses to present his work," says Chris Pautsch, CEO of the Downers Grove app-development firm KeyLimeTie LLC. "There's also something to be said for not carrying around all that paper." Quoted in Helmut Jahn meets iPad: The very best apps for small business.

Interested in your own mobile app?

If you are interested in developing an app, or extending an app you already have to multiple platforms to reach a wider range of users, contact KeyLimeTie at 630.598.9000 or sales@keylimetie.com.

For the second year in a row KeyLimeTie has been named as one of "Chicago’s 101 Best and Brightest Companies to Work For" by the National Association for Business Resources (NABR). Here's a link to the press release we just issued about the honor.

Receiving this award again further validates for us KeyLimeTie’s continued commitment to fostering a positive work environment where employees feel valued and can develop to their full potential. Results were determined based on the responses our employees gave to the survey distributed by NABR. As CEO and Co-Founder, I'm happy knowing employees expressed their enjoyment of working at KeyLimeTie in such a way that allowed us to receive this award again.