You might’ve seen our recent post announcing our new mobile site. We’d like to dive deeper into the design process, and point out the key components we set out to achieve. There were a few clear goals we had in mind while designing & building our mobile site. We chose some of them in order to go beyond what we’ve seen with the usual assortment of mobile sites today.

Seamless & Responsive Design

This phrase has been getting thrown around in website design for mobile devices discussions quite a bit lately, and we know that means the need for keeping focused on what people want becomes more difficult than simply following trends without fully understanding the rationale behind it. To counter that, we found that taking some common conventions head-on would help focus us on making the user experience better than ever.

Initially, we found that the use of something like http://m.hrb-ideas.com is fine & something that people have grown to terms with, but there are still some issues with detecting a mobile site by using a separate web address. For instance, link sharing has a discrepancy from person-to-person due to the device-specific URL rather than simply pointing to the content and adjusting for the visitor when the page is being viewed. It also restricts and isolates the mobile site in a way that we didn’t want to limit. For instance, we had the idea that, by having everything located at a single URL, the site could seamlessly respond to what the user is using/wants in a (hopefully) useful way. As a result, we’ve introduced a new feature on our site where the site automatically switches to the mobile site as soon as the screen is too small to show the full site.

Here’s a video of it in action (running in Google Chrome & sped up 2x for the sake of keeping the demonstration short):

This is especially useful when viewing the site via an iPad as the screen isn’t wide enough to show the full site when held vertically, but it is wide enough if held horizontally. It’s entirely up to the visitor to determine which way works best for them, and the level of control & custom tailoring is something we haven’t seen much of yet. If the mobile site isn’t for you, there’s still a button to switch between the full & mobile site that will remember the preference from that point forward.

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Designing for Touch

The use of touch screens changes some fundamental design concepts set with a keyboard & mouse in mind. This is not just due to hardware limitations (e.g. you can’t have stuff happen when hovering over something anymore [a tap is required]), but there are also design decisions that have to be made in order to avoid overlooking the niceties that people have come to expect when using a mobile device. To address this, we reworked our entire navigation to fall in line with modern mobile and touch conventions while streamlining the featured navigation to be tailored to what people would want when using a mobile device. Another important aspect was adding touch gestures where one would expect, and now all of the content cycles/slideshows (e.g. homepage & portfolio) have the ability to be navigated via swipes left & right rather than needing to tap on the left & right buttons.

Details, Details, Details

There are certainly things that many visitors will overlook while using our mobile site. We set out to use CSS layouts, shadows, etc. when possible so they show at full-resolution at all times. In addition to that, some of the primary images on the site were made at 2x resolution so they show at full-resolution on Retina resolution displays (which is not exclusive to Apple devices).

Text was made to be more compact on smaller screens so it’s a more efficient use of space (while still being legible), and text is shown at a larger size on tablets since they have more room and are usually held farther away when reading.

iOS users get the added benefit of complete home screen integration as they can add our site alongside all of the apps on their device. They then get treated to a high-res app icon on their app screen, can visit our site with one tap, and don’t have any of the web browser’s interface taking up room on the screen. It’s really worth checking out.

There’s definitely more to our mobile site than what was highlighted, but this should cover the three primary goals that we set out to achieve while we asked ourselves to “build a mobile app” with us as the client. We’re excited to hear what you think about it, and we would love to hear feedback or any questions you have that we could address in a future article. Most importantly, we hope you enjoy our new mobile site!

On the heels of Apple’s iAd last year, Google announced that they are adding rich ad serving to mobile devices courtesy of HTML5. This announcement has flown under the radar for the most part so what makes this stand out from Apple’s service? The biggest difference is that these ads can be shown on regular websites whereas iAd is limited to only be used in apps. Google has added this service to DoubleClick, a company Google acquired in 2007 for $3.1 billion, under their rich media toolset called DoubleClick Studio.

Downloading the information sheet (pdf) that Google provided alongside this announcement shows that Google predicts, by 2015, mobile devices are going to be the number one screen though which people engage with advertiser’s brands. This is no small claim considering the level of adoption the personal computer has reached, but I’m not sure if television is included in that claim seeing how they are talking about interactive advertisements.

Mobile advertising can provide a level of usefulness that other forms of advertising haven’t been able to achieve. People bring these devices with them everywhere, and that on its own is an incredibly important aspect (ex. seeing an advertisement for a restaurant while at home might bring it to your attention to go there someday, but an ad for the same restaurant while you’re looking something up on your phone might help you choose where you’re going for lunch that day).

These devices have integrated cameras and a bunch of sensors so the level of interactivity and intuitiveness can surpass previous mediums. What has been seen on mobile devices thus far is just the tip of the iceberg, and having established distribution platforms evolve to accommodate these capabilities is a good starting point.

We’re all familiar with online maps at this point. Some might have started with MapQuest while others were first introduced with Google Maps, Bing/Live/MSN Maps, or Yahoo Maps. For being something that was as simple as a fold-out that fit in the glove compartment of a car, the maps that the we all have access to today have come quite a long way. The maps that are available now are more accurate, have much greater detail & information, are quicker & nicer to use, accomodate for traffic & different methods of transportation, and are (of course) kept up-to-date. Let’s see how the evolution of these tools has affected web design as well as everyday people.

This entire campus was added via Google Map Maker. Image Credit: Ars Technica

Fundamental: Speed & Accuracy

It first started with trying to figure out who could get you the information you want the quickest & was the most accurate. We’ve all heard GPS horror stories of the map software telling people to do something crazy like make a u-turn on the interstate or simply takes them to the wrong location. Google Maps & OpenStreetMap have turned to crowd-sourcing to help enrich their maps with finer details (e.g. full-fledged college campus maps) in addition to staying up-to-date at a faster pace. Google has facilitated this by setting up a businesses verification process so businesses can manage their own listings, and Google has also launched Google Map Maker for making peer-reviewed map edits.

Behind the Scenes: Website Integration

Google Maps gained traction early on for its easy-to-embed maps that were still fully interactive rather than being static images (e.g. the visitor can get directions to the business & look around the map without leaving the site). They further catered to web developers by launching an API so developers can integrate a wide a array of map data/tools/capabilities into their website/web app. A developer API isn’t the most user-friendly tool available so they’ve since reached out to non-developers by launching My Maps so people can create & manage their own customized maps using an easy-to-use interface, and these can still be embedded like a regular Google Map.

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Important to Everyone: The User Experience

Google has also been evolving the technology powering their maps to make the user experience better. One of their largest improvements somewhat early on was the introduction of 3d models of buildings, landmarks, and terrain with the Google Earth application. The most recent improvement they’ve made utilizes HTML5′s WebGL technology to help merge the advancements made with the Google Earth application with the Google Maps website. They’ve been rolling out invitations to try out WebGL-enabled maps to people using HTML5-capable web browsers recently (a popup is shown in the sidebar to opt-in & shows a tour of what’s new). The WebGL tech allows for them to utilize complex graphics natively within a web browser (avoiding the need for plugins/downloads and doing so without introducing sluggishness/stuttering). Take a look at what’s new in Google Maps by utilizing WebGL:

I highly recommend enabling MapsGL if you’re given the choice as it’s a groundbreaking improvement technologically as well as being a more seamless & more enjoyable way to use maps in your web browser. WebGL is still a new web standard, but people can look forward to seeing more of this in the websites they frequent as HTML5-capable browser adoption increases. Needless to say, we’re investigating WebGL as something to be added to our website development toolset.

If you’re curious, Does my Browser Support WebGL? will tell you if your current web browser is WebGL capable or not, and upgrading to a web browser that has it is as simple as downloading the latest version of Chrome, Firefox, Safari (currently needs to be enabled via the Developer menu), or Opera (Internet Explorer hasn’t added WebGL support yet).

A site that’s online isn’t much of a site unless people go to it. The raw website visitor stats that services like Analytics and Quantcast provide sometimes aren’t enough for gauging the traffic flow to a site. A “link” is a fundamental way in which visitors reach a site, and direct links (typing in the web address) and search engines are the two other ways. Of course, there’s “good company” and “bad company” online that could be linking to you. I’m not going to discuss right & wrong in this article, but I will go over how to be more aware of one factor that affects all sites… backlinks.

Which method is best?

There’s a few different ways to find who’s linking to a site. Some are tools made available by search engines like Google while some are various services that are available online.

Google’s link: command (perfect for URL-specific stats)

Using link: as part of a Google search will list the webpages that have links to that specified webpage. For instance, link:www.google.com will list webpages that have links pointing to the Google homepage. Note there can be no space between the “link:” and the web page url. It’s also important to know that this finds the backlinks for that one URL, and doesn’t provide matches for every URL on the site. By the way, you can use the number of matches below the search box to get a rough number for assessing the online penetration of that webpage.

Google Webmaster Tools (perfect for site-wide stats)

As part of Google’s Webmaster Tools, they have “Your site on the web” => “Links to your site” in the side navigation that shows backlink stats for a site as a whole. Essentially, this provides:

• A list of sites and what pages they’re linking to
• Which page is being linked to the most
• The terms being used for the links
• and you can get fairly granular with each data set

Everything else

The above methods obviously depend on what Google has indexed, and similar tools are available using Bing and other search engines so one can diversify their data set. There’s also a great service from SEOmoz called Open Site Explorer that’s worth looking into.Unfortunately, searching for a tool that accumulates these stats resulted in finding a lot of adware/junk sites so your mileage may vary depending on the service being used.

Knowing who’s linking to a site a good way to understand what sort of company that site is involved with, and this can be helpful when working with the public relations & marketing for a website. It’s also a decent way to see what others are saying about a particular site, but do keep in mind that this is just one way that websites establish a connection with one another.

If you’re reading this, then it’s safe to say that you’ve probably played a browser-based game before. It might have been while waiting for a download to finish, during a break, or even is something that you like to come back to fairly regularly. The sheer ubiquity and pleasant simplicity of these games have allowed the online game market to grow immensely over the years. Tie-ins with the Facebook community (ie. Farmville & Mafia Wars) have generated quite a lot of hype fairly recently with some of them reportedly reaching somewhere around 60 million users each month.

Good ideas tend to spread to other mediums so we’re now seeing some of these games being ported to mobile devices. Games like Angry Birds, Plants vs. Zombies, and Bejeweled have found their way to the iPhone and other mobile devices even though their predecessors were simple Flash-based games that gained popularity with people who played the game in their web browser.

Here's a teaser of the Biolab Disaster game with an encouraging quote from the Guardian.

With the introduction of HTML5 comes another viable platform for creating these games. Parallels to the great flixel Flash-game library are being released that solely use HTML5 and other functionality built into every modern web browser. One that caught my interest is the Impact game engine. It comes with a library of common game-related functions, a level editor, and various other tools so that making a game in HTML5 doesn’t have to be done from scratch each time. You can check out the first game created using the Impact engine, Biolab Disaster. Impact is a commercial product that sells for $99 so I’m definitely curious to see if this catches on, and if it allows for further development.

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Games have been a part of the advertising repertoire for some time now. Companies like Nikelodeon, Adult Swim, PETA, and countless others offer web-based games while companies like Burger King and Doritos have even made the leap over to game consoles (XBox 360 owners should probably check out Doritos Crash Course. It’s free and yet tastefully Doritos-branded… sorry about that awful pun). The big companies aside, these HTML5 game libraries empower the web designers of the world (with knowledge of JavaScript & a good idea) to create games, and I can’t help but be excited about that.

I’m going to kick off this article by sharing what sparked my interest to write this article about HTML5 video useage. I recently went to boxee’s website (a company that offers Internet-based TV products and services), and I was happily surprised by the clever intro they’ve added to their site. It takes advantage of HTML5 video so people using web browsers not yet capable of HTML5 will have to see it second-hand, or you can (as always) choose to download Google Chrome or Safari to take a peek at it yourself. I’ve embedded a screen recording of the HTML5 version below so you can take a look (screen recording makes it look choppier than it really is).

Did you see the intro? You can skip this paragraph if you haven’t seen it yet, because I’m going to proceed to break-down what about this intro made me instantly know it was done with HTML5 video (honestly, the first thing I did after seeing it was look at the site’s code to verify my thought that it was indeed HTML5). The first thing that tipped me off was how fast it loaded. Flash videos take time to load up the Flash plugin instance (commonly causing a splash of color/white to be shown for a split second where the plugin will appear) and load the video player/skin portion of the Flash file (since Flash requires a “helper” file alongside the actual video file in order to display it) in addition to loading the video itself. Instead of requiring that whole process, the only thing that needs to be loaded using HTML5 is the video itself, and that means videos can start to play in less than a second. Another thing I noticed was how responsive my browser was even though it was playing a rather large video. Flash videos of that size typically cause my scrolling to become more choppy and are more CPU intensive than what was seen on this HTML5 version. Another, less obvious, thing I noticed was how well integrated the video was into the website design. The tabs at the bottom have a nice translucent look to them and there’s various pieces of the page such as their logo and login form in which part of the video takes place behind (this is something that is commonly problematic when using the Flash plugin), and the video compensates for the dynamic width of the browser really well.

HTML5 Video Usage as of October 2010. Courtesy of Mefeedia.com

With all of that whizzbang out of the way, we can now start to cover how the landscape of the Web has changed now that people are adopting the use of the HTML5 video standard. Part of the recent announcements was that Boxee has embraced HTML5 and switched over to using Webkit for it’s built-in web browser functionality. This definitely seems to the the trend since Boxee isn’t the first or the only company to switch over to the Webkit engine (most commonly known for it being what powers the Google Chrome and Safari web browsers) in an effort to provide the best support possible for the latest Web standards. Mefeedia (a video search engine) said in lastt October that 54% of web video is now available in HTML5 (doubled in 5 months), and they attribute the growing market of “smart” mobile devices as being the primary driving factor. These numbers are a good sign, but I still can’t believe the fact that bands and restaurants continue to use sites built for the Flash plugin even though their websites are most commonly accessed on a mobile device by people looking for a place to go while they’re out and about (costing them potential attendees/business with no real benefit as a trade-off).

It’s not all perfect though, because one thing that many people are still anxious to see the result of is if copyright-protected video providers decide to switch over to HTML5 or not. Currently, sites like Hulu and Netflix use Flash as it provides an encryption method that prevents people from ripping the video directly from the service. I personally think that’s actually a non-issue considering the people that want the content for free already have multiple avenues for acquiring the content (download via bittorrent, use a screen capture program [such as the one I used for the video embedded above] as a loophole around any protection the site might have, etc) and the protection methods that are available to be used in conjunction with HTML5 are actually enough to thwart off anyone looking to get the content from that particular website. A sticking point that affects web developers is the lack of agreement on which video codec is the official standard for HTML5 video, and this means that they need to offer multiple video files for various browsers (Firefox is looking for an open-source OGG video, Webkit is looking for a higher-quality H.264 video, and some are hoping WebM catches on as the official format). These issues can all be agreed upon eventually, and websites will continue to switch over to using HTML5 video so the future is looking pretty bright for a web video standard.

Google® gave us an update to what they’ve been up to regarding Chrome OS (announced in July of last year) and they seem to be ready to get serious about the potential of their new operating system. Until now, most updates concerning Chrome OS were highly technical and lacked any details describing what Chrome OS is actually going to be once it’s ready to be used by the public. As part of the announcement, Google launched a website dedicated to Chrome OS that includes videos detailing the primary features and a way to sign up for a chance to test the first set of Chrome-powered notebooks.

Operating System… like Windows & Mac?

Yes and no. It’s an operating system that’s based on the open-source Linux OS, but it’s very different from Windows, Mac and the other variations of Linux. The goal is to make the best operating system that’s built entirely around using the Web, because most people find themselves owning a computer yet only use it for accessing the Internet. Chrome OS’s inherent simplicity lends itself to strive to be as fast, mobile and secure as possible rather than trying to add and support new features that some people might end up using. They’ve been focusing on getting the core of the OS right first, and this leaves Google in a situation where they can now claim that their notebooks start up in just 10 seconds (even though the notebook itself is lower power for the sake of a better battery life).

I want to access my favorite websites & discover those I might like with ease

Enter Chrome Web Store. Google launched their Chrome-centric store as part of the announcement. Chrome Web Store has a decent selection of web apps for its launch and users of the Chrome Web browser will notice that this also offers extensions and themes.

iTunes® users will instantly be familiar with how the store is structured. The “apps” that are available to be installed from the store aren’t much more than bookmarks (considering they’re still sites you access with a Web browser), but they do have some enhanced functionality and added benefits.

• Installed web apps are able to be “pinned” so they take up less space in the tab bar and are easier to access (great for music).
• They can also be opened full screen by default (great for limiting distractions and for rich media sites).
• They also offer a different way to manage your saved websites (allowing bookmarks to be a set of links that you simply want to revisit sometime later whereas installed Web apps are sites that you commonly use or rely on).
• Web designers are free to make their websites act more like applications without having it seem out of place (sites can offer an app that looks and acts in a much different way than their website even though it’s accessing the same content).

This is what I'm greeted with when I open my Chrome browser

Do I need to buy a Chrome OS device to use it?

What a marvelous thing that open-source software is. Chrome OS is free to be installed on any device it can run on and it costs nothing to upgrade to the latest version (which isn’t too exciting considering upgrades to Web browsers, which is almost all of what ChromeOS is, have always been free). There might be particular hiccups that one could come across when using Chrome OS on a device not intended to run it, though. For example, Google will be bundling cellular data connectivity along with WiFi in every device in an effort to make it so that they always have an Internet connection. Check out Engadget’s in-depth preview of the Google Chrome notebook if you’re still skeptical that Google will actually be releasing this.

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Internet Explorer 9's new "site pinning" feature

Web browsers are becoming more of an extension of the computer/device’s capabilities than simply being a portal to access and share content with people, and this is allowing the landscape of website design to change along with it. People can now use an online photo service like Flickr® to upload, edit, manage, share, print and pretty much do anything outside of professional photo editing without even needing photo management software. The most extreme example of this idea is that something like Google’s Chrome OS® can actually be reasonable for Google to work on and for people to use.

Google made a great (under 4 minute) video that explains what Chrome OS is, but essentially it’s an operating system (replacing Windows/Mac OS X/iOS) that doesn’t include anything that isn’t necessary to access and use the Internet to it’s fullest. Doing so allows for greater speed optimizations and interface simplicity for those that only use their computers and devices to access the Internet and/or do things that could easily be accomplished using online services (i.e. manage photos via Flickr, play music via Pandora®, work on office documents via Google Docs, etc.). These things wouldn’t exist if the websites that people use today were to still use the precedents set by websites from years ago.

How are things going to change?

One of the things that’s being worked on and discussed is the natural extension of websites into the web browser’s interface and even into the operating system itself. The problem these efforts are trying to resolve is the non-standardized way that websites present interactivity and limiting the level of restrictions that websites have that’s ultimately limiting people from accessing the content that they’re interested in via their preferred avenue.

The beta for Internet Explorer 9 introduced a new feature called “site pinning.” Site pinning allows websites to provide a quicker way to access their site to those using Windows 7 by adding snippets of info and quick links to the Windows taskbar. A menu is shown where the program’s preview thumbnail is usually shown. This can range from an email provider showing the subject lines of the three most recent emails to a simple list of links that point to various sections of the site.

There’s plenty of room for discussion in this area in an effort to help determine the best course of action that considers impacts on usability, security, etc. One of the worst things that could be done is have something approved that turns out to be ill-fated, and any websites that spent time developing for that feature end up having their effort be a waste of time or possibly even have their site break. This deliberate and fully thought out advancement of web standards is what leaves features like natural extension of the browser’s interface to be merely proof-of-concept until agreed upon.

W3C Working Draft of the menu tag

HTML5 has a working draft of a feature that would allow websites to add a toolbar to the browser’s top bar only while viewing that specific site. This means sites like Google Docs could have a full screen view that attaches a toolbar that includes items that mimic those that can be seen in Microsoft Word. Doing so would mean that the look and feel will automatically fit the computer/device that’s being used instead of the look and feel that Google created themselves. It also provides greater control for the user (i.e. they could set various preferences for these toolbars that would then be applied to every site they visit automatically rather than having to do so on a per-site basis, resulting in a more unified and custom-tailored interface). This feature isn’t implemented in any web browsers yet due to the potential malicious activity where sites might try to trick users into thinking they’re doing something that’s being advised by their browser software (such as updating to a new version of Flash) and not the website that they’re currently viewing (such as installing malware).

The most common question

Why focus on building applications within a web browser when they can be built like traditional programs that are generally restriction-free and run directly from the operating system?

I’m going to have to keep my response to this quite brief as this article has grown to be much larger than I had originally anticipated. This is a valid point that the developer needs to put into consideration. Some of the more prevalent advantages of building an application online is the fact that rolling out upgrades reaches the entire user-base at once without any required intervention on their part, the inherent communicative aspect of it is well established and practically real-time, and any remaining disadvantages are being targeted in an effort to make them on par with other development environments. Running directly from the operating system will always have it’s advantages (i.e. performance), but the ever changing trade-offs are leaving web development as a valid option for many programmers, designers, and intellectual property owners. I do intend on dedicating a future article to this question so I can go more in depth while addressing this topic.

There’s a new Web service and iPhone® app called Path that’s been catching people’s attention. At its core, it’s very similar to other photo sharing services that you might have seen before, but with one key difference: they’ve decided to limit users to having 50 friends.

This seems counter intuitive at a glance, because the common goal of social media sites is to grow their user base to as large as possible and worry about monetization later. On Path, it’s up to you to determine who you want to have receiving your updates. In that same vein, it’s up to your friends to decide whether or not they want you to be a recipient of their updates. You can have up to 50 people that you send to and up to 50 people sending to you (these are separate lists so you can, in theory, interact with up to 100 different people).

They did put effort into making a nice looking app.

The artificial 50 friend cap and the accompanying media buzz about it has already generated a large amount of hype and controversy around this new service. I’m going to try to weed through most of that in an effort to understand what this means for those that actually decide to use Path.

I’m going to start by bringing up the obvious: other services don’t force anyone to friend/follow other people because they simply give you that option. People that find themselves overwhelmed with updates just need to take a look at their friends list and decide who they don’t want to continue following anymore in an effort to reduce the flood of messages that they couldn’t care less about.

Twitter® actually has functionality built-in to determine whether or not updates sent in reply to another person are included in your list of updates. You might have one friend that has 1,000 follows and another that has 10, but you’re still going to see their global updates. This makes it so that what you receive relies on their posting habit and not their number of followers. Facebook® acts in the same way. Users decide whose wall they want to write on or if they want to make a global status update for their friends to see. This option provides built-in functionality for determining what kind of updates you want to see in your list of updates.

So who might want to use this?

If you’re not pleased at how frequently particular friends are posting updates about stuff you couldn’t be bothered with; I’m sorry to say that Path is still going to make it possible for them to continue to do so. The real potential way for Path to survive is that public figures that use their Twitter and/or Facebook to speak to a larger audience can decide to separate their personal life from their public life by migrating their personal life over to Path. This is the primary reason why the “tech celebs” are generating hype around Path; they can now use the large user-base of Twitter and Facebook for publicity, and use Path for their real group of friends. Don’t think that this is special though, because this can be accomplished by using any second-tier social media service.

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People that don’t really have that need to separate the two groups (or only have one type of person they talk to online to begin with) won’t really see any point in trying to get their friends to sign up for yet another service when Twitter, Facebook, Flickr®, Instagram®, etc. give you the power to decide how many people you want to be a friend of or follow, and they also give you the functionality for reducing the amount of updates that don’t pertain to you or your interests.

Social media is not a matter of how many followers or posts someone has, but rather, it’s the content and quality of those posts that get people to actually read them. Path seems to have gotten publicity by adjusting something that’s going to leave many of their users nonplussed in the end, and it’s because of these factors that I’m not the only one seeing the “hook” to Path as pointless.

FeedBurner before and after the update (just look at those statistics!)

The concept of subscribing to Web content first started to take off with the widespread adoption of the RSS Feed in 2005 and 2006. These feeds were capable of containing text, images, audio, videos, assorted files and information describing each entry (even GPS coordinates).

This new found technology lead to people wanting to accomplish many different things. As a result, website designers had to adhere to numerous different types of logic and naming schemes just to get their content available to those that wanted it. Unsurprisingly, everyone rejoiced when FeedBurner opened to the public to alleviate these headaches and more.

FeedBurner made it possible for websites to provide a single feed that’s programmed and maintained in the way that they prefer that’s then automatically published out to the world in a way that universally available and fully accessible. This single service was great in it’s own right, but people wanted more and wanted to know more about how people are accessing their content.

FeedBurner proceeded to add features that allowed users to easily save, share, and subscribe to their favorite sites. For the publishers, they added analytics and instantaneous distribution of their content. The high level of activity and large user-base caught Google’s attention, and they ended up acquiring FeedBurner for $100 million. This was exciting news at the time, but Google seemed to have put them on the back burner. That is, until this latest update.

So what did they change?

They're serious when they claim that it's real-time data.

In traditional Google fashion, they focused on improving speed, granularity of information, and providing real-time data. Here’s a quote from their announcement:

“You can for the first time get stats on how much traffic your feed items are receiving from Twitter, as well as feed reading platforms like Google Reader in one place. Again, all within seconds of posting your content. Ping? Pong! Yep. That fast.”

I must admit, the novelty of seeing the graph update continuously right in front of my face with the latest information hasn’t worn off yet. The visual aesthetic has also been revamped to fit in with Google’s other services. You can opt-in to access the beta by clicking on the “Try out the NEW (beta) version!” at the top of the FeedBurner page, but it isn’t all good for early adopters.

This is still a beta, and unlike many of Google’s services that are in beta for years at a time, this one actually seems to deserve the title. A link to access to original design replaces the link that you click to try out the beta, and this is a key feature due to the fact that many essential features are not present in the new beta. You will have to switch back-and-forth to access any kind of feed and/or service management. This beta only addresses the analytics portion of FeedBurner. With that in mind, it’s probably worth checking out to see where they’re taking the service.