Web 2.0

As we all know Twitter is one of the most powerful social networks around. The network is so powerful that if you have a lot of followers on the network and post a link you can get an incredible amount of traffic. The popularity of Twitter was shown today when someone tweeted that Bill Cosby died and it was reported as true by some media (in fact Bill Cosby has said that he is getting family calling his house thinking that he had passed away).

Two weeks ago I thought I would have some fun on twitter and decided to take my Twitter account that only had one follower (my wife) and see how many followers I could get. I was using the account to post tweets about my Porsche Blog. So, the first thing I did is change the user-name to something a bit more descriptive as to what I was posting, theporscheguys. The next thing I did was look for other users that where interested in what I was posting. I did this by following people that where also posting things about Porsche and following people that where following them (this was the key as most of these people will be more likely to follow you).

To make sure that I kept the tweets going (people want to follow people tweet often) I used Feedburner's new Twitter feature that puts a Tweet on Twitter every time something is posted on my Porsche Blog and Porsche Social Network.

I started doing all of this on a Friday and by the following Monday I had over 200 followers (yes 200 in one weekend)! It has been about a week and a half and I now have over 500 followers. My Porsche Blog and Porsche Social Network have increased in traffic by quite a bit. Before I started having all of these followers I was averaging about 30 unique visitors a day and now I am averaging over 600 unique visitors per day and it keeps growing.

So, if you follow these tips you can get quite a few followers and possibly much more traffic to your site.

We know that there are a lot of social networks, with new social networks launched everyday. Most of these social networks die because not many people use them.

I believe that the issue may often be that these sites do not separate themselves from existing social networks. Most of these networks are almost exactly the same as a Facebook, Twitter, Digg or Flickr and since they are going for the same audience they have very little chance at surviving.

I think that in general the future of social networks is to create social networks for smaller niche groups. Take for instance a site that i have been working on. The Porsche Guys Club, which is a free on-line Porsche auto club. The idea of this social network is to connect Porsche fans in the same way as a traditional auto club, but without the cost and overhead of a traditional club.

You can take a look at the site here.

So, this is an example of what I think the future of social networks will be, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on the subject.

I found interesting tutorial today about using JavaScript with Gzip:

The main problem when we are using ajax framework is because of their big size. Of course, it will extremely slow down the sites load time. For example, if we use the standard jQuery, it’s almost 100Kb. It’s even more if we use the complete Prototype and Scriptaculous that will cost around 150Kb.Compress JavaScript with Gzip | Ajax Tutorial, Nov 2008

Read the whole tutorial here.

The new Visual WebGui Web Applications Framework version which was released today offers upgraded performance, scalability and complete developer and designer freedom to design and customize Web 2.0 UIs. Visual WebGui 6.4 beta 1 incorporates about 1,000 complete features either added or fixed from 6.3, including increased customizability with the new control level designer, theme designer and jQuery integration. The new version also includes 4 out-of-the-box skins for simple personalization of the UI look and feel. The new version improves WinForms compatibility and provides a much comprehensive set of events with upgrades to the DataGrid and ListView.

6.4 also presents runtime enhancements with improved performance, memory consumption and CPU usage as well as scalability. The improvement in 6.4 reaches the compatibility areas with greater browser support which covers almost the entire spectrum of prominent browsers in the market.

Visual WebGui SDK with integration into Visual Studio 2010 will be available by the time that a 6.4 release version is out.

As announced before a revised documentation and a new task oriented kit will be soon available for Visual WebGui developers. The kit which will demonstrate all of Visual WebGui's controls, features and concepts will allow a quick live view of all of the platform's components as well as a deep dive for more advanced developers in their work.

Free beta downloads are available here.

Visual WebGui version 6.3.11 released after the R&D team had a major breakthrough with a designer issue.

In addition, Visual WebGui 6.4 Preview 4 was released. This version presents an important progress as Preview 4 is the last Preview version of the 6.4 version. Visual WebGui 6.4 allows to take advantage of incredibly fast application development without sacrificing the essential flexibility and customization of designing from scratch.

"The Visual WebGui 6.4 preview version is another step towards simplifying and commoditizing complex Ajax web development . The ease of developing with Visual WebGui combined with the new efficient interface between developers and designers gives Visual WebGui an unparalleled advantage over other RIA development platforms. The market loves our solution and rewards us in its download and adoption rate," said Navot Peled, CEO and founder of Gizmox.

The release version of 6.4 is expected before the end of 2009.

Download Free Preview:
http://www.visualwebgui.com/tabid/639/Default.aspx

Free Downloads Here.

You may have seen the Google Product Search and may have thought that it would be useful to include a customized version of the search into a website or application. Unfortunately, you can't just create a custom search engine based on the Product Search using Google's custom search creator.

So, how would you incorporate the Product Search into an application? The answer is to use the Google Base API. The API allows for you to call a feed and if you use the [item type:products] option it will use the Product Search data.

The API allows you to receive the feed in Atom, RSS and JSON formats. Google has also made it very easy by making a feed URL builder (you can access the builder here).

So, if you want to make an application using the Products Search now you can.

MyTimelineOnline is a unique blogging website featuring advanced controls that allows users to document their life, or the life of a loved one and to share their collective experiences within their social network and with the world. MyTimelineOnline features a control originally designed by MIT and converted to .NET by Rob Chartier. The timeline view allows users to quickly navigate several years' worth of postings to explore what events occurred in their own life or the lives of others.

The site was developed by a single individual and originally technologies such as Telerik were considered and discarded due to the complexity and cost. As a result, the entire site was rewritten by a single part time developer in Visual WebGui which provided a significant increase in the usability of the site as well as the visual style. Visual WebGui was chosen since it was extremely easy to use & develop with and it also allowed rewriting pages written in other Ajax solutions very quickly. Additionally, Visual WebGui allowed focusing on usability since the Visual WebGui themes took care of the rest.

Prior to upgrading the site to Visual WebGui the user experience was lacking, including repeating unnecessary page refreshes. "With VWG I was able to create a fully ajax’ed site quickly without worrying about the typical issues," founder John Ruf.

Read the full article...

Visual WebGui is announcing that its rich Internet application platform can now enables customers to build and deploy applications to Microsoft’s cloud computing environment, Windows Azure. Gizmox will demonstrate to customers and partners an extremely fast and low-cost method to port line of business (LOB) applications to the cloud using the Visual WebGui Cloud platform, at the WPC in New Orleans this week.

There is more information about the Visual WebGui platform as a cloud solution in the official press release. Click here.

Visual WebGui 6.3.8a was released today as a fix to the following v6.3.8 issues:

VWG-5087 - IE-Button: The right-side border should be rendered in the correct position
VWG-4256 - Button with 21x21 image should not crop image with button size of 25x25
VWG-5091 - OpenFileDialog non-Flash should not throw JS error (while calling parent.Upload_CloseWindow())
VWG-5092 - OpenFileDialog non-Flash should not hang when OK button pressed
VWG-5093 - OpenFileDialog in Flash mode should not throw JS error while Obscuring active
VWG-5090 - OpenFileDialog non-Flash should show frames around the buttons

Click here to download all 6.3.8a versions...

Gizmox's Visual WebGui Web & Cloud platform will be presented at Microsoft's WPC in New Orleans between July 13 to July 16 within the Windows Azure booth. Visual WebGui can now enable the development & migration of applications to Microsoft's Cloud computing environment - Windows Azure.

Visual WebGui’s virtualization technology also dramatically reduces customers’ cloud bandwidth and CPU usage, offering a more cost effective runtime environment for native Azure applications.