Others Online Blog

Stats on Number of Others Online Targeted Introductions

Mike recently informed me that we're at almost 500K targeted "introductions" per week now. Our engagement rate on our widget is about 4%, and 40% of people who view a user profile go to that user's blog. Pretty cool, but IMHO not nearly good enough.

Widget Changes (Not Due to Halloween)

You might have noticed that our widget started looking a little different today. No, it's not dressed up for halloween (despite the horror therein), we're just playing around with different things to say on it and seeing what works best. For instance:

• Instead of our logo up top, we're displaying "Related People". To me it feels more appropriate to say "Relevant People" but then we've been seeing "Related Posts" in different blogs so maybe people understand "related" better than "relevant"?
• Below that title is "(hover over profiles)", just in case viewers don't realize all the fly-out goodness that exists when you hover your mouse over a profile.
• Instead of "Tag yourself. Be found." at the bottom, we have "Join now. Show here." Clever, huh?
• Oh yeah, and sometime last week you may have noticed the "Powered by Others Online" way down at the bottom.

Since we measure widget interaction (fly-outs, profile views and clicks) in order to report that info to our cherished users, we'll be able to see if this helps better drive traffic to users' profiles and sites. Expect to see small changes to these text areas over the coming weeks -- advertisers call this A-B testing. We're also playing around with different widget designs, but still not happy with anything.

Any ideas? Any feedback? Let fly.

Widgets and web site performance

We've been watching the use of widgets all across the web - in blogs and in traditional website - and an occasional question pops up regarding performance and whether a widget will slow down the display of a page. There aren't a lot of resources on the web that do a good job describing the situation and providing suggestions. Nial Kennedy has a fairly technical post on widget performance. The only really useful information is reduce total network requests - which basically means put multiple blocks of javascript into one file and multiple blocks of CSS into one file. This post about using fancy javascript to create widgets is on the right track, but really is meant for widget developers rather than widget users. Other sites that talk about web page performance actually have an incorrect understanding of how to achieve good performance, so I won't link to them here.

However, there are several tools that can help you see what your blog page performance is and provide a starting point to determining what to change - if anything. This full page test tool from Pingdom is very cool. It visually shows you all the files that a browser would load when someone views your site and gives you the actual download times.

Welcome TypePad Bloggers!

Yesterday the Others Online widget was posted to the TypePad widget gallery and since then we've had a number of new users. We've tried to take a look at each of the blogs who added our widget, in order to make sure all is working well, but it's possible we missed some. If so, please leave us a comment here or send us an email to support AT othersonline DOT com!

The making of a good widget

I've recently noticed several good blog posts about what makes a good widget - especially these three - one from Ivan Pope called "Ten Sins of the Widget makers" , one from Stefan Juhl "The 6 Essential Elements of A Great Website Widget" and one from Lawrence Coburn called "Anatomy of a Widget".

Ivan makes several good points about the being well-behaved when being embedded in a web page. The Others Online profile widget started out with essentially the same attitude - the widget should inherit the ambient look and feel of the hosting web page, the publisher of the widget should control the layout, sizing, color and borders to more closely adapt to the layout of their blog or page. One tricky thing which we also addressed was the page load time. The point of the page is to show content, and widgets are secondary, so we decided to delay rendering of profiles until the page has completed loading. Not many other widgets do this and those widgets negatively impact the apparent page load time. I hope widget developers read Ivan's post and take his suggestions to heart - all widgets should be well-behaved widgets and consider the needs of the page author above their own desire to be displayed first.

Lawrence's post talks about the value that a widget should provide to the publisher as well as the features that are valuable to a widget developer. In contrast to one point he raises there is a unique aspect of the Others Online widget - we aren't using our widget super powers to drive traffic back to our site, we are giving this visibility to relevant bloggers.

The comments on these blog posts are also valuable to read - check them out.

Performancing.com disses Snap Preview

This quote from Performancing.com is beautiful!

"Snap's preview anywhere gizmo is ruining the reading experience for millions of people. Its intrusive, obstructive and unuseful in almost every respect and use case. The fact that so many big blogs are using it, big well respected blogs, does not mean that it's useful, it just means that they, like most bloggers, have all the self restraint of a magpie in a sparkly things factory."

The comments on their blog were interesting and this was my contribution: I have found the Snap preview to be annoying also. Since I don't want to criticize widget developers in general, all I can say is that I hope they are able to tune it to be useful without being intrusive. One person mentioned that all widgets slow down the page load - but this isn't technically correct. There are a couple ways for a widget developer to delay rendering until after the page is loaded - similar to the way images load after the page is downloaded. I think modern browsers grab images on the fly so the display is faster, but its a similar idea. The trick is for the developer to care enough and be clever enough to do it right. For example, the widget I implemented at Others Online (which is very useful widget for bloggers in general - check it out) draws a simple grey frame then continues with the drawing of profiles after the page is loaded.

Update to the Widget Wizard

We've been getting good feedback from our early beta users of the profile widget and have incorporated a few suggestions. The biggest change has added support to the widget to choose whether to show which keywords match with the profiles found or to show interests from the profiles found. This is useful when you use a tag to create an ad-hoc grouping of people - like "2000bloggers" - and if that is the only keyword used for search, displaying that on every profile isn't all that interesting. But showing the user's interests is, uh, well, interesting.

Another change was to support "curved borders", but this only changes the display in the Firefox web browser. It doesn't mess up Internet Explorer, but the widget will just have the standard square corners. We'll have to wait until CSS3 is implemented before a simple approach like this works across all web browsers.

These changes are available via the widget wizard and you'll need to re-publish the widget to your blog to see the effect.

New Widget Designs and Wizard

Mike publlished a handy dandy new "widget wizard" today, along with 3 new formats. We're not yet done with Web site edits, so it isn't publicized on our site, but we do pitch it to new users on the last page of registration. Speaking of that last page, that has been overhauled too. GAWD, it was just horrible -- looks much nicer now. We love comments and feedback!

Here are screenshots of the new widget designs:

      

2000 Bloggers Widget Feedback

I'm pleased to see that http://www.2kbloggers.com is testing the Others Online widget. If anyone finds themselves here because they want to test it too OR provide feedback, perhaps y'all can comment on this post? Also feel free to reach us all by emailing support AT othersonline DOT com. We've already received good feedback, actually -- much appreciation