Google Website Optimizer, a powerful tool that allows website owners to split traffic and test the effectiveness and conversion rates for an array of variables, has traditionally required a lot of back-and-forth between any given site and the Website Optimizer interface.
With the release of a new API, announced today, Google is allowing site owners to conduct multivariate and A/B testing from their own platforms. Part of Google Analytics, Google Website Optimizer (GWO) is a free tool that "handles splitting a website's traffic, serving different variations and crunching the numbers to find statistical significance." For site owners, these minute variations can widen conversion funnels and lead to exponentially greater engagement and profit if changes are executed correctly.
In my last workplace, ordering food for the group was always a dreaded task. Regardless of how much you enjoy the company of your colleagues, there's always someone with a nut allergy, someone who wants their dressing on the side and someone who is quite simply, a pain in the butt. Best known for its web-to-door food delivery service, DiningIn just launched a group ordering feature. Rather than having to painstakingly record your staff's food preferences, users create an Evite-like invitation and give others carte blanche to fuss over their orders.
Every year at the Web 2.0 Summit Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker does a fast and in-depth presentation of internet trends. The report is available here.
Once again mobile is a big trend this year, with Apple's market share expected to "Surprise on Upside Near-Term."
Overall the key message was that financial markets have rebounded now; and that technology is "relatively impressive."
We're at the 6th annual Web 2.0 conference, now known as the Web 2.0 Summit. John Battelle and Tim O'Reilly opened the event. O'Reilly spoke about being at another transition point for the Web. They have termed this "web squared", a.k.a. "web meets world." O'Reilly said that in the current era "we're starting to instrument the world." He referenced a quote from VC Fred Wilson, that we are currently in a "golden triangle of mobile, social and real-time."
O'Reilly remarked that we're seeing "what may be the next wave of internet business models." Speaking about the evolution of both the conference and the web 2.0 trend, he noted that the "revolution we're seeing today is as great as the one we saw five years ago."
At the ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit last week a great time was had by (almost) all and participants are telling us it was one of the most valuable events they've been to in a long time. We so appreciate everyone's support in making it a great event!
Now that it's over - it's time to talk about what comes next. Below you'll find some thoughts - you can help us decide what ReadWriteWeb will do to follow up on this first event. Real-Time Web on the East Coast or Augmented Reality on the West Coast? Let us know what you think.
Barnes and Noble will launch its rumored Nook eBook reader later today at an event in New York City. Thanks to an early leak of the device on the B&N Web site, however, we already know most of the details about the Nook. We can now confirm, for example, that the Nook will retail for $259 and that it will feature two screens: a small LCD touchscreen at the bottom of the device and a standard 6-inch eInk display above the smaller screen. The Nook will be available for pre-order today and will ship on November 30. One of the most interesting aspects about the device, besides the two screens, the 2 gigabytes of on-board memory and the microSD card slot, is that B&N will allow users to lend books to their friends.
Mozilla plans to release Fennec, the mobile version of Firefox, for Nokia's Maemo, Windows Mobile and Android devices in the near future. In an interview with Om Malik, Mozilla CEO John Lilly also said that Mozilla has fallen behind in the mobile space, as WebKit-based browsers like Safari on the iPhone currently have a large lead, but he is confident that Mozilla can deliver a better browsing experience. Mozilla, according to Lilly, wanted to wait for devices to get to the point where they could handle everything a desktop browser could. Mozilla, however, isn't likely to develop a mobile version of Firefox for BlackBerry anytime soon.
The millions of blogs on WordPress.com will now have a clean mobile theme turned on by default, removing most of the formatting and making the sites easy to load on a phone. WordPress bloggers may want to opt-out of the new setting; not everyone likes how the first mobile themes selected by WordPress look.
As we wrote earlier today though, consumers are not happy with how the mobile web is performing. Turning on mobile themes by default could be one small step towards solving that problem in the large territory that is WordPress.
Earlier this year, the Associated Press, together with the Media Standards Trust, introduced hNews, a new microformat for describing news content. HNews allows publishers to easily attach machine-readable news semantics to content on the web. Today, the AP announced the completion of the first draft of hNews. In addition, TownNews, announced that is will support hNews in its BLOX content management system, which is being used by over 1,500 newspapers in the US.
An independent study by Equation Research found that today's consumers are disappointed with the performance of the mobile web. Despite the proliferation of smartphones with their full-featured web browsers, the majority of mobile web surfers have encountered issues with accessing websites via their handsets over the past year. The number one issue reported involves websites that are too slow to load, frustrating users to the point that over half said they would never return to the site in question.
