A few days ago, we spotted Twitter’s initial roll out of a geolocation feature on its Website. It appeared that Twitter was testing the feature because it quickly turned it off. Last night, the feature went back on, and Twitter co-founder and CEO Biz Stone officially announced it.

While Twitter’s geolocation feature has been live through its API since last November, this is the first time Twitter has enabled geolocation on its site. To start Tweeting with your location attached, you need to enable the feature in your Twitter Account Settings. Once you’ve opted-in, you will be able to add your location information to all your Tweets or choose to add them to individual Tweets as you compose them. You can choose to share your exact location (your coordinates) or your neighborhood or town.

Currently, the feature only works with Firefox 3.5 and Chrome for Windows. If you decide you want to send a Tweet without your location, you can simply click the “x” next to your location to disable it. Interestingly, if you Tweet with your geolocation on Twitter, the location doesn’t seem to show up in TweetDeck, Seesmic or presumably other third-party clients. And It doesn’t work from Twitter’s mobile site, at least not on the iPhone, where it would make more sense.

As we wrote in our earlier coverage, the timing of this move by Twitter is purposeful. With the SXSW conference in Austin starting today, the location wars are heating up. Earlier in the week, the New York Times reported that Facebook would unveil its answer to location next month at its f8 conference. Google, meanwhile, is in the game with Latitude and to some extent Buzz (but could have been in it a lot more). And of course, Foursquare, Gowalla and a host of other location-based apps are rolling out additional functionality. As we previously noted, many of these apps use Twitter’s geolocation API to pass the data back to Twitter, so it makes sense that this would be a good time to turn the functionality on for the website.

When MySpace announced earlier this week that they had now established themselves as the number one social networking application on the Android platform and the number three download overall, needless to say, we were a bit shocked. After all, (with no offense to MySpace intended), there are more Facebook users than MySpace users in the world. It's just a simple fact.

So how did this happen? Is the MySpace Android app that much better than Facebook's? Are Android users more interested in MySpace for some reason? Are they younger than other mobile users and therefore choosing MySpace over Facebook?

As it turns out, the truth is that measuring the mobile downloads of official applications may not be mean anything when it comes to measuring the success of social networking sites.

Sponsor

After scratching our heads for a good ten minutes, we decided to reach out to a mobile expert for help. Peter Farago of mobile analytics firm Flurry had a few ideas, all of which seem more than plausible.

Theory #1: Third-Party Apps

On the Android platform, there are over ten third-party applications which allow social networking users access to Facebook outside of the Facebook official app or mobile website. This means that thousands upon thousands of Facebook users are downloading other Facebook applications which are not being counted towards the official app's total.

Meanwhile, there is only one third-party MySpace application, so most of the downloads from MySpace users are going to the official app.

Theory #2: Facebook Pre-Installs

The Facebook application is pre-installed on the Droid, the most popular Android handset. It's highly likely that those pre-installed copies of the Facebook app are not being counted as downloads on the Android marketplace.

In addition, the Facebook application is included on the Android 2.0 mobile platform, alongside other popular apps like Amazon and Pandora. So again, that's another potential area where Facebook application downloads are not being counted.

Theory #3: Mobile Web Use

Another theory, (this one ours not Farago's), is that some Facebook and MySpace users don't access the sites via apps - they do so via the customized mobile websites. Facebook, for example, has two mobile alternatives to the official app - m.facebook.com and touch.facebook.com. For personal reasons, some Android owners may actually prefer accessing Facebook via these sites instead of by way of the app itself - an app which, unlike its iPhone counterpart, points to the mobile website when you interact with some of its functions, a regular complaint among Android users. In fact, many users actually consider the MySpace app to be the more polished of the two.

Theory #4: All of the Above

MySpace claims that its popularity on the Android is due to "deep integration with the Android platform" and, in their press release, the company mentions the multiple MySpace homescreen widgets for things like voice-enabled updates and photo uploads. The release also notes that the MySpace user base is highly engaged, with 70% of the mobile app users checking in three or more times per day.

However, these are probably not the major reasons contributing to the app's popularity on the charts, where it now ranks #3 overall. It's more likely that the combination of factors described above have more to do with where MySpace stands today on Android. Mystery solved.

Discuss

Sonos has now confirmed the Index Ventures investment we reported two days ago. The company has taken an additional $25 million in capital from Index, raising the total raised by the company to $65 million. And Index Ventures Partner Mike Volpi, a former CIsco executive, has joined their board of directors.

The funds will be used for growth equity, says the company, which signals that they are past the proof of product stage (well past, in this case) and will use the funds to speed market penetration.

From our original post:

Volpi will bring real expertise to the Sonos board. As recently as 2007 he ran an $11 billion routing and access products busines for Cisco. He clearly knows how to sell products at scale.

Sonos has been around since 2003 and has raised some $40 million from private angel investors and BV Capital. Until last year the company sold very high end music products that users loved passionately, but the mutli-thousand dollar price point for a complete system made mainstream penetration difficult.

But in 2009 Sonos began selling a new product, the S5 music system, that users control via their iPhone. The S5 is just $400 and has driven “massive growth” says the company.

Like Flip last year, Sonos likely had a choice between selling now or raising new money for major expansion. Flip sold to Cisco. Sonos, it seems, is taking more money, but adding an ex-Cisco exec as well. Perhaps they’ll get their cake and eat it, too.

Twitter announced yesterday that it would finally be adding location support and, while they certainly appear to be doing it right, we have to wonder about the new feature.

Twitter seems like it's a bit late to the game on this one, even though we've all been talking of the "location-based wars" lately. We already have Gowalla, Foursquare, MyTown, BrightKite and more - do we really need Twitter too?

Sponsor

First, we have to say that we're quite happy with the opt-in, "back out at any moment" method that Twitter is taking on including location into its service. Not only do its users have to opt in, they can even set the function to check every time they tweet as to whether or not they want to include location information. The specificity of the location data can also be chosen, whether you're including exact longitude and latitude coordinates or just letting everyone know you're in the hood.

So, on these points, we say "hurrah!" for doing the location thing right. Now, on to why we really won't be using it much, nonetheless.

When Twitter first came out, it was both a protocol and a place. That is, it was a website, Twitter.com, based on the 140 character message backbone. While the website was our only choice for a while, outside of text messaging, we quickly moved on to third-party clients that did it all much better. And now we have smartphone apps, web apps and desktop apps. Nowadays, Twitter feels much more like a protocol than place.

We've already moved on and separated out our location-based tweeting into a completely separate part of our brains. We have Gowalla, Foursquare, MyTown and Brightkite. We have our Twitter interaction where we just say something and we have our Twitter interaction where we mean to share our location. It just seems that, for those moments where we want to share our location in a useful manner, we already have a way and, much like the third-party clients out there, these other apps already do it better.

All of this isn't to say that including location data isn't a great idea. It could be followed up with some seriously interesting uses as more and more location data becomes available in the Twitter stream for outside apps to use. Too bad Twitter went the honorable route, however, and gave people a choice. For most of the tech savvy crowd out there, who use Twitter the most, we' re not sure that the Twitter homepage is going to be where we choose to include our GPS data. Most services have already found a way to include that data, by using Twitter in the way its been used best - as a simple messaging protocol that lays at the heart of some very cool interaction. Why would we want to enable the core to track us? That's just throwing our location data out there in the wind, to be gathered and used by whoever wants and that's not really the point. Context is what makes location important.

Where will all this location based tweeting come in handy? Real life situations like Haiti and Iran. And in some cases, maybe for good and maybe for bad. There is surely something to be done with all this data, but we can tell you one thing - in our day to day tweets, we will not be turning the GPS on.

But enough about us - will you be using Twitter's new location feature? Will you say yes when it asks or are you already satisfied with sharing your location with third-party apps?

Discuss

The fact of the matter is, we're relatively far and few between, according to a study by Barracuda Networks. One day, we're told Twitter is growing exponentially, the next, it's a dying service that's stalled out like your grandpa's Studebaker. But does growth, or the lack thereof, actually translate into use?

Sponsor

According to Barracuda Networks, the Internet security research company, Twitter looks to be an insider app, one that many people sign up for and never really use. Or perhaps it's like the sixth grade dance, with a few doing the waltz and the rest lurking on the edges of the room, afraid to ask the girl from math class for a dance.

The company analyzed more than 19 million Twitter users and found that a surprisingly small number were actually brave enough to ask the girl to dance, so to say.

Out of the more than 19 million users analyzed, only 21 percent, or just under 4 million, are considered to be "True Twitter Users", a term applied using some extremely lenient criteria. To be considered a "True" Twitter user, a user needs to have 10 followers, follow 10 others and have tweeted 10 times.

For the most part, Twitter's explosive growth really seems to be a party that millions of people came, saw, and quickly decided to leave. But despite the sticker shock of these initial numbers, the report shows that those who decided to stay are becoming increasingly active. Last June, 30 percent of users had no followers, whereas only 17 percent are follower-less now. The same goes for people following other users - the number following zero, less than five and less than 10 have all decreased since last June.

So, maybe Twitter isn't quite exploding and it isn't quite stalling out. Instead, it's still indeed growing at a very regular, unimpressive rate and most people decide they don't want to use it after all. Quick, somebody do another study, before we think Twitter is just doing something average for too long.

Discuss

This morning, Google launched an "extensions" gallery for their real-time communications product, Google Wave. Within the new gallery, you'll find the tools and add-ons that have been created by the developer community to add additional functionality to the Wave service. Among the extensions are those some Wave users have probably seen before - like the popular "yes/no" voting gadget, for example, which lets you create polls via Wave. However, there are others that you may not have seen yet - like the "iFrame Gadget" that lets you embed webpages into a Wave or the "Likey Gadget" that provides a "like" (and "dislike!") button for showing support for a particular topic, similar to those found on Facebook or Google Buzz.

Sponsor

According to the Google blog post, developers interested in submitting their extensions for inclusion in this gallery can do so by first submitting them for approval here. Google has also released a new Google Wave robots API (v2) for developers to try.

The complete list of extensions includes the following:

• Wave Sudoku (play Sodoku with friends in a Wave)
• Extension Installer (for developers only)
• Colcrop (game)
• Yellow highlighter (highlight text)
• Napkin gadget (for doodles)
• Waffle (date-picker)
• Iframe gadget (embed webpages in a Wave)
• Yes/No/Maybe gadget (for polls)
• Map gadget (insert maps)
• Video Chat Experience (chat in Waves)
• Phone Conference (call your friends)
• Mind Map gadget (collaborate on diagrams)
• Likey gadget (like/dislike a topic)
• Pollo gadget (for surveys)
• Take-out gadget (for ordering out)
• AccuWeather (weather forecasts)

Will Extensions Bring You Back to Wave?

With Google Wave soon becoming a member of the Google Apps family of products sometime this year, it's good to see development work continue on this innovative, if somewhat confusing, real-time tool. Although members of the tech community have expressed mixed feelings about the product in its current state, what Google has presented is definitely a unique service and one that may still be useful in several niche scenarios, if not as the email replacement some hoped it would be. For example, small teams in the workplace needing to collaborate with one another may find Wave a better option than sending multiple emails back and forth.

That being said, traffic to Google Wave has been declining sharply since November or December of 2009, depending which analytics service you use. Looking at the numbers, it's clear that Wave has been abandoned by many of its earliest adopters - users who were once clamoring for invites in ways that haven't been seen since Google first launched Gmail. (On that note, we actually have several spare invites sitting around - if you want one, comment and ask.)

Will extensions actually bring those one-time Wavers back? Probably not - at least, not for longer than a quick look at most. On the flip side, however, Wave advocates feel that there's great potential in this experimental project. Still, even most of those folks have to admit there's a lot of work that needs to be done before Wave could attract a mainstream audience.

So will Wave ever replace email? Perhaps not. But we wouldn't be surprised if some of the innovations developed in the Wave playground ended up in our Gmail inboxes one day. And for that, we'll keep one eye on Wave...even if we're not entirely embracing it just yet.

Discuss

Last August, we wrote about Lunch.com, a reviews site that’s setting out with the goal to make the world a better place by changing the way people think about each other (as I wrote then, it’s a pretty lofty goal). Today, the company is launching a new feature called Communities that lets users build their own review sites around any niche topic. If you’d like to try founding a community, you can do so using the beta code “techcrunch”.

The new feature can be likened to a ‘Ning for review sites’. As a community founder, you select a topic on whatever you’d like, then invite other users to contribute reviews and other content (you can elect to moderate this as it comes in). For examples, check out Strollerland, a new community that’s dedicated to reviewing strollers. There’s also Gluten Free Groupies, for (surprise) people who like to talk about gluten-free foods.

The benefits of this kind of niche-community setup are clear — if you cater to a group of people passionate about a given topic, they’re probably going to be more knowledgeable and engaged than your average user. I’d rather take recommendations from someone who reads about strollers all day than from a guy who liked the one he chose at random at Wal-Mart.

CEO J.R. Johnson says that Lunch’s system allows for the creation of multiple communities around the same topic (for example, there could be ten different reviews communities that revolved around bicycles). Because all of these niche review sites are built on the Lunch.com platform, the site can use its universal search and suggestion engine to recommend content you may be interested in, even if it’s found on a different community than the one you’re currently browsing.

However, it sounds like new communities may have some trouble getting off the ground.  Johnson says he expects that lots of the niche review sites will be launched by existing online communities (say, a Yahoo Group).  For them, the system should work well, but if you just want to launch a review site about stamps but don’t already have many friends who are interested in the topic, you may have trouble getting much traction.  That said, these niche communities will be exposed to search engines, and if you produce relevant content Lunch’s recommendation engine should also help introduce your community to new users.

Google has just rolled out the first version of the Google Wave extensions gallery, making it easier for users to take advantage of some of the cool add-ons developers are building into the service.

After making a big slash at Google I/O last year, Google Wave (the real-time communication platform that is still in preview) has re-gained some momentum, thanks to an improved API and the addition of e-mail notifications. The addition of an extensions gallery speaks to even more growth on the service’s part.

If you have a Google Wave account, you’ll see an “Extensions” item in your navigation panel. Click on it and you can see what extensions are available to install and then use.

Here’s a rundown of some of the extensions you can install and use now:

Wave Sudoku – Play Sudoku with a friend in real-time using Wave

Developers Extension Installer — Developers can use this to create an embeddable installer for extensions they create

Yellow Highlighter — Adds a yellow highlighter tool to your toolbar

Trippy — Useful for planning trips with friends

Video Chat Experience — Video chat in Wave

Pollo Gadget — Conduct polls and surveys across Wave

AccuWeather — See the weather of people in the Wave or from places you are planning on visiting

Once you install an extension, in most cases it is added to your toolbar and can then be accessed within a wave.

There are more extensions in the gallery and developers can submit their own to be included by going to this submission page for Google to review.

What Google Wave extensions are you using? Let us know!

Disclosure: Mashable has teamed with Google for the Google Wave API Challenge.

---

Reviews: Google, Google Wave, Mashable, video

Tags: Google Wave, google wave extensions

Update: the Apple Store is back up, and yes, you can now pre-order the iPad. We haven’t seen any other significant changes in the Store.

It’s finally here; the moment where the iPad actually comes into some sort of contact with the market. As we announced before, iPad pre-orders begin at 5:30 AM PT (in about 1:30 hours), and the Apple Store is currently down, indicating that pre-order forms will be available when it comes back up (and possibly something more – you never know.)

Of course, users won’t actually be able to fondle the device until April 3rd, but (besides giving fans and enthusiasts a chance to be one of the first people to own an iPad), this moment is exciting because from now on, Apple (and, hopefully, the media) will have some idea how well this thing actually sells.

Although the iPad has created an enormous hype, one mustn’t forget that the jury is still out on whether it’ll be a huge success or a complete flop. It’s not only a new device, it’s a new type of device, and we’re eager to see what kind of ripples it’ll do to the IT market.

Tags: apple, ipad

Having been to Paris, I can tell you that it’s a city you won’t be able to fully fathom in a week or a month — it takes a lifetime to see all the city has to offer. This was before, of course, this amazing 26-gigapixel panorama of Paris was created; it won’t replace actually visiting Paris, but with all of its amazing details, it gets pretty darn close.

Paris 26 Gigapixels is a stitching of 2,346 photos, which add up to a high-resolution panoramic view of Paris. When we say high-resolution, we mean it; the end result is a 26-gigapixel (354,159×75,570 px) interactive photo. You can move around by clicking anywhere on the image and moving your mouse, and you can zoom with your mouse wheel (alternatively, you can use the arrows and +/- keys on the keyboard).

It’s easy to get lost in this huge panorama, so Paris 26 Gigapixels features quick tours of 20 of Paris’ most impressive monuments, together with some textual information about them.

The entire project, created by Martin Loyer, Arnaud Frich and Kolor, is available in English and French; there’s also a special HD view (highly recommended), activated via an icon in the upper right portion of the page, which requires installation of an additional plugin.

Oh, and one more thing; this is one of those times when you’d want to switch to full-screen browser mode.

Tags: panorama, Paris, photo

First, we'd like to thank all 596 survey respondents and the many Open Thread commenters who gave such interesting and valuable feedback in our recent post "Should Social Media Experts Be Required to Know Their Tech?"

Over the past couple days, we've been able to put together a decent picture and identify some knowledge gaps and points of confusion for many would-be social media experts. But first, let's address why some of the RWW staff - and many of our readers, some of whom must hire social media experts - feel it's important for even the most marketing-oriented of consultants to have a rudimentary understanding of the workings of the Web, including its ecosystem of companies and applications.

Sponsor

You will always need to know more about the Web.

Konqueror is a popular browser among Linux users. The browser Mozilla hasn't been supported since 2006, having been replaced by Firefox and, to a lesser extent SeaMonkey, both products of the Mozilla Foundation.

The Web does a lot more and a lot less than the average bear would think.

For the most part, we humans have a hard time admitting that we're "average bears," though. Before you earn the moniker of "guru" or "expert" or even "professional/consultant," you need to be far above average in your knowledge of the Web, not just how to get a few thousand Twitter followers or how to increase sales by X percent through Facebook promotions. Those things can come down to common sense or secondhand advice from true pioneers in social media.

Generally speaking, a social media expert will have been around the block long enough to know a CMS from a CPU, to know a bit about servers and DDoS attacks, to know what kinds of operating systems and browsers and even hardware the tech elite prefer to use (or debate over). And the good ones will remain humble enough to keep learning and will always admit there's more to know. Some of the wisest social media advisors I've know will ask to not be called experts, in fact, for how can any one person truly be an expert on something as vast as the Internet?

Flip Side of the Coin: Imagine someone telling you he was a broadcast media expert. That includes television - national, local, cable, satellite, you name it - and all kinds of AM/FM and satellite radio. It might also include pre-show advertisements in movie theaters. That also includes media spend, account management and metrics for all kinds of ads, from branding to direct response. Essentially, the person is claiming to be a one-man ad agency - an impossible claim at best and a fraudulent one at worst.

How to Fill the Knowledge Gap: Start listening to people who disagree with you. Search the farthest corners of the Web for new people and new ideas. Stop hanging out in echo chambers and start telling yourself every day, "I know that I know nothing." That phrase seems to have done Socrates some good; chances are it could help you, too.

You need to communicate with developers.

Haskell is a rare and complicated programming language. .NET sounds more familiar, but it's a framework, not a language.

In almost every social media project that doesn't involve something as simple as setting up a Twitter account, you'll have to work with and rely on the expertise of developers.

You might not want to learn a programming language yourself - it can take a lot of time, which is a precious commodity. But if you don't know the basics of what programming languages can and cannot do, as well as what languages your developer colleagues use, you'll end up frustrated and inefficient. And the aforementioned developer colleagues might feel disrespected as well; being asked to deliver fantastical products or results from someone with no understanding of your work isn't a fun experience.

Flip Side of the Coin: Imagine a CTO telling you, an interactive marketer, to run a direct mail campaign and get 500,000 new registrations. It could be done, perhaps, but it's not efficient or a good way to use your skills. Even if he told you he wanted 500,000 new signups, is that a realistic goal? Is it based on current adoption trends? Does this guy have any idea what he's asking for?

How to Fill the Knowledge Gap: Read up on the basics of programming languages; spend a few hours here and there on Wikipedia and O'Reilly books. Then, ask questions of developers you trust. Don't be afraid to "sounds dumb" or be inquisitive.

You need to rely on hard data and facts, not gut feelings.

It may seem to be the ad-free fluffy bunny of the social networking world, but Twitter turned a profit through search deals in 2009.

On occasion, we social media folks make intuitive choices that turn out to be dead wrong. While there's a lot to be said for making bold choices for your users and clients, there's much more value in making solid choices based on observed trends, analyzed data and tested outcomes. In fact, it's plain irresponsible to make recommendations to clients based on feelings rather than facts.

Always challenge yourself to make sure your opinions and advice line up with facts, not the other way around. As a wise man once wrote, "You don't use science to prove that you're right, you use science to become right."

Flip Side of the Coin: Rather than looking at marketing budgets or user traffic, your CEO tells you to spend $1 million on an AdWords campaign because "Google and advertising are where's the money's at online, right?" It seems like a ridiculous gamble with no logical reason or rhyme.

How to Fill the Knowledge Gap: Test everything you might suggest. Test it over a reasonable period of time, making sure to take peak times into account, and get a reasonable data sample. Learn about A/B and multivariate testing, website analytics, SEO and all the dirty details of traffic and user responses. Most of all, never, ever assume.

You need to know about the finance and investment market to identify competitors, potential partners and pitching opportunities.

Friends and family (and fools) will always be the first to invest in any startup.

Especially if you're communicating with or about startups, you need to understand a little bit about venture capital, if for no other reason than to understand an app or company's place in the market. VCs can sometimes be good barometers of a startup's health or the likelyhood of future success.

Likewise, with regard to our survey question about profitable social media apps and companies, knowing about various stages of development can help you know when to suggest key partnerships. Collaboration between two entities can give a boost to both.

As a strategist, a consultant or any kind of expert, you need to be able to spot a sure bet just as quickly as a sinking ship. And in the startup-filled world of social media, few are better at this all-important task than those with an understanding of tech investment.

Flip Side of the Coin: Your CEO informs you that the company is about to start a marketing campaign on a website that, through your social and industry connections, you know is about to go out of business. In fact, every website of its kind if flailing; you're surprised he wasn't aware of the situation.

How to Fill the Knowledge Gap: Read ReadWriteStart, of course! We recommend (and frequently interview and comment on) various brilliant VCs, angels and experienced entrepreneurs on this channel.

We hope you've found this information entertaining and informative. The remaining questions on the poll were, by and large, answered correctly. There still seems to be some confusion on the definition of the word "hacker," but I'm convinced that one will simply take more soapboxing on my part.

What words of advice do you have to share with your less technical colleagues in social media? How can we all improve our game online while making the Internet a better, smarter place? Let us know in the comments.

Discuss

Back in January 2009, as Vodafone was preparing to close a £20 million ($30 million) deal to buy Swedish mapmaker Wayfinder, it was seen as a bold move from a carrier intent on entering the apparently lucrative market for location based services. Fast forward to the present day -- past the bit where free Google Maps Navigation destroyed TomTom and Garmin share prices, and past the introduction of free turn-by-turn navigation to Nokia's Ovi Maps -- and you'll find Wayfinder gently sobbing into a handkerchief as it permanently closes up its doors. Vodafone's Anna Cloke gives us the reason for it with devastating concision:

"We could not charge for something that others gave away for free."

So there we have it, the paid navigation services deathwatch has its first fatality, and it's the unfortunate nature of the beast that plenty of others will be following suit, unable to resist the destructive effects of the free and ubiquitous services now on offer.

[Thanks, Chris]

Vodafone's Wayfinder is first victim of free smartphone navigation services originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 12 Mar 2010 05:18:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  Sydsvenskan.se  | Email this | Comments

Chris Allison is a social media strategist at NeboWeb, where he helps clients make the most of the social web. You can follow him on Twitter as the voice behind @Neboweb.

As social media marketing becomes more widely practiced, the questions of the day are less frequently focused on the benefits of social media and more often focused on its implementation. Justifying social media to superiors is no longer the marketer’s biggest challenge.

Instead, marketers are being challenged not on the potential benefits, of which there is ample evidence, but rather on how to get those benefits. Where to start?

---

Social Media as a Catalyst

---

With this challenge in mind, it’s vital to understand that social media is neither the end nor the beginning of any marketing effort. Rather, social media is a catalyst that works most effectively when it is finely woven into the fabric of a brand’s other activity.

When putting together a puzzle, it helps to take a look at the big picture on the front of the box. Likewise, when putting together a social media strategy it’s necessary to zoom out a little and examine how social media will fit into the context of your other business activities. Below are four pieces of the puzzle that brands can mesh with social media to maximize results.

---

1. Cause Marketing

---

The socialization of the web has made it evident that brands that want to succeed online must feel and act like humans, not like desperate, distant corporations. Accordingly, some social media marketers have taken on the role of teaching brands how to be human: don’t say stupid things, don’t feed the trolls, and don’t dominate the conversation – pretty fundamental stuff that somehow got lost during the incorporation process.

However, guidelines for not screwing up aren’t enough for brands to really benefit from social media. Until you bring something interesting to the table — something that inspires passion, laughter, or curiosity — nobody will care if you have a Twitter account.

One of the most effective, simple ways to get people to care about what you’re doing is to do something worth caring about: get behind a cause. Brands have been benefiting from cause marketing for a long time, but the catalytic nature of social media has brought three additional benefits to the cause marketing table:

1. Access to increased publicity
2. The ability to be a vocal activist instead of a silent philanthropist by joining conversations
3. The ability to bring customers into the support process

Pepsi is one of the best examples of a brand that has recently seized the opportunity to leverage a mix of social media and cause marketing. Their Refresh Everything project incorporates votes from users to decide where Pepsi will donate their funds as well as a variety of other simple social media features: single sign-on, a Facebook Fan Page, and a blog.

By involving users with a voting process, Pepsi has effectively done three things. First, instead of just doing good themselves, they’ve helped their customers do good, which helps establish a very positive brand association. They have also created a situation that will compel users to share with their friends (in order to accrue votes for the cause of their choice). Finally, they have built a feedback mechanism that will ensure the causes they support are also the most popular among their customers (which is great PR).

Brands can benefit greatly from integrating social media with cause marketing, and they can learn a lot about how to get started from the tactics that Pepsi has used.

Disclosure: Pepsi sponsored Mashable’s NextUp NYC: The Future Journalist event.

---

2. The Offline World

---

Isolating the impact of social media to the web is an easy mistake to make. It seems natural enough to meet online goals with online activity, but the tangible world of physical objects, locations, and events can often provide a compelling medium to drive fans to engage with you online, or vice versa, you can use your social media efforts to drive activity to guerrilla marketing events like Red Bull’s stash, or simply to brick and mortar stores.

Integrating your social media efforts with real products, store locations, or activities is an important way to acknowledge that you care about the complete customer experience, and that you’re not just in the social media space because it’s popular.

Some of the most successful campaigns, such as Burger King’s Whopper Sacrifice, have been focused on driving the purchase of offline products. Similarly, customer support profiles like Comcast Cares would be much less successful if they didn’t have the power to influence real offline change by working with customer support representatives that can help customers on location.

On the surface, social media may look like a simple set of social networks that people use to communicate, but when marketers look deeper they find that it presents a whole new venue for empowering all of their existing services, online as well as off.

---

3. Media Coverage

---

Though citizen journalism and user generated content have proven to be extremely powerful (Iran’s election crisis, Barack Obama’s massive online get out the vote efforts, etc.), it is important to remember that brands can still benefit enormously from traditional media coverage.

When it comes to social media, or any marketing for that matter, brands must find ways to leverage all of their assets in the same direction. Just like the offline world can easily be used for online gain, so too can traditional media be leveraged in the new media space.

Amit Gupta, founder of several wonderful startups like Photojojo and Jelly, sheds some light on how his businesses have benefited from traditional coverage:

Mainstream press is harder to get, but still drives significant awareness, especially among ‘everyday’ people who aren’t spending all day on the internet. And the names of old media carry
significant cache, enough to drive double-digit increases in conversion rates simple because of the credibility their names lend.

I exchanged e-mails with Amit and he was kind of enough to lend some extended insight on what to expect from traditional media. TV, web, and radio are all able to generate fast, measurable results. With these mediums, people are either interested, or they aren’t. There are comparatively few lagging responses. Newspapers and magazines on the other hand, while carrying significant credibility, produce results that are harder to measure because their content is often read over days, weeks, or even months.

The ultimate success of a social media strategy depends on your ability to recognize problems and seize opportunities to solve them. When considering the needs of your campaign, whether it’s brand equity or an immediate spike in interest, consider traditional media as another tool in your toolbox that could meet those needs. However, remember that part of your strategy should involve doing, saying, or making something interesting and worth talking about. If you don’t do that, no amount of good press can save you.

---

4. Technology

---

Lastly, your social media strategy is inherently paired with technology. Without technology, social media cannot exist. However, technology’s role in creating a social media strategy often goes understated.

At SoCon10, a social media conference in Atlanta, Carol Kruse (head of interactive marketing at Coke) described the pain her team went through creating a Facebook application, only to find two months later that changes in Facebook’s design would require Coke to restructure the application – a maintenance cost that hadn’t been anticipated. Having a plan in place for making technological changes on the fly is an important ingredient in the fast-paced social media world.

But technology is more than just a potential cost that bloats social media campaigns; it’s also the life that fuels them. Applications like the recently launched MySpace Fan Video are powered by collaboration between experienced creatives and programmers, not just one or the other. Thus, perhaps the most important synergy to be formed by any company delving into social media is one between their technology team, internal or external, and their marketing team driving the strategy.

---

Conclusion

---

Synergy is the name of the social media game. Whether you’re coming from a small company or a well-known brand, starting as far back as possible, zooming out and staring at the big picture, is crucial to creating a strategy that makes sense.

These are four of the most important pieces to the social media puzzle. If you can think of more or have something to add to these listed, please leave a note in the comments.

---

More business resources from Mashable:

---

- 5 Ways to Avoid Sabotaging Your Personal Brand Online
- 4 Elements of a Successful Business Web Presence
- HOW TO: Implement a Social Media Business Strategy
- HOW TO: Choose a News Reader for Keeping Tabs on Your Industry
- HOW TO: Measure Social Media ROI
- HOW TO: Use Social Media to Connect with Other Entrepreneurs

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, TommL

---

Reviews: Facebook, Iran , Mashable, Twitter, iStockphoto

Tags: cause marketing, List, Lists, mainstream media, MARKETING, PUBLIC RELATIONS, social media, technology

We've just rolled out an initial version of our extensions gallery: simply look for "Extensions" in the navigation panel of Google Wave. The gallery is intended to make it easier for users to discover the fun and useful extensions you all are building with the Google Wave APIs.


The gallery is simply a set of waves containing extension installers (the puzzle pieces). The first wave, "Read me first" contains an introduction to extensions and how to use them. In many cases, those particular waves won't maintain their read/unread status in Google Wave preview; we're working on this. Beyond that, we have some design improvements in the works, but we wanted to get this out there to get feedback and help users find your extensions.

As a tip, you can also use the waves in the gallery to share a direct link to your extension's installer with other Google Wave users -- simply open the installer and copy-and-paste the URL (note: the panel arrangement and search query are included in the URL, but can easily be edited out).

While you're building your extensions, if you'd like them to be included in the gallery, please be sure to submit them for review. You may also want to check out Mashable's Google Wave API Challenge.

We look forward to seeing what you come up with -- especially with the new Google Wave robots API (v2).

Posted by Dan Peterson, Product Manager, Google Wave

Recently, startup Cc: Betty, a nifty service that organized and managed group email threads, decided to rebrand and relaunch its service. The new product, Threadbox, was going to be streamlined and tweaked to appeal to workspace users.

Today, Threadbox is officially launching in private beta, as a more collaborative and user-friendly service. Essentially, the site aims to combine email, IM, and collaboration tools into one platform. Instead of focusing on email like Cc:Betty, Threadbox centers around collaboration in the workplace. The service organizes and logs every type of communications with clients, allows users to share documents and images, and record decisions and feedback. The new service also has the ability to serve as a project management tool, allowing users to share and track requirements and specs, then track and follow team members from start to finish.

Additionally, Threadbox aims to serve as a communications tool between employees, with the ability to gather comments, opinions, exchange feedback, share documents and media on the same page. You can add maps, files start conference calls from within the platform. And as the service’s name implies, all communications are threaded and organized according to client and subject. Threadbox still incorporates elements of Cc:Betty’s technology. You can received notifications of thread activity and reply to threads directly from your email client. It’s unclear if the service will integrate with social networks, like Twitter and Facebook.

The basic Threadbox service is free but the startup offers a premium product for $19.95 per year. Cc: Betty raised $500,000 in December of last year, and has $2 million in total funding now.

With Threadbox the startup is clearly making a play towards the work user; I’m doubt the average consumer will find the service as appealing as Cc:Betty was for personal use. But collaboration is the key word in enterprise-focused products at the moment, so Threadbox will certainly catch the wave of small to medium sized businesses which are looking to upgrade their communication platforms. However, this is a crowded space with many worthy players so the competition, which includes Yammer, Chatter, Jive, Socialtext, WizeHive, and many more products, will be tough.

Here’s a video from Threadbox that goes into more detail about the new service:

If you visit the DreamHost blog today, chances are you'll give a quick guffaw, shake your head in dismay at the state of the Internet and quickly close the browser tab.

But if you take a moment to read all the way to the end of the post, you'll find that the company has just announced the implementation of a one-click install for its open-source, white label microblogging service Status.net.

Sponsor

The blog, which features a tattooed beer belly and a cat sitting at a keyboard, is really showing off the proof-of-concept (hopefully) tongue-in-cheek site, PetStatus, a micro-blog for pets.

Buried down at the very bottom of the post is the following nugget of exciting information:

Status.net, our new one-click software package, powers the entire operation. DreamHost customers can now install Status.net to their own domains with a single mouse click - making specialized Twitter clones at whim in a matter of seconds!

Triss Hussey first noticed the real announcement, saying if it hadn't been for an email subscription to the blog it would have just passed on by.

We first wrote about Status.net a year ago, saying that the service could be an "incredible opportunity to analyze a rich and dynamic set of data about interpersonal conversation." The company just announced the launch of its public beta last Tuesday. And our Own Alex Williams just took a closer look at the service's future in the enterprise last week and argued that it "has the features that the enterprise customer wants and it has a strong developer community." A one-click installation means we may start seeing specialized Twitter-clones reproducing like rabbits across the Internet.

We can only hope that PetStatus isn't an omen of what's to come.

Discuss

Looking for new contributors and fresh perspectives for your open source software project? Through the Google Summer of Code™ program, we fund students worldwide to work with mentors from the FLOSS community on a three month coding project. Over the past five years, we've successfully paired nearly 3,400 students "with more than 3,000 mentors from backgrounds spanning industry to academia, with some spectacular results: more than 8 million lines of source code produced and over $20M in funding in support of open source development. We're particularly excited by the social ties our students form through the course of the program. We've connected people in more than 100 countries, and hope to bring people from even more places into the Google Summer of Code community this year. We're looking forward to our sixth year and welcoming another group of 1,000 student developers to the program.

We're now accepting applications from open source projects who wish to act as mentoring organizations. We'll be taking mentoring organization applications until Friday, March 12th at 23:00 UTC. Our list of approved organizations will be published on the 2010 Google Summer of Code site on March 18th. Interested students will then have several days to discuss their ideas with the accepted organizations before student applications open on March 29th.

Check out our Frequently Asked Questions page for more details and a preview of the application. And remember, if you have any questions, you can always find us in the Google Summer of Code Discussion group or in #gsoc on Freenode. Best of luck to all of our applicants!

By Leslie Hawthorn, Open Source Team

Plastic Logic, which was planning to ship its Que e-reader in April, has concluded that it needs more time to put the finishing touches on its creation. It says it’s postponing release until summer in order to “further fine-tune features and enhance the overall product experience.”

If the delay indeed ends up being a few months at most, it doesn’t seem like that huge a deal. If I were a prospective customer, I’d surely prefer to wait a few months for a rock-solid Que than get a buggy one right away. Besides, a little extra time doesn’t mean much given than the company started previewing the Que in September of 2008 (and in fact was talking about using its technology to make e-readers as far back as 2000).

The real question about the Que and all other e-readers that use monochrome E-Ink screens is whether they’ll survive the technological sea change that seems inevitable when Apple releases the iPad on April 3rd. Even setting aside the fact that the iPad is a multi-function device with a color screen, it’s likely to have a major impact on folks’ expectations for tablet-type gadgets: Judging from demos, it’s is blazingly fast. no E-Ink-equipped device is anywhere near zippy, and the Que felt especially sluggish when I tried a pre-release version at the Consumer Electronics Show in January. (The software was still a work in progress at that point, so the version that Plastic Logic releases may be quicker–and the delayed releases makes all the more sense if the company is tweaking it for better performance.)

Unlike most e-reader makers, Plastic Logic is a real technology company with its own innovative manufacturing process and factory. It’s also got a unique focus–it’s catering to business professionals–and the slickest user interface I’ve seen on any E-Ink device to date. It’ll be interesting to see how Que fares–even if we have to wait a bit longer to find out.

Share/E-Mail

Aol launched Lifestream, a social aggregator and publisher, as part of their AIM platform at TechCrunch50 Last Fall. Since then it has gained nearly 2 million users, say Aol. Based on that success Aol is now launching Lifestream as a standalone product at lifestream.aol.com.

Like Friendfeed, Lifestream aggregates a number of third party social networks – Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Foursquare, Delicious, Digg, Flickr, YouTube, etc., so if you follow a Lifestream user you’ll see all of the content that user publishes on those networks, and Lifestream automatically pulls in content from people you already follow on those various social networks, so you don’t have to create yet another new friend list. Lifestream isn’t yet integrated with Google Buzz, but Aol says it may be coming soon.

Users can filter out content from specific networks if they like, on a per user or broad basis. A way to think about this – “noise cancellation for social networks.”

Lifestream also lets users publish back to social networks. Status updates posted to Lifestream can be posted back to Facebook, Myspace and/or Twitter. Lifestream also optionally notes your location in your status updates via GPS on mobile devices, or you can manually add it instead.

That’s not it though. Users can sign in to Lifestream using their Facebook account via Facebook Connect, making it unnecessary to remember separate account and credentials for the site.

You also have a variety of choices in how you use Lifestream. You can access it via the website, an AIR application, or via iPhone and Android applications. As I said above, the mobile applications are particularly useful because they auto-note your location for easy check-ins, and you can post pictures you take from the phone.

That mobile version of the product is what excites me most. You can see where your friends are checking into on, say, Foursquare, click through to a place page and then go there yourself and check in. And Lifestream allows you to follow places just like people, so you can see whenever someone checks in to your local cafe or bar. That ability to follow places is probably the single best reason to use Lifestream.

The Lifestream product is simple, intuitive and really, really useful. Frankly it’s what Google Buzz should have been – both an independent social network on its own, but very deep integration into all of the other social networks you are likely to use daily. It’s nice to see actual innovation coming out of Aol.

Hearst has about 70 apps under its LMK banner in the iTunes App Store right now and it just plans to keep adding more and more. Most of the LMK apps sell for about $1.99, while a handful cost $0.99 per download. The LMK initials stand for “Let Me Know” and are devoted to news and photos about a single Hollywood stars and sports teams and figures, as well as hobbies and general topics like cupcakes and Barbie dolls. The apps run the gamut from Lady Gaga to Metallica to Tiger Woods to the NY Yankees and feature photos and news updates.

Back in the fall, Hearst Entertainment EVP George Kliavkoff and LMK head Michael Gutkowski unveiled their plans for the LMK.com aggregation site, which were predicated upon the idea that SEO tactics will get searchers to visit the special topic sites, while the constant flow of updates would drive return visits. As it expands the LMK strategy to mobile, Kliavkoff tells the WSJ that he believes users obsessed with their favorite stars or teams will be willing to pay to get these automated updates on their phones.

In immediately charging for the apps, Hearst also believes it can avoid what major online publishers now perceive as an early mistake; that is, relying primarily on ad-support instead of transferring the newsstand price structure to the internet. “Unlike the web, we’ve always trained people that everything on the mobile device costs money,” Kliavkoff says. While the iTunes Store has sold more than $2.7 billion of apps, the WSJ says, citing stats from mobile measurement firm Flurry, it’s unclear how much the sales of the apps will mean to Hearst’s business. All the the downloads provide a one-time charge that Hearst can benefit from, the company will slowly begin adding advertising once it feels the individual apps have reached enough mass.

In terms of creating so many apps for a single topic, Hearst believes that with a haystack as large and growing as the App Store, you’re going to need a lot of needles if you want consumers to find your product. Plus, it allows for greater ad targeting later.

The focus on the apps also shows Hearst’s increasing emphasis on mobile. It followed Conde Nast’s paid app representation of GQ magazine by putting an app version of Esquire for sale on for $1.99 per issue in the App Store as well.

Also, at the start of the year, Hearst promoted Sophia Stuart from her role as head of Hearst’s mobile unit to the post of executive director, digital for Hearst Magazines International, a move that was seen as giving mobile a more central role in the company’s thinking.

Related

• Hearst Debuts Automated Topics Site LMK.com
• Esquire, GQ Apps To Be Sold Monthly; Hearst, Condé Nast Look To Apple As Another Virtual Newsstand
• Hearst Moves Mobile Head Stuart To International Digital-Mag Post

Yes, this is another round-up of fresh and useful Javascript techniques, tools and resources. But don’t close the tab yet, as you might find this one very useful. In this selection we present calendars, forms, buttons, navigation, debugging, optimization and compatibility tables as well as handy resources and tools. We also cover various jQuery-plugins that will help you extend the functionality of your website and improve user experience with ready components or coding solutions.

The last section also covers a number of useful educational resources such as a compilation of useful JavaScript coding practices, a detailed comparison of JavaScript frameworks and general JavaScript programming conventions. We are looking forward to your feedback.

You may be interested in the following related posts:

• 50 Fresh JavaScript Tools That Will Improve Your Workflow
• 45 Powerful CSS/JavaScript-Techniques
• 70 Useful AJAX And JavaScript Techniques

[By the way, did you know there is a brand new Smashing Wordpress Book? Push WordPress past its limits!]

Calendars and Timelines

jDigiClock – Digital Clock (HTC Hero inspired)
jDigiClock is a jQuery plugin inspired from HTC Hero Clock Widget.

jQuery Sliding Clock v1.1
jQuery transpearant Slider clock with CSS sprites.

Date / Time Picker
Note that this control is not designed to work in IE6; although it will function correctly in most cases, the positioning of the calendar may be way off depending on how your page is styled.

JavaScript Debugging and Validation Tools

Venkman JavaScript Debugger project page
Venkman is the code name for Mozilla’s JavaScript Debugger. Venkman aims to provide a powerful JavaScript debugging environment for Gecko-based browsers namely Firefox 3.x, the Netscape 7.x series of browsers, Netscape 9.x series, Mozilla Seamonkey 1.x and Mozilla Seamonkey 2.x. It does not include Gecko-based browsers such as K-Meleon 1.x, Galeon 2.x and Netscape 8.x. The debugger is available as an add-on package in XPI format. Venkman JavaScript Debugger has been provided as part of the Mozilla install distribution since October 3rd 2001.

CompanionJS
Companion.JS (pronounced Companion dot JS or CJS) is a Javascript debugger for IE.

How to Test your JavaScript Code with QUnit
QUnit is a powerful JavaScript unit testing framework that helps you to debug code. It’s written by members of the jQuery team, and is the official test suite for jQuery. But QUnit is general enough to test any regular JavaScript code, and it’s even able to test server-side JavaScript via some JavaScript engine like Rhino or V8.

JS Bin – Collaborative JavaScript Debugging
JS Bin is an open source collaborative JavaScript debugging tool.

Forms, Buttons & Navigation

Making a Google Wave History Slider
Here is shown how to create a Google Wave-like history slider. Using it will enable visitors to go back and forth in time to view the changes that take place on a comment thread.

Fancy Radio Buttons With jQuery
Creation of 2 mandatory option sets that a user could choose, while hiding off the radio button inputs and using an anchor links to make it a bit more usable.

Creative Button Animations with Sprites and JQuery
Fading hover effect for which the transition is smoothed with JavaScript, using jQuery library.

Password (un)Masking
JavaScript jQuery that toggles the masking and unmasking of the password field.

jQuery MagicLine Navigation
These “sliding” style navigation bars have been around a while, and turns out it’s really pretty darn easy. Here are put two examples together.

Fixed Fade Out Menu: A CSS and jQuery Tutorial
The aim is to have a fixed navigation that follows the user when he scrolls, and only subtly showing itself by fading out and becoming almost transparent. When the user hovers over it, the menu then becomes opaque again. Inside of the navigation we will have some links, a search input and a top and bottom button that let the user navigate to the top or the bottom of the page.

jQuery plugin: Simplest Twitter-like dynamic character count for textareas and input fields
The best way to explain what this plugin does is to mention Twitter. Twitter posts are limited to 140 characters. While typing the Twitter post there is this always present information about how many characters the users have before reaching the limit. The information is not only provided merely by displaying a number, there are different colors applied to certain stages to notify the user about the status.

Sliding Labels v2
Form label keeping the label inline, but sliding it off to the left rather than going away on click.

Ketchup Plugin
Ketchup is a slim jQuery Plugin that validates your forms. It aims to be very flexible and extendable for its appearance and functionality.

Layout tools

jQuery {css}designerGrid Plugin
{css} designerGrid is A jQuery Plugin developed for website interface developers who use the grid system of layout. {css} designerGrid is intended to assist these developers with CSS prototyping.

css-template-layout
JavaScript (jQuery) implementation of the CSS Template Layout Module

How to create a fluid grid with jQuery
Grid-based layout is probably the more preferred way to style up a webpage to give it more magazine-like look and feel. This tutorial is about how to use CSS and Javascript to create a fluid grid-based layout (See demo here). The algorithm/procedure used in this tutorial is very simple and straightforward. There are more advanced algorithms out there which can handle multiple scenarios. But the purpose is to understand the basic logic on how to create such layout. So here it goes…

closure-templates
Closure Templates are a client- and server-side templating system that helps you dynamically build reusable HTML and UI elements. They are easy to learn and customizable to fit your application’s needs. Closure Templates support JavaScript and Java and use a data model and expression syntax that works for either language. You can also use the built-in message support to easily localize your applications.

Useful jQuery Plugins

TipTip jQuery Plugin
TipTip detects the edges of the browser window and will make sure the tooltip stays within the current window size. As a result the tooltip will adjust itself to be displayed above, below, to the left or to the right of the element with TipTip applied to it, depending on what is necessary to stay within the browser window. TipTip is a very lightweight and intelligent custom tooltip jQuery plugin. It uses ZERO images and is completely customizable via CSS. It’s also only 3.5kb minified!

jQuery Roundabout
Roundabout is a jQuery plugin that converts a structure of static HTML elements into a highly customizable turntable-like interactive area. (And now, not just turntables, but many shapes!)

jParse – jQuery XML Parse Plugin
jParse is a jQuery plugin that allows you to parse XML that was fetched with the jQuery .ajax method (making it fully customizable).

jQuery Quicksand plugin
Reorder and filter items with a nice shuffling animation.

typeQuery, change website typography with jquery
typeQuery gives the flexibility to change the font-family for everything you define with class, id, or tag, this example is referring to the selected item on a select object with id=”tag” and the font-family value at select object with id=”family”: $($("#tag").val()).css("font-family", $("#family").val());

Flip! A jQuery plugin v0.9.9
Flip is a jQuery plugin that will flip easily your elements in four directions.

Data Encryption With JavaScript: jCryption
jCryption is a jQuery plugin for encrypting POST/GET data submitted by forms. It uses public-key algorithm of RSA for the encryption & has a PHP file for handling the decryption of data.

Minimalist jQuery: 11 useful plugins under 4K
jQuery makes our lives easier. So much so that it’s tempting to use it all the time, inadvertently slowing our page load times (cue YSlow and Hammerhead). Combining, compressing, and delivering scripts at the end of your page helps in the HTTP request department. On the file size front, below are jQuery plugins that give solid bang for your performance buck.

Undo/Redo in jQuery
An easy-to-use plugin for adding undo/redo capabilities to a jQuery application. It is based loosely on the Objective-C/Cocoa way of doing things.

editease
editEase – jQuery CMS | no fuss, no database, no worries

jsHub
jsHub is a single piece of JavaScript (a “tag”) that can handle reading different sorts of page information and then send them to many different vendors’ products. One piece of code to send to Google Analytics, Omniture SiteCatalyst, WebTrends and Mixpanel. Instead of one piece of JavaScript per vendor, jsHub has a single piece of code (the “hub”) and plugins that know how to translate into the required wire protocol for each vendor. Vendors only maintain the plugin for their product.

Educational JavaScript Resources and Tutorials

Caffeinated Simpleton
JavaScript is an amazing little language, but it’s got some quirks that turn a lot of people off. One of those quirks is this, and how it’s not necessarily what you expect it to be. this isn’t that complicated, but there are very few explanations of how it works on the internet. This article is an attempt to explain how this works and how to use it properly.

What You Need To Know About JavaScript Scope
This article discusses how JavaScript handles scope and how various JavaScript libraries provide methods for dealing with it and how they smooth out a few bumps. We’ll also look at how you can get back to basics and do some interesting scope wrangling without a library, a useful approach if you’re writing code that needs to stand alone.

Learning Advanced JavaScript
A very nice tutorial to learn JavaScript, containing code and discussion from the upcoming book Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja by John Resig.

Highlight search terms automagically with JavaScript and mark
Script surrounding the search term(s) with the mark element rather than a span, although the class searchword is retained in case you want to style these marks differently from others. In the CSS, the rule article mark is just added to turn it a gentle shade of pink.

10 Really Helpful Traversing Functions in jQuery
With jQuery, selecting HTML elements is laughably easy. But at times, we may wish to further refine the selection, which can be a hassle when the HTML structure is complicated. In this tutorial, we’ll explore ten ways that we can refine and extend a set of wrapped elements that we wish to operate upon.

Using keyboard shortcuts in Javascript
If you want to enhance your web app, Javascript keyboards shortcuts is definitely something to consider. In this article, you’ll learn to use JS keyboard shortcuts, with and without the JQuery framework.

Code Conventions for the JavaScript Programming Language
This is a set of coding conventions and rules for use in JavaScript programming.

jQuery – Select element cheat sheet
This cheat sheet helps you to find the index of a selected option, set the selected option by value, set the selected option by text, insert a new option before or after another and get the text or value of the selected option.

Compare JavaScript frameworks
Modern Web sites and Web applications tend to rely quite heavily on client-side JavaScript to provide rich interactivity, particularly through the advent of asynchronous HTTP requests that do not require page refreshes to return data or responses from a server-side script or database system. In this article, you will discover how JavaScript frameworks make it easier and faster to create highly interactive and responsive Web sites and Web applications.

Park your Horse, Code Cowboy: Professional JavaScript Workflows, Part 1
In this series, we’ll talk about tools & techniques you can use to cover those No’s, and cut a lot of strife & embarrassment from your JavaScript experience.

JavaScript Reference examples (example source code)
JavaScript Reference examples, organized by Objects, Properties, Methods & Collections. Some Event Handlers Reference are also available.

JavaScript best practices
A compilation of best practices and good advice I’ve amassed over the years, much of it learnt the hard way (experimentation and suchlike). Take the advice below to heart and keep it in a part of your brain that has a quick access route so you can apply it without thinking about it. I am sure you will find things to disagree with, and that is a good thing – you should question what you read, and strive to find better solutions. However, I have found that following these principles has made me a more effective developer and allowed other developers to build upon my work more easily.

wtfjs
JavaScript is a language we love despite it giving us so much to hate. This is a collection of those very special irregularities, inconstancies and just plain painfully unintuitive moments for the language of the web.

Related Posts

You may be interested in the following related posts:

• 50 Fresh JavaScript Tools That Will Improve Your Workflow
• 45 Powerful CSS/JavaScript-Techniques
• 70 Useful AJAX And JavaScript Techniques

Poll

---

© Smashing Editorial for Smashing Magazine, 2010. | Permalink | 6 comments | Add to del.icio.us | Digg this | Stumble on StumbleUpon! | Tweet it! | Submit to Reddit | Forum Smashing Magazine
Post tags: AJAX, javascript, jquery

Now that the iPad is officially available for pre-order, the question that we want to know from our readers is: Will you pre-order? The Wi-Fi iPad will be available on April 3, 2010, and the Wi-Fi + 3G models will begin shipping at the end of April.

You can choose to either reserve a Wi-Fi model for in-store pickup on the third or opt to have it delivered to your house. If you pre-order the Wi-Fi + 3G model, it will ship directly to you once it comes out.

So, to pre-order or not to pre-order — take our poll and then let us know why you are (or are not pre-ordering) in the comments!

Apple wouldn’t be Apple if it didn’t offer some totally hot, yet totally over-priced accessories to accompany a new product launch. If you pre-order an iPad for home delivery, you can add some accessories to your order. These include a dock (with and without keyboard, a protective case/stand, an extra power adapter and a VGA connector. Are you adding any of these items to you pre-order? Let us know!

Tags: apple, ipad, ipad pre-order

Wait! Stop. Before you hand over Apple your credit card and pre-order the iPad, you may want to check out the other touchscreen options available now and in the near future. The iPad isn’t the only game in town. Sure, it might have a fancy-pants interface, but each of the follow seven tablets win the hardware fight, which is just as important to a lot of consumers.

Of course the hardware only tells part of the story. The iPad has a leg up on all of these options because of the user-friendly iPhone interface, but it’s not like you’re dropping $600+ on a tablet for your parents, right?

Read more…