The timeline has come. Sounds like something a Walrus might have said as a prelude to talking of many things. While timelines can be used to talk about almost any of many things, I'll ask just one question: why is it that so many of the organisations which rushed ahead to the new Facebook format are not taking full advantage of its communication, branding and marketing potentials?

That's rhetorical. Most of this avant-garde are probably nowhere near fully aware of the possibilities. Good Internet warned in Short 'n' Shallow last week that I would blog deeper about the new Facebook Timeline. So let's discus it a little and take a closer look.

As with Facebook profiles ahead of them, fan and business pages will soon default to the new format which became available last week. In fact, inquiry's been running so thick 'n' fast, we've been kept a greater distance from this blog than we'd normally like. What's surprised us most about timeline for pages is the astonishing rate at which it's already been adopted by Facebookers everywhere. Many were immediate in their take-up of the new format not automatically imposed until the end of the month.

That's hardly surprising. The opportunity for business to brand itself on Facebook has never been so bold and strong. It's a good choice now. In three weeks, there will be no choice. So you might as well prepare while you still have time. Take control and test your  new design before going live, rather than letting Facebook mash it for you.

 What's to work with?

You have a "cover" bigger than most website header banners seen these days, a profile picture keylined into it - and large custom tab apps, if you know how to make them. Within reason, Facebook allows good scope for you to capitalise these visual elements with your branding. There's even some limited guidance in help topics. Of course, you also have control over what to post within the Facebook template. The custom apps themselves provide even greater capacity to turn your page into a marketing powerhouse. However, you're virtually on your own here.

Given the rapid uptake of timeline by business page administrators, it's clear this inaugural release will look commonplace sooner rather than later. Indeed, the old but still current page style timeline replaces already looks dated and ordinary by comparison, less than 2-weeks into the new format. Do you agree?

Business page admins quick off the mark and looking funky right now are going to look pretty plain in a similar interval, as the rest of Facebook's 750 million users come kicking and screaming to the new, universal format. (Well, we haven't heard too much screaming, only one or two dissenting kickers.) Straight off the mark, page owners with design capabilities have the lowest handicaps. Facebook doesn't give you design tools, just the facility to upload images. Sadly, we've already seen quite a few drab results.

How long before timeline loses its impact?
 
With pages on a level playing field, the key to being a standout business on Facebook now is in the hands of third party platforms, app creators and web designers who can wield the power of design apps and custom tab apps ... and the clients who employ them. After all, another significant question is: how much time and effort can a business owner devote to climbing what can be a very steep curve? While you're doodling with image software, business won't take care of itself!

Business page owners have never had such an opportunity to look so good for so little financial investment; zero, as far as Facebook is concerned.

But to look exceptionally great, well ... you get what you pay for. You'll need to bring your own toolbox and talent to the Facebook cutting table. Or employ a bespoke who has the tools and knows how to use them.

With the new maximum 810 pixel page width, a custom app, an iFrame or two, plus some polished design and content, it is now possible to have great fitting websites within great looking websites. And vice versa. Like Russian nesting dolls, sites sit one inside another; but like a Tardis, they get bigger on the inside.

If Facebook is an important marketplace for you, you can use tab apps to bring your entire web profile into your page and engage your audience like nowhere else, like never before. You can turn that page into a site-like experience. One solution based on the tabsite/microsite platform even generates a separate stand alone website of your Facebook tab apps outside of Facebook, making for some valuable SEO opportunities - but again, you may want to work with an expert to maximise your chances of being indexed by Google and minimise the time it takes. (See G-Sites.) 

There are many and varied third parties coming to the timeline table. An equal number puzzling over it because the new potentials are at first not readily apparent.

Good Internet has put together a few custom tab apps on its own Facebook page to show you some  things that can be done. (Check out their "Good For Websites" tab.) They've also put together a nice timeline profile for me. Follow my Author link. A little science, a little cloud, a little voodoo ... and hey! Woo hoo, far out, hot diggity - there's some power in them thar pages just waiting to be uncovered, so to speak.

Hint: designing a new website for your business? Make it a good fit and drop it into a custom tab app on Facebook.
Now you're on the world-wide-web and the face-wide-web all at the same time.

What do you think of the new Facebook Timeline for pages? Will you take full advantage?
Please leave your comments below ...

Who remembers the days when making a website meant tweaking and testing for a multitude of browsers, each diplaying the same site in a variety of unpredictable ways? Better browsers, wider use of CSS plus new and improved HTML appeared to see those days far enough.

However, the surging popularity of mobile devices used for web browsing and the associated proliferation of platforms duelling for supremecy sees uniformity again on the back foot. While developers rally, cross-platform, cross-browser compatibility is beating a reluctant retreat.

Whereas once we had only to contend with the Mac vs Windows divergence, web mobilisation and the corporate contenst to win ownership of this expanding space has created a new myopia. As is usual at critical junctures of technology, Big Business calls the shots - and none with heavier ordinance than Apple. Just witness the recent brief but titan skirmish with Samsung over ownership of the tablet market.
 
Latest player to feel the heat is Adobe, whose Flash animation software has taken a big hit from Apple. Apple's iOS - its operating system for iPhone and iPad - has not introduced the Flash support many had hoped for thus locking out Flash content such as animations and navigation. In some cases, entire websites!

Since the reason for this appears to be a dislike by Apple for anything which can be downloaded from anywhere but its own online mega-mart, the situation is unlikely to change. Web developers can include executable code with Flash files which could be used to allow iPhone and iPad users to download apps and content from places other than, say, the App Store.

This is a significant issue for all website owners whose sites use Flash to engage visitors with high impact animations and navigation, since around 40% - that's forty percent - of website visitation is now via mobile devices and in Australia (which tends to lead the world in first uptake of new technology) most of these mobiles are Apples.

Happily over here, only two of Good Internt's client sites were impacted by the realisation that a large number of web users couldn't gain full acess and probably never would. One of those sites was so severely broken by the lack of Flash support on iOS that Good Internet is rebuilding the site, without Flash of course.

The other site has a nice animated intro which, while not detracting from a smooth landing and quick access to site navigation, simply wasn't seen on iPhones and iPads. We set about fixing this by recreating the animation in HTML5, only to find that not only don't iOS devices appreciate nice Flash, they don't like playing sound tracks automatically.
 
This is new territory. Even Adobe's recent Flash replacement solution is still in beta.

At the end of a frustrating day, we opted to include a large play button in the screen area occupied by the new HTML5 animation, and this, I think, has actually turned out for the better. Visitors can decide for themselves if they want to enjoy the animation or jump right into the site. You can experience the solution at Wild1.

By the way, some developers are referring to this scenario of changeover from Flash to HTML5 as 'Flash Conversion'. I think this is misleading, since there is currently no way to perform this kind of format change in a scripted or automated way. You don't change one file into another. We went back to our original source files and, by referring to our Flash animation as a guide, used them to recreate the sequence in HTML5.

It's definitely time to be thinking web mobilisation but it's also time to be thinking Flash replacement.

An interview with Scott Swedorski                          by Steven Phillips

While some of us were sleeping and the rest of us wondering what the “Internet” was all about and whether the so-called “World Wide Web” had any practical implications for the real world, Scott Swedorski saw an opportunity to revolutionise software delivery. Through the business he founded, Tucows, Swedorski became one of the first young dot com moguls. Approaching 20-years later, he sits as Vice President Product Development with one of the web’s fastest growing and best loved website solutions providers, CoffeeCup. 
Steven Phillipscaught up with Scott Swedorski to provide Good Internet with this insightful discussion of what it means to be a successful web entrepreneur. 

Scott, you first made your mark as an internet entrepreneur back in 1993 when you founded Tucows.  How did that come about?
“It actually started by chance. I just got my first full time job out of college working for a library consortium and the Internet was extremely new. It was early 1991/92 and you could view all the websites on the ‘net in under an hour!

“Over the next year or two, more and more patrons of the library wanted to get online but had no idea how to do this. I decided then to make a website with a single page on a local computer server that had instructions on how to establish a PPP connection using Trumpet Winsock with Windows 3.11 for Work Groups.  From there the page just started growing by adding more instructions, applications and so on. Within a year, I had an entire website with categories and sub-categories with all kinds of programs.

“At this point the site was still called The Ultimate Collection of Winsock Software.  It wasn’t for a few more months when I read some news groups  postings where people were talking about UCOWS that I figured out that was me.  I just added the T and Tucows was official.”

The concept of an “Internet” had been around for a while by 1993. But it was still in its developmental infancy. Most software, for example, was shipped on disc.  What was the catalyst for you to create the functioning model for Tucows and how readily did users take to downloading freeware and shareware?
“For me it all started with people just wanting to find information online but it was all so new and impossible to manage. Downloadable software was practically non-existent except for what you could obtain through a BBS (Bulletin Board Service). If I had to point to one single thing as the “catalyst” I would say we owe it all to Microsoft for Windows 95. Without that OS, I think the Internet would not be what it is today.”

Was this in some respects a step into the dark for you? What were your expectations?
"Actually, I never really thought of it that way. It was amazingly fun and because it was something I could create while getting paid to do my primary job, that made it a bonus at the time.

Was it your goal to build and then sell the business?
“I never in a million years thought Tucows would be a business. This was just a fun thing to do in my spare time. It was just by chance that I hooked up with some people and they offered to buy the website and pay me full-time to work on it that I saw what potential it had.  It was an amazing time being in the tech business during the height of the dot com explosion.”

Even so, from a business perspective Tucows appears to have been a virtual overnight success because within two years you had investors wanting in. Did you sell outright or did you maintain an ongoing interest?
“I sold a large part of the business and retained some ownership in the company.”

Tucows went on to become one of the monoliths of the internet. How did you figure it’s worth back then? Investors today are paying millions for minority stakes in promising internet businesses. Can we assume, Scott, you walked away from Tucows a very wealthy young mover and shaker?
“I never had any complaints in that regard.  The money I earned at that age just boggled my parents minds. They never could understand how you can make money from something that has no tangible goods.”

So today, you’re with CoffeeCup and you’re VP Product Development. When did that happen and how did the move come about?
“CoffeeCup was actually one of the first editors that I reviewed back in the day.  I developed a relationship with the founder of CoffeeCup at the time and remained friends.  Years later he asked me to come work with them. That was almost 8 years ago.”

Is it the same buzz as your first successes? Are your business instincts still tested and fulfilled?
“I think any Internet company is an amazing thing to be a part of. Is the buzz the same?  Not really because it is different. I used to deal with thousands and thousands of software developers and now I deal with hundreds of thousands of Internet users. I love dealing with customers from all over the world in every conceivable demographic.  I have talked with a 10 year old on the phone because a parent could not figure something out and wanted me to explain it to their daughter and recently talked with a customer in Korea who is 99 years old and building his first website. That is just amazing!”

Your basic premise for Tucows, it seems, was to make software affordable and easy to obtain. Now with CoffeeCup you’re passionately engaged with a similar philosophy: to make web development easy, fun, affordable and accessible. My personal reflection is that when I walked out of the gates of Canberra University at the end of my final day of html for websites studies - around the time you would have been moving on from Tucows – I was confidently optimistic there would become an easier way, a wysiwyg functionality like Pagemaker’s, for website design. In a way, my wishes were fulfilled with Dreamweaver – but when I later discovered CoffeeCup, I felt like I’d been liberated. How well do you think, for example, Visual Site Designer 7 stacks up against other solutions?

“We all know there are hundreds of “web solutions” out there and each has its own way of doing things. With Visual Site Designer we made it so working with the software was as easy as a word processor. No complicated tasks, no having to know HTML. Just point and click.  If you can use a mouse, then you can build a website.  The other amazing thing is, what you make in Visual Site Designer will look very good in practically all browsers and operating systems.  That is no small task! 
“One of the best things about CoffeeCup Software in general is we have customers who purchased Visual Site Designer (or other programs) almost 10 years ago and each time we have an update, they get it for free. That is a pretty good investment for $49. Compare that to any other web editor on the market today and there is no comparison.”

You cover a lot of bases, especially in your interaction with CoffeeCup end users.  How does your contact with customers inform your role in product development, if at all?
“If it were not for our customers, we would not be here today. They are the lifeblood of our company. I would have to say we have some of the most loyal users that any company could hope to have. Because of this loyalty we always go out of our way to elicit support from our community, giving them access to pre-release programs we are creating or beta versions we are about to release.  This gives us the ability to receive feedback directly from the people who will be using our software in everyday life.” 

S-Drive represents a quantum leap for CoffeeCup and its many customers – not just because it’s such a versatile tool but also because it debuts CoffeeCup as a provider of “hosted” solutions (in addition to downloadable desktop solutions). Scott, I know you don’t like the term “hosted” as a fitting descriptor for the S Drive service – so would you mind describing in your own words what S-Drive is all about?
“S-Drive is a set of integrated services provided by CoffeeCup that work together toward a single purpose: Simplifying the process of creating and maintaining your website. From the very beginning, CoffeeCup’s main goal has been to simplify web development for our users. However, over the years, one of the main things about web publishing that has confused our users is the File Transfer Protocol, or FTP. FTP has always been a somewhat vague network standard, full of settings that many people don’t understand, or don’t need to understand. In other words, it’s overly complicated for the average user. After all, it was originally designed to be used by network specialists, and these days, just about everyone has a web presence. S-Drive makes FTP a thing of the past by creating an easy way to publish and maintain your website. You just need a free CoffeeCup account and to choose a subdomain you wish to use for your website.”

 Can we expect additional features in S-Drive when it moves out of beta?
“We have so much in store for S-Drive through the year.  It is going to be a great year for our customers and us.”

The internet and the World Wide Web feel as if they’re taking quantum leaps of their own right now, with so much choice and change, nothing standing still. There’s the perceived chasm between the cloud and the desktop, for example, and the complex array of web devices and delivery options, with the ubiquitous “mobile” looking more like the Star Trek communicator every day (catching up at last). So, where do you see the Internet and World Wide Web,say, in five years from now and how will you be helping to shape it?
“I think users are just starting to understand or at least hear the term “the cloud”.  This technology is what actually powers S-Drive.  What I think we are going to see in the next few years is even more of a merging of desktop computers, cell phones and online services in ways we have never even imagined. Each year we become just a little more connected with other people and the world around us. Video Chat, conferencing, collaboration will become so commonplace that we cannot imagine not having them a part of our everyday life.”

Scott, you credit Microsoft with making possible the Internet as we know it. Are there any individuals you credit with being landmark achievers, mentoring influences or a personal inspiration to you as regards the progress of the Internet?
“There are definitely some people and or services that we owe a lot to.  Some may hate them, but you cannot deny the impact they have had on the world. 

“People that stand out: Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page/Sergey Brin.

“Services that stand out: Gmail, YouTube, Wikipedia, Adobe Flash, MySpace, Twitter, eBay, Amazon.

“Most of these services we all use in everyday life now, but if you were around before these services were created, the ‘net was really quite a boring place.”

 

Content drives interest, not the technology which carries it, says the man who took his employer's revenues from $1.7bn to more than $30bn a year, and who has since struck out on his own. “The digital revolution is a very big deal. But there are those that maintain that digital represents a brave new world. I’m not sure that is completely the case."

So, according to last week's B&T Weekly report, says ex-Disney ceo, Michael Eisner, addressing 2,600 delegates at the Adobe Omniture Summit in Salt Lake City, Utah. The gist being, according to Tim Addington reporting out of Salt Lake and attributing this to former Walt Disney Company boss, Eisner, that "The revolution in digital media should not render everything else obsolete with content still king."

“You can have all the best social media strategies in the world but they won’t get people to spread the message for you unless what you are writing and creating is of interest," Eisner is quoted as saying.

As a writer and content provider,  I would have to agree heartily. But is this a circular argument? Is it digital chicken vs digital egg for supremacy? Or simply a case of the tweet - the cluck, to be consistent - being more important than the clucking?

This would be the case according to Eisner. Certainly, content was universally acknowledged king long before Twitter, Facebook et al took centre stage as drivers of website traffic.

Without content, the whole web experience - not just social networking - is hollow.  

Desktops, mobiles, handhelds? “If you are able to get the content right then every distribution system will invariably be your friend,” Eisner is quoted.  “We live in an age of platform adoption on steroids. For content providers like me, such a proliferation of devices could understandably lead to a nervous breakdown, but we remain calm.

“The eternal truth remains. Whatever the platform, great content will always win out.”

Three tweets for content!