Pemaquid Communications

Are you like me? Always late on the draw sending cards around the Holidays? We’re here to help.

Pemaquid has designed a Facebook app called Jenny’s Cards (you must have a Facebook profile to view). You can use it to send a little last minute Christmas cheer to all your friends (all of your friends are on Facebook, right?)

In addition to Holiday cards, you can send your Facebook pals Birthday cards, Thank Yous or just-plain-simple note cards. The card graphics are done by annie|catherine designer stationery, a Pemaquid Client whose site we redesigned earlier this year.

We rolled out this app after Thanksgiving for two reasons: to test how “infectious” this type of viral marketing can be, as well as to help a Client promote their products (there are links to the annie|catherine Web site in the app).

So far folks from Far East Asia to Down East Maine have used the app (Facebook has 50 Million + members worldwide) and annie|catherine is seeing traffic flow from the app to their site.

Done right, Facebook apps are an excellent way for businesses to extend their brand.

Pemaquid’s adventures on Facebook are the subject of a story in today’s Portland Press Herald (Just my luck, I got a haircut the day after they took the photo, and no, you won’t see it here).

Thanks to my Facebook buddies Wendy Clark (Portland Diner logo) and Jennifer Ecker (Web design) for their help in creating Pemaquid’s Facebook apps. Thanks also to Facebook friend Justin Ellis (PPH reporter who wrote the story), who gave us a very “honorable mention”.

Our apps mentioned in the story:

• Portland Diner
• Lost on Liftoff

More are on the way. Stay tuned…

Ladies and Gentlemen… we have Liftoff. Lost on Liftoff. (Sorry, I just couldn’t resist.)

Pemaquid Communications premiered a brand new Facebook app for Lost On Liftoff, one of Portland, Maine’s hottest local bands, @ the techMaine conference a few days ago.

Go here to add the Lost On Liftoff app if you have a Facebook profile.

The idea is pretty simple. Once you add the app, it puts a “badge” on your Facebook profile, along w/a player created in FBML (that’s “Facebook Markup Language”) that allows you to play your favorite Lost On Lifoff song from their latest album, Mixtape Blackouts. You can change the favorite song if you like and invite other friends and fans to add the app to their profiles.

For the band, it’s viral marketing at its best. Pemaquid launched (no pun intended) the app just a few days ago and - through the power of Facebook’s social graph - it already has several dozen people using it.

Lead singer Walt Craven did the amazing album artwork and is working with us to redesign the group’s Web site.

Rock on!

Walt Mossberg reviews Leopard, the latest version of Apple’s OS X, in today’s Wall Street Journal. he says it’s easier to use than Microsoft’s Vista. His review illustrates once again that in the digital world, designing for usability will lead to success in the long run. As many as 20% of non-corporate computer sales go to Apple now, up from low single digits recently.

Why? Here’s what Mossberg says of OS X:

…It has proved to be as powerful and versatile for mainstream consumers as Windows, yet easier to use(emphasis mine) and more secure…

It works the same way for Web sites. In the long run, if your site is easier to use than a competitor’s - think Facebook (easy) vs. MySpace (cluttered and clunky) - you’ll win in the long run, even if your competitor has the #1 spot on Google.

This just in from Techcrunch: MySpace is apparently saying “me too” to the Facebook Platform. According to Techcrunch, the MySpace Platform will launch in about a week’s time.


Since the Facebook Platform launched in May, more than 5,000 third party developers have created “Facebook Apps” that Facebook users can add to their profile (Pemaquid has built one called Portland Diner - a restaurant guide for southern Maine). Some apps have well north of a million installed users, and the implications for marketers (er, and other social netoworking sites) are obvious.

Google is also preparing to get in the game.

If your want to position your brand to a young, smart, tech-savvy crowd, figuring out these open platforms - the Next Big Thing - should be on your agenda. Pemaquid is the first developer in Maine to have created apps for these open platforms, so contact us if you’re looking to make them a part of your Web strategy.

If you’re a Web designer, 2007 is the year that Internet Explorer 6 became “the new Netscape 4″. Actually, no, things could never be that bad again, but when you’re designing Web sites using CSS and Web standards, IE6 is the one that now throws up the most humdingers.

A question I often hear from other designers is why, with IE7 and Firefox offering better support for Web standards, aren’t more people upgrading from IE6? (The latest browser statistics show IE6 use falling from about 42% to 36% during the past 8 months.)

The reason has to do with usability and cost-benefit analysis.

While most Web designers wouldn’t dream of using IE6 as their primary browser these days, especially with add-ons like the Web developer toolbar and Firebug available for Firefox, it works just fine for what most people want to do online. Checking email, reading up on sports scores and stock prices, buying shirts from LL Bean and using social network sites like LinkedIn, Flickr, Facebook and MySpace all can be done just fine w/IE6. There’s no compelling reason to switch.

Kevin Hale of Particle Tree has written an interesting article on the subject.

The upshot for Web designers? Remember to focus on usability when working with Clients to design features for an interactive Web site. Think about how customers, employees and other groups will do on your site before investing a lot of development time in creating a cool Web site feature that won’t get used all that much.

And it looks like IE6 will be with us for some time to come.

MaineToday.com jumped on the Facebook bandwagon yesterday en masse. Joe Michaud? Check. Wendy Clark? Check. Paul Caiazzo, Carl Natale, Wendy Almeida, Monica Wright? Check, check, check, check. The timing is interesting, having just joined myself 10 days ago.

Hooray! More friends for me from the old workplace…

I keep hearing about Facebook (maybe that’s partly due to the fact that I’ve just signed up and am now in tune).

Here’s a post from Paul Allen about Facebook- which he claims will become the largest social network in the world.

There’s no reason to doubt it. I’ve watched as Facebook’s Portland network has ballooned to over 15,000 members, w/several hundred added since I joined up about a week ago.

Facebook is already a more popular online destination than eBay and is gaining on - are you ready? - Google. And I’ll bet people stick around longer on FB than they would on the Big G.

And with the new Facebook Platform and the ability for developers to create Facebook apps people can add to their profiles, like…. (shameless self-promotion) the Portland Diner app created by Pemaquid, it’ll only get stickier.

To top it off, Facebook’s people demographic is better and it’s interface is much cleaner than MySpace. If I were Uncle Rupert, I’d be concerned.

Played around w/t/ Facebook Platform over the weekend, and was able to create an app for Portland Diner. Now, members of Facebook’s Portland, ME network (and anyone else, for that matter) can add the Portland Diner app to their profile and check out local restaurant listings right there - which is of course why Facebook created the platform in the first place - to allow developers to create tools that would make the user experience at FB more engaging and - shall we say - “sticky”.

There are a few minor bugs in the CSS - Facebook doesn’t allow linked CSS and rewrites inline sheets placed in the <style> tags - but it seems to work just fine. There are other wrinkles - no javascripts are allowed, and Facebook requires that developers use a subset of HTML called, naturally, FBML. SQL can become FQL and there are some proprietary tags that include an “FB:”.

If you have a Facebook account and live in Portland, Maine, you might find the Portland Diner app useful. Go get it here. We’d love to know what you think; please let us know.

Do you do your social networking at Facebook? Head on over to the Pemaquid Zone and cool your heels w/us for a bit.