Pemaquid Communications

When designing all these way-cool, bubblicious Web 2.0 apps, and when working with frameworks like jQuery, it’s easy to get caught up in the ajax-y goodness of it all and forget about accessibility requirements.

One reason many Web sites don’t have a higher degree of accessibility built in is that accessible design is seen as hard work. It’s one more set of best practices to wrap one’s brain around.

Often, for designers, it can seem to take the fun out of things (though it doesn’t have to be that way).

Drew McClellan has a recent blog post on the subject that illustrates the point. He talks about the Cappucino framework, developed by 280 North and billed as a way to build “desktop-caliber applications that run in a web browser”. The 280 guys are even working on a drop-and-drop IDE, called Atlas, for creating Cappucino apps.

I haven’t tried Cappucino first hand, but the word on the street is that this system is incredibly stunning, and the folks at 280 North should be congratulated for the accomplishment.

Cappucino’s javascript-laden framework, however, still has a ways to go to address accessibility issues. Hopefully, the 280 guys – and others developing similar systems – will take the time and do the hard work necessary to make sure their creations have a high degree of accessibility built in.

We can do it without losing the Coolness Factor. Focus on simple elegance in your design, make it your business to understand best practices for accessible design, and you’ll be able to build sites that work with assistive devices and are also fun to use.

I’m a disciple of David Allen and his ever-popular Getting Things Done method for efficiently managing all the “Stuff” we need to do.

There are dozens of great tools our there to help you GTD. (See what I mean?)

For about the last six months I had been using NetVibes, a popular start page application, to create and shuffle todo lists. NetVibes lets you easily create and categorize todo lists and its ajaxy goodness lets you drag list items (and entire lists) around to prioritize them.

Still, in some ways NetVibes was lacking. I have an iPhone, but there’s no iPhone app for NetVibes, so I couldn’t add new todos directly to my list while on the go. And trust me, you don’t want to use the iPhone’s small view screen to browse NetVibes.

I also couldn’t set deadlines for my NetVibes todos – and moving a todo from the “Calls” list to the “Waiting for” list required a cut and a paste. I started to think I could do better.

So over the last two weeks I’ve been reviewing a veritable tag cloud of todo apps, and after creating countless user accounts, my vote for the best time-management app (at least during this election cycle) goes to…. Remember The Milk.

RTM was built to be a todo management tool, unlike NetVibes, which is really primarily an RSS feed reader. It’s also built for speed. It’s loaded w/ajax – I wonder how it performs w/a screen reader – which allows you to add and manipulate todos almost as fast as you can think them up. Items can be prioritized and assigned a deadline. And you can easily move items from one list to another w/a click or two.

You can search/sort your todos in a number of ways. Yep, you can tag ‘em too.

RTM is everywhere. There’s a widget that lets you integrate it with your Google Calendar; you can also tie it to other handy apps like Jott, and you can tie todos to locations.

SMS reminders? Check. iPhone app? Check.

I’ll still use NetVibes to compile long-term GTD project lists; and it’s a great feed reader.

If you’re feeling swamped trying to manage the crush of things you need to do each day, you might want to give RTM a look. As always, YMMV, depending on what you need to do and where/when/how you need to do it. Tomorrow I hope to post a list of some of the other time-managment tools I found while rummaging around the Internet.

I don’t know why it took me so long, but it finally hit me – Twitter is the new blogging.

I remember when blogging first came on the scene – it took me awhile to ‘get it’. Why, I thought, would someone take the time to post their musings about the everyday, and who would care? I couldn’t see the point of most of it initially, though now the Web is full of thoughtful, colorful and amazingly informative blogs on every topic, and you don’t have to look hard to find detailed information about something that’s of interest to you.

Now, we have Twitter and everyone, it seems, is tweeting. For the most part, these tweets are pretty mundane (“…heading out for a bikeride…”, ” Trying to finish up several key deliverables so I can get out on the boat today ” and even simply “Baseball”) are samples of the <140 character slices-of-life you'll find when you follow someone's twitterings.

You could call all this 'micro-blogging'.

I'm not sure how meaningful all of this is, where it's all going or even what any of it means, but I do know one thing - it's an exploding cultural phenomenon. Just like blogging was a few years back.

I've learned my lesson. This time, I'm going to pay attention to the cultural changes wrought by the Web and work harder to understand what it all means.

Follow me on Twitter

Seems like everybody is Twittering these days (or at least everyone in the wonderful world of Web).

For the uninitiated (unindoctrinatred?) Twitter is a service that let’s you tell your buds where you are and what you’re doing in up-to-the-minute detail (emphasis on “minute” as in ‘my-NOOT’). You can post to your Twitter via a cellphone text message and your pals subscribe to be notified when you “twitter” (verb). You can “follow” the tweets of others, having the site alert you by cellphone when friends update their accounts.

It’s this “text-message-broadcasting” that makes Twitter unique.

I’d always been of the opinion that all this twittering is not especially useful, and that instead of making life easier it adds an unnecessary layer of complexity. I recently had the perfect opportunity to test that assumption: the 2008 SXSW conference in Austin, Texas. I knew some folks who were going to attend and Twitter seemed like the perfect way to stay in immediate contact as we fanned out across the cavernous conference facilities.

At that it worked reasonably well. “Panel in Ballroom A rocks! – u should b here” or “I’m coming down from the second floor – meet me at the 4th Street entrance and we’ll go to lunch” were typical posts. On the other hand, I concluded that I could have easily survived – as I have for many years – without the tweeting.

There’s a certain tyranny about using Twitter. Ostensibly, one of the biggest reasons to use Twitter is to let your pals know where you are or what you’re thinking in up-to-the-minute fashion. So you can easily fall into a post-early-post-often-vortex in order to keep friends informed (otherwise, after all, they might think you’re dead, and come to look for you at your last-twittered location).

Many technological tools are like this. There’s a tantalizing enticement to do something you’ve never been able to do before (“Cool, I can send a single text message to a Web site and it can alert all my friends? Dude!”). We spend a lot of time in front of our computers… because we can (I’m guilty as charged). We use devices that save us time – but if we then fill up that newly-found free time with activities that aren’t very meaningful, our quality of life goes down, not up.

There’s a usability message here: before adopting a new technological device or app we should take a serious look at whether these tools truly help make our lives easier and better – or merely different.

Gettin’ on a Big Ol’ Jet Airliner later today to head to the biggest, baddest scrum of Web-slinging early-adopters the world has ever seen.

Yep, SXSW Interactive ’08.

Two years ago, there was blogging. Last year, online video. This year it’s… (you guessed it)… All Things Social.

I’ll be reporting live.

Facebook apps continue to take the online marketing world by storm. For the uninitiated, a Facebook app is kinda like a widget that FB members can add to their profiles.

Pemaquid has several under development now. We’re the first Web design company in Maine (and so far, still the only one, though competitors are starting to get a little jealous) to have developed 3rd-party Facebook apps.

A good example of an app is Portland Diner (you’ve got to be logged into Facebook to see it, though there is a stand-alone site).

Why is this so important to marketers? One word: eyeballs.

Some of these FB apps have millions of members using them, so they become attractive advertising vehicles. Of course, you have to position things carefully so that the advertising message doesn’t cause the user experience to be a drag.

I’m going to be giving a presentation on Facebook apps at the MESDA techMAINE Annual Conference tomorrow. If you’re curious to learn the basic ins and outs come on down and check it out.

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.

The Portland Press Herald interviewed Pemaquid Communications’ Rob Landry (Principal) and Sarah Hines (Creative Services Coordinator) for an article in Monday’s news on social netoworking and related Web sites like Facebook and MySpace.

Pemaquid Communications is the only Maine Web developer to have created a Facebook app. Reader’s of this space know it’s called PortlandDiner.com.

Are you one of the many folks out there who wonder what RSS is and why anyone would care? Take a look at this plain-spoken presentation on RSS at Common Craft.

Many of the most popular RSS feed readers available are mentioned; one he doesn’t mention is the one I use and which I recommend: NetVibes. You can get NetVibes here.

Having an RSS feed on your blog or news site is a great way to increase the traffic and visibility of your site, by making it easy for both search engines and human readers to keep up with new postings.

Bad News: MaineToday.com doesn’t have an RSS feed for news.
Good News: My old boss Joe Michaud says they are on the way and will be built into the next generation of the MaineToday site.

Can’t wait. Netvibes awaits…

I’ve known about Netvibes for some time now and had toyed around w/it. Over the Fourth of July holiday, however, I suddenly realized how you can keep track, at a glance, of whether you’ve read the items in a particular feed.

That’s all it took.

I spent part of the day yesterday bringing in all my feeds and content, which I had set up in my old feed reader, Newsgator. This type of site, w/its high level of Ajax functionality, no doubt would be difficult for people who require a high degree of accessibility to use, but for an average joe like me, the usability is A+. You can see a tremendous amount of information in one screenful and very quickly and easily add stuff or move it around.

Hello… Houston… we have a tech bubble. TechCrunch reports that one of the latest startups to gain funding is MizPee, a site for your mobile devices that lets you know where the nearest loo is located.

Consensus on the new site is “Huh?!?” (Read the comments). It seems most people just look for a Mickey D’s or an Irving station when they’ve got to go, instead of whipping out that cellphone and scrolling through search results.

Which brings us back to Web site usability, interestingly. Moral: think about whether people will use that Web interface before you sink millions into a Web site (oh, wait – it’s not their money they’re spending, it’s venture capital – forgot)

Looks like the whole Web 2.0 thing is bottoming out (remember companies that wanted you to buy pet food online and had sock puppet mascots?) The canary’s coughing. Deja vu, baby.

We’re excited about some new features we’ve added to Portland Diner, the restaurant guide for Southern Maine. There are expanded listing pages and Google Map links to each restaurant in the system.

Even better, you can now create your own account and then rate restaurants and add your own mini-review.

More features coming soon. In the meantime – Bon Appetit!

Mobile dating services are sprouting up to help people find a match while they’re sitting at the bar.

MeetMoi.com is one. You enter your ZIP code into your cellphone and soon you receive profiles of other daters in the vicinity. In theory, if your blind date’s a bust, you can get on the horn and call in a replacement while the night is still young.

Sounds like a great idea – if you live in San Francisco. In Portland, Maine, you might end up like the only guy in town w/a fax machine (no one to send your message to).

I could be wrong – I haven’t personally tested the service (I’m married, after all).