Pemaquid Communications

Reading through the tea leaves here is not that tough. Microsoft is offering a 60% premium over Yahoo’s recent stock price b/c it realizes that apps (email, spreadsheets, document-creation, etc.) is migrating from the desktop to a new home on the ‘Net.

Case in point: I work w/several young guns who:

• Use Google Talk for IM
• Use Google spreadsheets
• Use Gmail

They think “Why should I fork over my hard-earned moola for MS Office when I can get it online for free?”

Then there’s Google AdWords, Google Analytics; oh, and Google also has this really cool search engine thingy.

Google here, Google there, Google, Google everywhere…

It’s definitely a threat to Microsoft’s facetime w/computer users.

What does a combined Microshoo mean for business marketing online? Probably a new ad network, combined MSN-Yahoo! search engine. Something that looks a lot like… Google.

Stay tuned…

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!

More from recent wanderings about the ‘Net:

• Mystery of the flat input buttons in Leopard - explained! - Have you noticed flat form inputs in Safari 3/Leopard? Dominey gives you the skinny.
• No more ‘click to activate’ - soon you won’t have to click to activate that control in the IE browser that makes an object play. Microsoft has licensed the component in question from Eolas. I think we’ll still use SWFObject and UFO, though. (Ajaxian)
• Anatomy of a good Web page (hotlinked image) - good markup, w/t/Cliff notes…
• Foamee - brought to you by Dan Cederholm. Ever wanted to keep track of who owes you a beer - and who you owe? Dan’s app makes it go down smooth. I’m linking you right to the How-to page…

Cheers!

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.

OK, so you’ve decided you want to add a blog to your Web site - a good move since. pound for pound, frequently-updated sites tend to grab higher search engine rankings than their peers who go without. So you download a copy of Wordpress, an open source blog platform that has all the features you’re looking for. Great.

Next, you want your blog to have the same look and feel - theme, if you will - as the rest of your Web site. Your designer cracks open the Wordpress blog in Dreamweaver and gasps at all the PHP code in the templating system. Skilled as she is with HTML, your designer can’t make heads or tails of the CSS or PHP.

Not to worry. Pemaquid has designed Wordpress blogs for a number of Clients. In fact, this blog you’re reading is a Wordpress blog (though an imperfect one - ever heard the one about the cobbler’s children who had no shoes?).

So if you’re looking to add a Wordpress blog (or Typepad blog, or any other flavor), contact us and we’ll get you set up. We’ll do it fast too (48 hour turnaround is doable), if necessary.

Striped backgrounds are a bit like last year’s music now, but this is a handy tool for creating them:
Stripe Generator.

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.