When I finally saw it pop up in the Google Play store this week I decided to put my preconceived notions about Home aside and give it a whirl. Immediately after installing my whole phone changed. It was as if I had just switched operating system, I was no longer on Android I was on Facebook OS.

Facebook Home is effectively a launcher and replaces your home screen with a full-screen sliding news feed. The user interface now consists of a tiny bubble of my face which can be dragged left to launch Messenger, up to access the app launcher, or right to open my most recently used app. These are the only options available to you and everything else is hidden away behind fiddly drag and swipe options.

The Facebook Home UI.

All of this sounds lovely in Facebook land where guys dressed in hoodies and flip flops laugh at videos of screaming goats all day, but for those of us who want to use our phone for tasks outside of Facebook it is a real hindrance. My apps aren’t just there anymore, I have to go through a series of steps open them. And my widgets have completely disappeared, which for any Android user is like losing a limb. Important features that I had customised to be accessible with one touch such as Google Now, Twitter, Phone, Messages, and Email now take several actions to access. I counted that it took me 5 different actions to open Gmail as opposed to one before. I can’t even see basic information such as the time, notifications, battery indicator, or the weather.

Home also takes over your lock screen and only allows you to unlock your phone after you choose a specific app to open, it then takes you to your old lock screen where you still have to swipe and enter your pin. So effectively it adds two or three extra steps to unlock your phone. This is a real inconvenience, although it can be disabled in the options.

The news feed itself doesn’t exactly lend itself to the full screen experience. Images don’t fit on the screen properly and look dark and pixelated, even high-res images. The posts displayed on Facebook Home appear to be completely random, sometimes it would show me something posted 5 minutes ago and other times it would show a post from 3 days ago. With such a push for content to be instant Home seems to be overwhelmingly slow and irrelevant. Home is also very slow, after pressing the home button on my device when inside another app it sometimes took 5 seconds to load the Facebook Home screen. Another issue I found was that after scrolling through a number of posts there was no way (that I could find, anyway) of returning to the most recent post.

Engagement is one thing about Home that is easy and intuitive. Simple ‘Like’ and ‘Comment’ buttons in the bottom left hand corner work nicely, although I did find it easy to accidently hit the ‘Like’ button (always awkward).

One of the most talked about features on the launch of Home was Chat Heads. Despite the name, Chat Heads is a feature that makes a lot of sense. One thing that has always bugged me about the phones I’ve owned (both Android and iOS) is that messaging takes you out of whatever you are doing. Chat Heads tackles this by allowing you to view and reply to a message on-the-fly without it interrupting what you are doing. This feature works quite nicely and is something I would like to see implemented into Android.

How Chat Heads appear.

So after using Facebook Home I’ve decided I’m probably not the target market, but even looking through the eyes of an avid Facebook user I can’t see the benefits of it over the standard Facebook app. It’s clunky, disruptive, slow, and actually makes the whole Facebook experience rather tedious. The main reason I, and most people I know, own an Android device is for the customisability, Facebook Home takes all of that away. It cuts off access to your widgets and home screens and makes it difficult to access other apps. It’s early days, and it may well improve with future updates, but I fear that once Zuckerberg and co. roll out ads on the platform it will be even more unusable.

I’m not alone in my feelings toward Home, the app has an unimpressive 2.2 star rating in the Play store. Here are a few comments from other users:

“Not an intuitive app. Made my phone so frustratingly complicated to use that I uninstalled after just four or five hours.” – Victoria Wiley

“It limits my phone. If I wanted a single company to take over my homescreen appearance, I could use an iPhone.” – Lee Milstein

“Not intuitive and it makes my phone butt ugly.” – Ric Brown

Although, it seems to have won a few fans:

“It does exactly what it’s suppossed to do. It has a beautiful interface and is quite handy for people that use fb often.” – Keanu James

“Simple and easy to use. I love it.” – Gregory Ro…

Have you used Facebook Home yet? What do you think of it?

The post Hands On with Facebook Home appeared first on PushON Ltd.

Are you sitting comfortably? Then I shall begin.

Let me tell you a story. However unlike other stories you have read, or been told, this one will not contain any lions, witches or wardrobes. I shall not weave tapestries with my words of knights in shining armour or dragons that must be slain. Which I suppose is a shame really, as I’m sure some out there would find that a far more interesting read for a Friday afternoon.

It’s as I type this second paragraph that I realise I may have taken Nichola Stott’s talk at ionSearch yesterday a bit too literally. You see one of the key takeaway points from her talk for me was that when you choose to follow the much championed “content led” model or strategy for your business, the content you produce must tell a story in some way, shape or form. As by telling a story you create engagement with your target audience, which is the key to making your strategy work.

When this little gem of wisdom was revealed to me, I asked the obvious question. “What’s a story?” Obviously it’s not what I started to write at the start of this post, even though that’s the traditional thing you think of as a story. A story nowadays, in the context of creating great content for your audience, tends to be things that measure things or are evocative or emotive. What’s great about thinking like this, which Nichola pointed out as part of her presentation, is that you can use your clients existing “stuff” to create these stories. Nichola suggested that people find out what their clients are doing currently, find their USP and look at consumer groups. If at all possible use all of this to give people “the warm fuzzy wuzzies” as part of the story.

One great example Nichola gave as part of the presentation showed how you can create something out of nothing if you dig deep enough. One client they had sold thermostats, not exactly the most evocative of markets. Yet upon digging further they found that they were selling thermostats to the NHS. The NHS was in turn using these thermostats in the production of incubators for babies. This all meant that they now had a fantastic, emotive story that they could create content around to share and gain both visibility and (hopefully) links.

Now while all of these great hints and tips were shared with us all at ionSearch, and in turn I have now shared with you, I couldn’t help but notice something. A lot of what Nichola had been talking about sounded to me like traditional PR work. Now this does go hand in hand with the way I believe offsite SEO to have been heading for the past two years, and the way I have been working here at PushOn, but it does lead me to wonder if PR’s and SEO’s can continue to cling to their love/hate relationship. Or will it cause them harm as the few who can let go and just love each other tear ahead of the competition. Simon has shared his own opinion on the matter here at the wallblog, which seemed to cause quite the ruckus, and it’s well worth reading both the piece and the comments to form your own opinion if you haven’t formed one yet.

Hm, I think I can see my next story to tell you on the horizon.

If you want to read a general overview of ionSearch day one, there’s a fantastic one here, written by my colleague Jonny.

Images courtesy of the BBC and me.

The post ionSearch – Let Me Tell You A Story appeared first on PushON Ltd.

This past week Google announced that it will give its users a ‘digital will’ option for their online data. The premise behind it being that users can decide what happens to their online account after they die.

It has been dubbed “data-after-death” and lets users tell Google what to do with emails and other data if their account becomes inactive.

Google email and YouTube posting can be deleted after three, six or twelve months of inactivity. Alternatively they can choose to give access to the data to specific people.

This got me thinking, what happens to all your data when you have gone? What about your Facebook page or Twitter? Social media usage has been increasing at an exponential rate but no one has considered the implications to the data on there.

Both Twitter and Facebook have policies in place to allow users to request that an account be deleted in the event of users passing. Twitter users can obtain a permanent backup of all tweets from a designated account.

What if you do not want to close your Social Media accounts? How about carrying on your social media activity even after you have died?!

Here are a couple of options;

Dead Social

Dead Social enables a user to send out messages after death from various social media accounts.

The key features are;

• Send messages directly to your private Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin account
• Send out a final message and / or series of scheduled messages
• Release unseen video and audio messages

DeadSocial covers all the post-death social media options, scheduling public Facebook posts, Tweets and even LinkedIn posts go out after someone has died. The free service will publish the text, video or audio messages directly from that person’s social media accounts or it can send a series of scheduled messages in the future, say on an anniversary or a loved one’s birthday. For now, all DeadSocial messages will be public, but the company plans to add support for private messages in the future.

LivesOn

This caught my attention because I read about the service and watched an episode of Black Mirror that contained very similar themes.

Essentially LivesOn analyse’s a user’s tweets and learns about what is frequently tweeted and the style of tweets. The idea being that in time a tweet from LivesOn would be identical (or as close) to what the original user would tweet. Tweets will begin to populate on your LivesOn feed. A user has to nominate an executor for the account and they can decide whether to keep the account live.

LivesOn’s slogan is;

When your heart stops beating, you’ll keep tweeting

Legacy Locker

The previous two examples specifically dealt with social media accounts, Legacy Locker deals with your online presence as a whole. Legacy will manage your Facebook, Paypal, Linkedin, iTunes and Gmail to name but a few.

There are different levels of accounts from free to $30 a month. The free account will store and hand over 3 logins to one beneficiary and send out a farewell message to your loved ones, the top tier account has unlimited access.

Would you be interested in any of these services? It would be great to know your thoughts.

Please Tweet us @PushONLTD

The post When life logs you off, how to stay online appeared first on PushON Ltd.

Top 5 April Fool Digital Jokes

1. Bing

This is what happened when you searched for ‘Google’ on Bing:

2. YouTube – ‘YouTube’s ready to select a winner’

YouTube released a video saying the service would be coming to an end and they will be picking the “best video”:

3. Google

Google were to introduce a search-by-smell feature called Google “nose”

4. Google Treasure Map

Google added a new feature onto the Google Maps page, allowing for the World to be viewed in a ‘Treasure Map’ format.

5. Virgin Atlantic

Virgin Atlantic launches a glass-bottomed plane

Mashable created a list of the 2013 pranks, which can be found here:

The Ultimate Roundup of 2013′s Biggest April Fools’ Day Pranks

Facebook updates

Facebook’s messenger app has added VOIP which has now become available in the UK, following on from the US and Canada.

The option appears on active Messenger users’ profile page as ‘Free call’. I have checked this and it has not arrived on my screen yet but I imagine it will be rolled out soon. The call will be placed via WiFi or 3G.

Although the idea is great in theory in practice it will take a while before it takes off, why would you use an app to call and text when there are plenty already out there?

Will you be using it?

Facebook Phone

Screenshots of a phone rumoured to be announced by Facebook has been leaked ahead of an event on Thursday.

 The hardware will be produced by Android and have dedicated ‘Facebook’ style graphics and homepage.

The post Digital RoundUP 02/04/2013 appeared first on PushON Ltd.

Adria richards and that ‘joke’

When is a joke between two people private? The answer it seems is never.

Last week in the United States at a PyCon programming conference a developer who worked for PlayHaven made a joke amongst other things about ‘dongles’.

Adria Richards, a developer for a company called Sendgrid, was sat in front and tweeted this;

Not cool.Jokes about forking repo’s in a sexual way and “big” dongles.Right behind me #pycon twitter.com/adriarichards/…

— Adria Richards (@adriarichards) March 17, 2013

The developer was thrown out of the conference and subsequently fired from his job.

This act led to the lynch mob on the internet attacking Richards on Twitter with a flurry of offensive comments. Pressure was put on SendGrid to fire Richards and a few days after the original incident they relented. On Facebook they wrote;

Effective immediately, SendGrid has terminated the employment of Adria Richards. While we generally are sensitive and confidential with respect to employee matters, the situation has taken on a public nature. We have taken action that we believe is in the overall best interests of SendGrid, its employees, and our customers. As we continue to process the vast amount of information, we will post something more comprehensive.

So at the end of it all two developers lost their jobs and the internet was outraged. This could have all be avoided had Richards turned round and said to them that the joke was inappropriate. The fact that she tweeted their picture and publicly shamed them was not the smartest idea and made her position untenable.

Once something hits the web there is no going back, think before you tweet.

Google Keep

In the wake of announcing the demise of its Reader service, Google last week launched a new product – Google Keep. The note-taking app was released last Wednesday for Android devices, to mixed reviews.

Keep was immediately thrown into the ring with the likes of Evernote, although I don’t necessarily think Google is going after the note-taking giant. If they were, surely they would have released it across all platforms. I agree with Danny Sullivan’s take that it’s simply a service for Android users to sync notes across different devices, like you can with the iOS Notes app. It’s something that was missing from the Android setup.

So what’s the app like? Being an Android user myself I was looking forward to testing the app as most of my life is synced to Google anyway. My initial thoughts were that it’s a typical Google product, simple, clean interface, easy to use, and did the job. There are a variety of ways to enter a note; you can add a standard note, a list, take a photo or speech input. There is also an ‘Add quick note’ textbox at the top for additional simplicity. The notes appear as tiles that can be colour customised, re-organised, and synced to Google Drive.

The app looks good, but once you start using it on a day-to-day basis you realise that there’s a few things missing. The lack of a sharing function is a bit of an oversight, if I want to send a shopping list to my girlfriend for instance, there should be an option to share it across to her Keep account. There is also no way to set a reminder for a note, which is very annoying. This is a bit of a dealbreaker because it’s such a basic feature for an app of this kind, I couldn’t replace Any.DO or Google Calendar without this functionality. It’s also hard to access your notes on the web, I was expecting a ‘Keep’ tab to have appeared on Google’s black bar but instead I have to manually type in drive.google.com/keep/. I’m sure there is an easier way, but the fact is it’s not intuitive.

In my opinion, Google have got an opportunity to make a really good app out of Keep, but it’s not there yet. I’m sure there will be numerous updates in the next couple of months that will make all of these improvements.

Have you tried Keep yet? What do you think?

Dropbox buy Mailbox for $100M as reservations reach the 1 Million Mark

Early in the week, reports were going around that Dropbox were launching a bid to buy Orchestra, the company behind Mailbox. It was reported in a blog by GigaOm, that Dropbox paid more than $50 million for Orchestra. However, this was questionable with other sources saying the fee was much closer to $100 million.

On the official Mailbox blog, they wrote about moving to the new office move after being bought by Dropbox. They also announced that they reached the 1 million reservation mark after six weeks of being available in the Apple store. After our blog on release, the demand still remains high for access to app. With this benchmark they also released version 1.1 of the app to fix a few bugs and adds “shake to undo” to its feature set.

“Today we’re releasing an update to Mailbox in the App Store. Among hundreds of fixes and improvements big and small, we’ve added shake to undo—the feature our users asked for most. You can download the version here if you haven’t already updated.”

What will Dropbox do next with Mailbox? Rumours circulating around a file attachment integration with Dropbox’s own services.

TWITTER TURNS SEVEN

Twitter reached the ripe old age of seven this past week, and it looks like its popularity is going to continue to grow.

When did you first tweet and how often do you use it?

And We’ll leave you with this Chrome Experiment called Maze to keep you busy during the week – Try it on the PushON Homepage! 

The post Digital RoundUP 25/03/2013 appeared first on PushON Ltd.

Facebook Layout Update

Facebook are at it again, once we get used to their changes on the website, they bring out another one and it takes some getting used to.

The post Digital RoundUP 11/03/2013 appeared first on PushON Ltd.

google+ Sign-in

Last Tuesday Google launched Google+ Sign-In for third party developers, they can now allow users to sign into applications using their Google+ account. This is Google’s latest attempt to get ‘normal’ people using the social network, it will also give the search giant plenty of user data to slobber over.

Google is claiming that its new sign-in functionality is more secure than the likes of Twitter and, in particular, Facebook. It also gives users sharing options so that their social networks aren’t spammed with app updates and activity. Google+ director Matt Waddell released an image taking an indirect (but quite obvious) shot at Facebook with the tagline ‘Try the red pill.’ Facebook have received criticism in the past for ‘social spam’, however, Danny Sullivan took a closer look at Google’s new feature and decided that it’s not too dissimilar.

Take a look at Google’s launch video:

Google: how search works

A busy week for Google, it also released a stunning interactive infographic called ‘How Search Works.’ If you haven’t seen it yet and are thinking, ‘urgh, another SEO infographic’, take a look it’s pretty cool. The infographic itself gives a pretty basic and general overview of how Google indexes and ranks websites, but it also has some useful stuff for professional SEOs.

The coolest part is probably the live spam screenshots which show examples of ‘pure spam’ that Google has penalised. This is updated in real-time and some of the examples are pretty humorous.

These pages are examples of ‘pure spam.’ They appear to use aggressive spam techniques such as automatically generated gibberish, cloaking and scraping content from other websites.

This page also goes on to list the types of spam that Google looks for and takes action on such as cloaking, keyword stuffing and unnatural links to/from a site.

Google also published data for the first time on manual actions, webmaster notifications and reconsideration requests. The data in these graphs is really interesting. The graph below shows the number of websites that have had manual action taken against them over the last 8 years and is broken down by the different spam types.

YAHOO CEO BANS WORKING FROM HOME

Marissa Mayer, the Yahoo CEO, sent an email out to thousands of her employees last week in which she announced she was banning them from working ‘remotely.’

As a result, several hundred staff must relocate to their nearest Yahoo office by June or quit. Mayer’s said ‘to become the absolute place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we all need to be working side-by-side. That is why it is critical that we are all present in our offices.’

Those who only work one or two days in the office will have to submit to the new regime. ‘Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings,’ she says, ‘speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home.’

groupon send andrew mason packing

It came as little surprise last week when Andrew Mason was relieved from his post as CEO of Groupon. The company has been going through a rough patch since going public just over a year ago, and its poor 4th quarter earnings sent its stock reeling.

Rumours of Mason’s exit have been floating around for a while now, and he seemed to be expecting it as on Thursday he released this letter to his employees on Twitter.

For Groupon Employees: jottit.com/v5wux/ (Apparently, sharing oranges is necessary but insufficient #leadership)

— Andrew Mason (@andrewmason) February 28, 2013

‘After four and a half intense and wonderful years as CEO of Groupon, I’ve decided that I’d like to spend more time with my family. Just kidding – I was fired today.’

Mason took full responsibility for his role in Groupon’s recent poor performance and told his former employees; ‘You are doing amazing things at Groupon, and you deserve the outside world to give you a second chance. I’m getting in the way of that.’

Groupon, now valued at less than £2 billion, is searching for Mason’s replacement. In the meantime, Executive Chairman Eric Lefkofsky and Vice Chairman Ted Leonsis are taking the reins.

That’s our weekly RoundUP of industry news, I’ll leave you with this little treat from Qualcomm:

The post Digital RoundUP 04/03/2013 appeared first on PushON Ltd.

PlayStation 4 Announced 

On Wednesday night the worst kept secret in video gaming was finally revealed with the announcement of the Sony Playstation 4. During a two hour presentation the assembled media were told and shown the capabilities of the ‘most powerful platform ever’. However we did not get to see the console and were only shown the  ”DualShock 4″ controller.

Interestingly there was an acknowledgement from Sony that the previous console was difficult to develop for. This time round they contacted games developers whilst the console was being made, hopefully this means that more games companies want to get involved on the PS4.

So what can we expect with the PS4?

• A highly powerful AMD x86-based 8-core CPU, an enhanced GPU and amazingly 8GB of DDR5 RAM. This all means this will be the most powerful games console ever made and would go toe-toe with most gaming PC’s on the market.
• Games will still be on Blu-ray discs but all games will be fully downloadable, and can be played instantly with downloading continuing as you play.
• The PS4 will have an ‘Instant On’ feature which means the console never turns off but rather hibernates. This means that the user can instantly return to whatever was being played prior to turning off the console.
• The controller features a ‘share’ button which means gameplay can be instantly uploaded to Facebook and video streaming sites.
• The “PlayStation App” will enable iPhone, iPad, and Android based smartphones and tablets to become second screens
• PlayStation 4 Eye – 1280 x 800 camera (Xbox Kinect style feature)

Overall the PlayStation 4 is a smart piece of kit, the biggest disappointment was the fact the console was absent from the press conference. However this means it will most likely get shown at E3 in June. We are looking forward to it, now its over to Microsoft.

The PlayStation 4 is scheduled to be on sale in December 2013.

Google Glass

Google have been developing their revolutionary augmented reality head-mounted display for quite a while now, with little being shown apart from the headset over the last few years.

Now they are trying to push the sales in a social campaign by asking the question, ‘What would you do if you had Glass?’. To enter the competition you have to answer in 50 words of less with #ifihadglass using Google+ or Twitter, photos can be used and a short 15 second video can also be included.

The main drawback is that this is only available to U.S residents, meaning we will just have to write our own #ifihadglass tweet:

‘#ifihadglass I would visit the Wonders of the World and compare them using Glass to show the originals compared to 2013’s Wonders of the World.’ – Pedrom Pourkashanian

‘#ifihadglass I would go to a new city where I couldn’t speak the language and try and get a date by the end of the day’ – Jonny Pennington

‘#ifihadglass I could finally be on time for stuff without getting lost for 2 hours’ – James Whitelock

So I pose this question to you… What would you do if you had Glass?

Find more details here – if you are in the US you can enter on Twitter or Google+

interflora DISAPPEARS

Last Thursday, Martin Macdonald broke the news that Interflora had effectively been ‘wiped off the face of the Internet.’ Google hit the flower delivery service with a penalty which saw it virtually disappear from the SERPs for prime keywords it was previously ranking #1 for, including its own brand name. The company was sitting at the top of the search results for search terms such as ‘flowers’, ‘flower delivery’ and ‘florist’, but now finds itself buried in the 5^th or 6^th page.

We can only speculate the full extent of Interflora’s bad behaviour, but it appears a long history of bad link building practices has caught up with them. A quick Link Detox showed over 70% toxic and suspicious links, this includes advertorials, link networks, web directories and paid blog posts on abandoned networks.

Reminder: Google’s guidelines on paid links that pass PageRank also apply to “advertorial” pages. See goo.gl/PhwsY for more info.

— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) February 22, 2013

Following this incident, last Friday Matt Cutts posted a polite reminder on Google’s Webmaster Central blog that selling links is naughty and can lead to a penalty. It will be interesting to see how, and if, Interflora recover from this nightmare, whether they move to a new domain or start a long and gruelling recovery process, it won’t be easy.

The post Digital RoundUP 25/02/2013 appeared first on PushON Ltd.

Text version:

Social media became even bigger in 2012:

The post A Look Back at Social Media in 2012 [Slideshare] appeared first on PushON Ltd.

PushON have invested heavily in attaining Magento Silver Partner status and we’d like to share some of our experience in using Magento to generate a significant ROI for Ecommerce brands with you.

We are also delighted to have sessions from both SagePay and Postcode Anywhere who will also share some insights on easing the user journey and maximising conversion using Magento. Magento themselves will be in attendance of course.

The pinnacle of our seminar will be a case study by legendary Manchester brand, Bench Clothing, a Magento Enterprise client.

This seminar will take place at The Hive in the Northern Quarter on the 20th February. It is a half day as there is a significant amount of information to cover. It is, as you might expect, free, but open to merchants only. The mornings events are as follows:

• 8:30am – 9:00am : Registration
• 9:00am – 12:00pm : Presentation and Q&A
• 12:00pm- 1:00pm : Lunch and Networking

There will be lunch to follow and an opportunity to compare notes with your peer group.

If you would like to attend, please follow the link to sign up for the event and please feel free to pass the opportunity along to your colleagues.

We look forward to seeing you there..

The post PushON Announce Magento Event in Manchester appeared first on PushON Ltd.