During the 2010 f8 conference, Facebook announced that it would be launching a new set of data permissions as part of the new Graph API.  The permissions themselves, while they provide more granular coverage of the data available via Facebook, aren’t really that interesting – the interesting part of the new data permissions are what Facebook grants to clients in terms of license to use and store the data.

User Experience

The user experience has changed as part of launching the new data permissions.  Using the old permissions required a user to click through a number of authorization dialogs, one for each permission required.  This series of dialogs sometimes caused confusion for users, depressed conversion, and sometimes left developers with an incomplete permission set as users began authorizing the app but quit when they felt they were giving too much away.

Figure 1 – Facebook previously required four popups to log in, allow offline access, and read/write access to the user’s stream.		Figure 2 – With the new permissions dialog, all of the required permissions are displayed in a single authorization prompt.

Facebook’s CTO Bret Taylor wrote in the Facebook Developer blog  that this change increases conversions for applications by 28-41%.  If only we could get that kind of conversion rate increase from flipping a switch on other websites.

Better Data Provisions

One of the most debilitating parts of a Facebook application, performance-wise, were the restrictions on data that prevented most Facebook data from being cached for more than 24 hours.  As Facebook’s Ethan Beard wrote in the Developer blog, we often had to write special code paths to handle Facebook data due to the 24 hour caching limit, or worse, we never actually stored the data at all, instead using FBML or XFBML to access it.  Now with explicit consent, we can access the user’s preferences and store it forever (as long as we provide a way for the user to opt-out).  This opens a number of new possibilities – imagine a business like Amazon.com taking advantage of knowing a user’s preferences.  All of a sudden, they could start recommending books similar to Anthem or 1984, even though I’ve never bought those books on Amazon, because I listed them as part of my favorite books on Facebook.

On top of the new data retention policy, Facebook is actually going to start pushing data to application owners via a process they’re calling Real Time Updates.  Now, application developers don’t even have to query the data – it gets pushed to us as users authorize our applications or as they change their profiles.  This will hopefully speed up Facebook by not having numbers of redundant queries being made on behalf of applications, but it will also provide the opportunity for more interesting development tools to be included.  I’m happy to say that real-time updates were important enough to me to include support for real-time updates for users as part of OpenGraph.NET, an open-source .NET Framework-based toolkit for developing for Facebook’s Graph API.

Like It or Not

As of June 30, you can access these changes via the Developers application .

Figure 3 – The New Data Permissions setting is disabled by default for existing applications, but enabled by default for new applications.

I haven’t seen in our applications that the new permissions are causing much trouble because of the way they’re used, but as always, your mileage may vary, and it would be better to check it out now before they’re forced on your app.

After months of developer community anticipation and beta releases, WordPress 3.0 is finally out in the wild. WordPress updates the core code several times a year for maintenance reasons, but this iteration has some pretty significant improvements that have got the Terralever developers of the WordPress persuasion (myself included) pretty excited.

If you don’t know what WordPress is, it’s a powerful, lightweight, flexible CMS. It’s evolved from a powerful blog tool (which it still is), into a tool that can power myriad websites with varying content and technical requirements. Terralever has built several websites with WordPress as a backend content management system, including the award-winning Ashley Fiolek site we recently built for Red Bull at http://www.ashleyfiolek.com.

There are a few new features that have me excited about the new version of WordPress, both from a development perspective and an end-user perspective.

1. Child Themes
2. Built-In Menu Support
3. Custom Post Types
4. and last but not least…Multiple Site Support!

One major limitation that’s been lifted by WordPress 3.0 is support for “child themes,” which are themes that inherit functionality and styling from, you guessed it, a Parent Theme. This gives you the flexibility to create variations of your base theme (such as creating a seasonal, holiday, or promotional theme). It’s also helpful for developers who do a lot of WordPress development, and want to use a base theme with common resources for each build, but don’t want to have to modify the core code of the theme. When a WordPress site utilizes µ (WordPress MU) functionality, child themes can be utilized to provide variations of a base theme for the different site instances.

One good indication that a feature should be included in the core, is how many plugins have been developed to deliver a basic piece of functionality. A perfect example is built-in menu support (Just search the plugin repository <http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/search.php?q=menu&sort=> for “menu”). Previously, there wasn’t a whole lot available out-of-the box in terms of building a dynamic navigation menu based on your site’s page taxonomy. However, in WordPress 3.0, it’s simple for non-technical admins to manage the organization of their navigation through the backend. The new interface provides a means to quickly create menu items, and drag/drop them into their proper hierarchy. As long as your theme has support for this new feature, you should see immediate results. If you want to take it for a drive, look for the ‘menus’ option under the Appearance menu in the WordPress admin.

Custom Post Types are especially interesting to me, since we use WordPress to power such a diversity of sites with varying content requirements. Essentially, this feature addresses a need that’s been handled previously by users creating posts and categorizing them in categories such as “portfolio” or “products,” or otherwise creating a custom plugin to manage content. Custom Posts allow developers and admins to more effectively manage different types of content on their site, by organizing them under their type of post, alongside similar posts in the admin. This opens the door to something like turning your WordPress site into an ecommerce site, or a collection of any other type of data that can be administered through the post editing interface.

And perhaps my favorite new feature, is that WordPress µ (Multi User) support is built into WordPress 3. If you need to create a bunch of WordPress sites, and you don’t want to get a separate server for each one, this feature is your friend. Each site built off of this base can be managed by administrators that only have access to that specific site, but the super admin can access all sites on the WordPress µ install. Themes and plugins can be shared from the root of your site with each of the individual sites, so it now becomes very easy to manage updates and maintenance to your codebase across multiple domains.

And that’s just a few of the new features in WordPress 3.0. For a full list of new features, visit:

At the age of four, my parents and I left Tempe, Arizona, and ventured into the heart of Europe, to live in the capital city of the Czech Republic, Prague. My family traveled there as missionaries to work with the local church to develop student ministries, just a year after the the country split from Czechoslovakia in the Velvet Revolution. Growing up overseas gave me a cultural experience like nothing else and a much wider perspective of the world. Europe branded me with a passion for travel and culture that has followed me to this day.

Since my family and I have moved back to Tempe, in the summer of 2007. I’ve had a chance to intern for several of the most innovative and exciting design and development agencies in the metro Phoenix area, including Perk, Integrum and Keane Creative. Working for all of these awesome agencies has given me a chance to be involved in multiple exciting projects and gain the practical workplace knowledge not taught in high school, as well as aiding in funding my passion for photography.

I first became interested in web development in 6th grade, where our class assignment was to create our own personal web page. Although, I would cringe looking back at what I created then, the experience left me with a longing for more. To discover how everything worked, to break things and put them back together again. This passion has grown since then to all things from laptops to webpages, but it always leaves me with a desire to learn more.

Currently, after graduating from McClintock High School, I am pursuing my degree in Business Management at Mesa Community College while I Intern at Terralever. The work that I do at Terralever isn’t the typical intern work, such as sending faxes or refilling staplers but it’s getting to do what I love, web development! It gives me a chance to work on huge projects such as Red Bull Stratos or Flugtag, collaborations I would never have a chance to be a part of working freelance. It gives me a chance to utilize my abilities to the fullest extent. I believe that the experience and training I receive while I intern here at Terralever is as valuable as the teaching I could be studying at ASU. The web is growing explosively and the demand for current and up to date programming is increasing. It’s difficult for college course content to keep up with the growing pace of the web. That’s why I believe that interning at Terralever, not only gives me practical workspace knowledge but allows me to work with technologies that aren’t being taught.

One of the best parts about working at Terralever is having the ability to go to developers who are higher up than me and get their help and assistance in any project I am working on or struggling with. Not only does this teach me new ways to problem solve and tackle different issues, it prevents me from hitting walls or road blocks in which I am unable to solve a problem myself. I can get immediate help and feedback, which makes me significantly more productive. I get the opportunity to learn an exceptional amount of web development as well as teach others what I have learned, or what experience I have gained.

My passion is to travel back to the Czech Republic and to shoot photography. For now I want to continue pursuing my career in web development as well as continue rock climbing, playing the drums, shooting photography, drinking lots of tea and living for the gospel. Follow me on my blog at http://www.connormcsheffrey.com/

When Silverlight just lived in the browser, it was relatively easy to interact with the analytics framework of your choice via code; it simply interacted with JavaScript on the browser.  This wasn’t terribly designer-friendly, since it required using code unless your developers were clever, but when Silverlight 3 and the out-of-browser experience came around, suddenly developers no longer had the guaranteed access to the analytics JavaScript hosted on the containing web page.  In response, Microsoft developed the Microsoft Silverlight Analytics Framework, a plugin-capable API for implementing analytics clients within a Silverlight application.  With it, we can now easily add any number of analytics vendors to a single client, without much headache at all, and what’s more, it’s extended to be easy-to-use for designers:

The components and behaviors built-in for Analytics in Expression Blend is already pretty deep.

The Analytics API implements behaviors, so that you can simply attach certain actions and behaviors to events on objects, easily in Expression Blend (so easy, a Designer can do it):

Here, Expression is collapsed, but you can see the Analytics TrackAction behavior is selected and can have its properties modified.

Given how often we utilize Google Analytics within our solutions, we were very excited to hear that Google was one of the providers to implement the Analytics Framework.  As our ability to track behaviors for our clients grows, we’re especially excited to see where the future of Silverlight will carry this capability – to mobile devices and embedded scenarios, or interactive and offline video players, our ability to monitor conversions and user behavior is only going to grow.

Originally posted to the Phoenix Business Journal

Terralever has become one of slightly more than two dozen companies to be recognized as a preferred developer by Facebook.

The Tempe-based interactive marketing agency is one of 14 companies in the Facebook preferred developer consultant program, which can build programs for the massive social networking platform.

Terralever has been involved with Facebook applications since 2007 and has built programs for companies ranging from Apple and BMW to Red Bull and the University of Phoenix.

“Clearly, Facebook is one of the most innovative companies in the world. In the last five years they have strategically found ways to capture the attention of users everywhere, attracting more then 350 million active users worldwide,” said Chris Johnson, Terralever CEO. “We are honored and excited to be a part of this new program and to have the opportunity to continue to develop new experiences on Facebook Platform.”

Joel Neubek, Terralever’s Director of Technology, is presenting at this years Mix Conference in Las Vegas.

Joel will be talking about how Terralever was able to use the powerful new features of Internet Explorer 8 to change how users interact with the Digg website.

Those who stop by his presentation will learn how using Accelerators and web slices changed the way users are able to discover, as well as simplify submitting stories to Digg. He will also be looking at how taking advantage of these awesome features can improve a user experience, while increasing the number of users visiting your site.

If you would like to attend Joel’s presentation it will be taking place on Thursday March 19th from 2:30-3:45 pm at The Venetian in Las Vegas – presentation room, San Polo 3501.

To register for the event or to check out more details, you can visit The Mix website here.

We hope to see you there!

It’s fairly common for a prospective or existing client to come to say “we need to redesign our web site.”  The first question we ask is “Why?”

Occasionally the answer is motivated by something technical:

• Our IT department has decided we’d be better off if we changed over to Ruby on Rails
• We’re thinking doing a site in Silverlight would differentiate us
• We can no loner maintain our site because the guy who built it quit

More often than not the answer is subjective or ambiguous:

• It’s time for a change
• The last redesign we did was 2 years ago
• Our new CEO’s wife doesn’t like the color blue we’re using

What we almost never hear is that the decision is based on a business goals or performance metrics. Examples:

• We used to convert about 4% of our browsers to buyers, but we’re far below 3% for the last six months and we feel it’s due to a direct competitors’ superior user experience
• We have a full Flash site and can’t get a foothold in organic search which we’ve determined is preventing us from a great deal of potential business
• Our offline and online brands aren’t in sync; we think if we can get the two in parity we would have better conversion and retention of customers

When is the right time to redesign your web site? It could hinge on a number of things.  If its along the lines of the reasons just above this paragraph, you’re good to go. Is your web site developer’s departure or a general feeling that “it’s time for a change” a good enough reason?  It could be.*

My advice?  If you’re going to expend the time and energy to redesign your site, take advantage of the opportunity and ensure the money you spend is an investment. Whatever your industry, if you have a web site it serves some sales, marketing or support role for your company. Regardless of how you enter into a site redesign, consider this as a high-level guide for your redesign process:

1. Reflect on your current site and what you hoped it would provide your organization
2. Review any metrics you have on how your site currently performs
3. Understand what your visitors motivations are and how they can be serviced – be objective – this is about your visitors, not you
4. Clearly define what success would mean to your organization after the redesign (such as we’d have better visibility online, our content would be more engaging, or we’d reach new prospects and have an opportunity to create a dialog with them)
5. Map success metrics to key performance indicators that are measurable (such as a 25% increase in traffic within three months, a 10% decrease in bounce rate at launch time,  or 3,500 new email newsletter sign-ups by end of year)
6. Create guiding principles for your site redesign design based on your visitors, goals, and measurable performance indicators
7. Build your new site by the principles above
8. Put performance measurement tools in place so the new site can be evaluated and improved upon over time

What’s above is oversimplified; a general approach that will help direct your redesign process towards measurable success. If you are getting close to a site redesign, there’s several great books out there that can provide you with a complete, detailed process.  If you’re interested in a recommendation, just ask.  And, if you need a company to lend you a hand, I know of one of those, too.

* If your site is designed for a maximum screen size of 640×480 pixels and no more than 256 colors, and the CGI programmer that’s held it together for the past ten years quit to start a one man pilgrimage to acquire the last card to complete his Magic, The Gathering set then yes, you should absolutely redesign your site.

Originally posted on Scott McAndrew’s online marketing blog.