Time Magazine has released their “50 Best Websites of 2009” list. After reading through the list, it’s clear that these sites exemplify the primary activities performed in today’s online world – sharing, learning and organizing. I’ve segmented the top 20 sites into these categories below.  However, I realized that a fourth segment is starting to emerge - sites that are replacing “old” forms of media. These sites represent a shift in behavior and provide online versions of activities that have been around for years (tv entertainment, shopping, phone calls, etc).

These online behaviors don’t really seem to be a huge surprise. We’ve all read about online holiday shopping being through the roof,  heard the news media talk on-and-on about Twitter, and watched real-time election coverage on Youtube and Facebook.  So what I find most interesting is that ....65% of these sites were NOT AROUND 5 YEARS AGO (I added some years below if you are interested). 

The rapid growth of technology coupled with the adoption by the consumers….that’s the amazing part.  Broadband has certainly played a huge part in this growth. Without a high-speed connection, sharing a video would be pretty much out of the question. To put things in perspective, take a look at this collection of screenshots from September 11, 2001. It doesn’t seem like that long ago, but sites like CNN and MSNBC look archaic. The average American is just adopting a more digital lifestyle in general. It’s become mainstream which is feeding the technology growth and vice versa (a nice happy circle of life). Nytimes did a good job covering this topic a few weeks ago when they summarized Forrester’s annual update on consumers and technology.

Time's Top 20 of 2009 (full list in chronological order can be found on Time.com)

SHARING – Consumer generated content (photos, video, thoughts/text) broadcasted out or consumed by the masses as the ultimate reality entertainment.

• Flickr – Feb 2004
• YouTube – Feb 2005
• Vimeo – Nov 2004
• Twitter – April 2007

LEARNING - Information portals. Tools that make information available and searchable online.

• Google – Sept 1997
• Wolfram|Alpha – May 2009
• Academic Earth – March 2009
• California Coastline – Oct 2002

ORGANIZING - Bookmarks, Group blogs, aggregators – Sites that help consumers organize and filter the information on the web as they please. Customizable crowd sourcing per se.

• Delicious – March 2005
• Metafilter – Nov 2004
• popurls – March 2006
• Boing Boing – Jan 2000

REPLACING OLD MEDIA/BEHAVIORS -  Tv online, reservations online, phone calls online, classifieds online, shopping online, travel agents online, etc.

• Hulu – March 2008
• Fora TV - 2005
• OpenTable - 1999
• Skype – Aug 2003
• Shop Goodwill - 2009
• Amazon - 1995
• Kayak – Jan 2005
• Craiglook – March 2009 **Really smart…Mashes Yahoo Pipes and Google Maps into an RSS browser for Craigslist.
   

#40 on the list gets my honorable mention - Mint.com.  It’s the ultimate financial planning tool. It is linked in with online resources to keep your assets (and debts) up to date and generates pretty charts for you to analyze. Did I mention it’s free? Definitely worth checking out. Since they have  access to everyone’s financial details, they’ve been publishing some  interesting stats lately too. Such as this little widget - Mint Map: America’s Most Frugal Cities

Every week we take Internet marketing questions from friends, acquaintances and client business partners and unravel them at the end of these enewsletters. Is there something you would like to know about the weirdly wonderful world of websites? Ask us here and we shall answer.

Question: What is Google Website Optimizer?

Answer: Per Google's dry summation:

Google Website Optimizer is a free A/B testing and multivariate testing application that helps online marketers and webmasters increase visitor conversion rates and overall visitor satisfaction by continually testing different combinations of website content. But, if you're a website owner or an Internet marketer with "mad scientist" tendencies…

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Every week we take Internet marketing questions from friends, acquaintances and client business partners and unravel them at the end of these enewsletters. Is there something you would like to know about the weirdly wonderful world of websites? Ask us here and we shall answer.

Q: What should we do with all of our old pages when we launch our redesigned website?

Short Answer: Always back it up and map your legacy content to new locations.

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Prepare to rejigger your website code.

Microsoft has officially moved IE 8 out of Beta and into full release.  You can download it yourself, or just wait for them to push it onto your PC. That's right, they plan to push IE 8 through Automatic Updates, just like they did for IE 7.

With the latest version of IE, Microsoft is hoping to reverse the market share loss they've experienced over the past several years. As recently as 2004, IE had 94% of the browser market (!!), but at the start of 2009, most measures had them slipping below 70%.

There are some potentially nifty features in IE 8, and it purports to be IE's  most standards-compliant version (insert joke here), but judging by the beta release, it's pretty bloated and not all that fast.

Time will tell whether they've tuned it up enough to stem the flow of users to their competitors.

Have you played with IE 8 in beta? Have you downloaded the actual release already this afternoon? Let us know your thoughts.

In summation, there's an amazing post over at User Interface Engineering by webslayer Jared called the “$300 million button”:

The designers fixed the problem simply. They took away the Register button. In its place, they put a Continue button with a simple message: “You do not need to create an account to make purchases on our site. Simply click Continue to proceed to checkout. To make your future purchases even faster, you can create an account during checkout.”

The results: The number of customers purchasing went up by 45%. The extra purchases resulted in an extra $15 million the first month. For the first year, the site saw an additional $300,000,000.

A must-read for anyone who likes happy customers, big, shiny buttons, and keeping money flowing on their site.

http://www.uie.com/articles/three_hund_million_button

By now it's all over the Internet - Microsoft's Internet Explorer has lost significant ground in the web browser war. According to statistics reported by Net Applications from January through December 2008, IE's hold on the worldwide browser market has slipped from 75.5% in January 2008 down to 68.2% in December 2008, with a steady decline across all months. On the other hand, Mozilla FireFox and Apple's Safari browser made steady gains, rising from 17.0% and 5.8% to 21.3% and 7.9%, respectively, over that same time period. Google Chrome crept in and took 1% of the market since its appearance just four short months ago in September 2008.

An examination of data collected by Congruent Media for several of the most visited websites that we host also reveals this downward trend in IE's market-share. Our data, which is collected from sites that are primarily viewed by browsers within the United States and Canada, suggests that IE commanded 81.2% of the browser market in January 2008, falling to 75.9% of the market in December. In that same time period, FireFox rose from 13.7% to about 17.3%, and Safari moved up a percentage and a quarter from 4.2% to 5.4%. Chrome took 0.7% of the market in the four months since its debut, more than all non-FireFox Mozilla browsers, Netscape, and Opera combined.

If the steady decline in IE market share illustrated by the Net Applications data and corroborated by our own holds true in 2009, it's possible that we'll see IE drop into the high 50% range worldwide and in the high 60% range in Canada and the USA. This is extremely significant news for anyone with a web site, and for web development teams in general.

Assuming this trend is not an anomoly (and a full year of decline is not likely an anomoly), it rings the death knell of the days of Microsoft's web browser market share domination. We are moving into a time when many good, competitive browsers are on the market, pushing innovation of web technologies and converging on web standards, with many more web-savvy consumers willing to try them out. This means that web developers can no longer adhere to the faulty mantra of "it works in Internet Explorer, that's good enough", which may have been fine in the early half of this decade. Now, however, developers must produce sites that are cross-browser compliant, functioning well in not just Internet Explorer, but also in the other popular, competing brands.

Sites that fail to do so are immediately rejecting 1/4 to 1/3 (or possibly even 1/2 come the end of 2009) of their potential market. If your web site is an eCommerce store, that translates directly into a monetary loss - you are casting off 1/4 to 1/3 of potential sales! That's huge!

Now, consider the flip-side. If you have a well developed, compliant, cross-browser friendly site, not only are you keeping those 1/4 to 1/3 of potential sales on your site (because, well, the site works correctly in Safari or Chrome or FireFox), you're also going to catch the eye of the cast-offs from those other sites that AREN'T compliant. (Of course, browser-compliance isn't going to be the key to the success of your eCommerce store - you still need to be selling something people want - but you get the picture.)

Fortunately, Congruent Media has always developed web sites with this mindset, adhering to the latest web standards and ensuring that the sites that we produce work correctly in all of the popular browsers.

They got one by us! After, oh I don't know, a near-decade of speculation about GoogleOS, the crew from Mountain View decided to drop a browser-bomb on us over the holiday. Announced midday yesterday, scheduled to launch midday today, it's Google's foray into the muddy waters of the browser market- Google Chrome.

When the first news stories started trickling in, I'll admit my heart skipped a few beats. Sure, I love Google, but do we really need another browser? Details were sparse. Rumours were wild. My last day on the beach was full of questions about what this meant for web developers and users. There are still plenty of questions surrounding Chrome, but Google's own Chrome Comic (a 40-page graphic masterpiece) does a fine job explaining what it's all about (as well as giving me a compulsive urge to F5 the two rumoured Chrome launch sites).

From what I've read (a lot; this release has probably excited me more than it should), despite entering a crowded market, Google Chrome looks to be amazing. Taking the best offerings from Opera, Safari, and Firefox, giving the browser a nice minimalistic feel, and completely overhauling how browsers are made and work gives me the sense that Chrome will eventually become my browser of choice. Eventually. It'll take a lot to pull me from Firefox (especially because of what I know is coming in 3.1), but Chrome may someday become a strong enough competitor.

Let's have a quick rundown of what's in store for Chrome users:

• Prominent, persistent tabs that can be dragged and dropped between windows, retaining their state and session info
• Better performance with today's RIA's acheived by separating each tab and plugin into it's own process (which means when one tab dies [with an awesome "Sad Tab" graphic, to boot!], the rest live on perfectly insulated and unharmed) and a completely new Javascript engine called V8
• Increased security from "sandboxing" all tabs and processes
• New methods of pop-up control that constrain all popups to their parent tab, keeping your browser and desktop from getting cluttered up with windows
• In-browser process management that allows a user to see and control which tabs and plugins are using which resources
• Built-in site blacklisting powered by a constantly updated list of known malicious sites that warn users when they encounter a possible phishing or malware-hosting site
• Increased privacy features, dubbed "Incognito", that function like Safari's Private Browsing option
• One of the best rendering engines available thanks to Chrome's base of Safari's WebKit engine, the nightly builds of which currently pass the Acid 3 tests and which has, for my money, the best font-rendering of any browser on the market

So basically, Chrome represents an entirely new way of thinking about browsers, provides what seems like an ideal environment for users, and wouldn't cause many (if any) headaches for designers and developers. A perfect storm of awesome, and one that has me salivating as we get closer to 1:00PM EST.

Will Google Chrome be the final nail in IE's coffin? Probably not. Firefox has had many years to do so, and is still working double time to make the inroads it has in market share, so the new kid on the block probably doesn't stand a chance, but it's got a great sounding system behind it, and even if it only ever becomes a niche browser, you can bet that most of the features that Big G is pioneering with Chrome will soon be incorporated by the other browser manufacturers. So no matter what, the users will win, which is and always has been Google's top priority.

More Info

• Google's Official Announcement
• Wikipedia article on Chrome

Long the bane of web developers everywhere, Internet Explorer's lack of compliance with even basic standards (and Redmond's seeming reticence to even make attempts at them) has for years slowed the adoption of new web technologies. Even with three very capable browsers snipping at their heels (go Firefox!), IE's six-years-in-the-making update was languid at best. As their market share continues to tumble, you'd think they'd maybe step it up a bit, but that hasn't seemed to be the case.

Granted, IE8 looks like it'll be a beast (and as the microformats guy here, I'm certainly thrilled to see them tackling hAtom despite their puzzling attempts to Redmond-ize it [seriously, hSlice?]), but with no official release date, who knows when we'll finally get an IE browser with some decent standards support. And further still, how long before adoption rates pick up and we can even take advantage of the new features (IE7 has been out for 2 years now, and IE6 still has >34% share!).

Tired of watching Microsoft ruin the web for everyone, the team at Mozilla has, according to reports from Ars Technica this week, taken it upon themselves to drag Internet Explorer out into the light. How? By releasing plugins for IE that will attempt to fix its many, many bugs. First up, support for the new canvas element in the forthcoming HTML5.

As awesome as it is, that's not really that helpful right now, given the sheer number of other bugs floating around, specifically in IE's problems with positioning, selectors, and Javascript. But it's just a first step. The next step is what's truly go to rock - ScreamingMonkey, a plugin that will enable Mozilla/Adobe's new Javascript engine (Tamarin) to run on IE, bringing all of the latest Javascript2 features to Internet Explorer.

While the plugins still have a long way to go, and the battle for adoption will be tricky (the Ars article mentions a possible tie-in with the next version of Flash, though I see that unlikely given the public's general annoyance with "unintended" installs [see: iTunes/QuickTime packaging], but I would love love love to be proven wrong on this), Mozilla has shown an unprecedented level of committment to making the web work for everyone.

Now if only we could get the guys from Opera to create a CSS plugin for IE, we'd be all set :)

This is the second in a two-part series exploring the current state of Web 2.0 and the need for better optimization in the age of Rich Internet Applications.  Part 1 gives an extremely brief history of Internet development and takes stock of the current state of the World Wide Web, specifically in terms of various big-name and AJAX-enabled sites.  It also discusses large download sizes inherent with Rich Internet Applications and their impact on end-user perceptions.  Part 2 introduces various client-side optimization methods that every Web 2.0 developer should perform and every Web 2.0 client should expect from their Internet solutions partner, and explores these optimization methods in detail.

Current State of the Internet (Redux)

In part 1 of this post, the Congruent Media team examined some big-name websites and discovered some disconcerting results about their size and lack of optimization.  By far the worst site in the data set was CNN.com (as measured the afternoon of July 23rd, 2008), which came in at a total size of 635 KB with 263 external items (images, cascading style sheets, and JavaScript files) encompassing nearly 97% of the total download.  BBC News came in a close second with 503 KB total download size.

To recap:

A further investigation revealed that none of the external JavaScript files for the CNN site, including third-party libraries, were compressed!

In this Web 2.0 age of the Internet, first impressions count - users expect things to work quickly.  Waiting around for 10 or 20 seconds for a page to download and work correctly is time that a web browser is likely to spend doing something else, like hitting the back button, returning to their Google search results, and trying the next site down - your competition.

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This is the first in a two-part series exploring the current state of Web 2.0 and the need for better optimization in the age of Rich Internet Applications. Part 1 gives an extremely brief history of Internet development and takes stock of the current state of the World Wide Web, specifically in terms of various big-name and AJAX-enabled sites. It also discusses large download sizes inherent with Rich Internet Applications andtheir impact on end-user perceptions. Part 2 introduces various client-side optimization methods that every Web 2.0 developer should perform and every Web 2.0 client should expect from their Internet solutions partner, and explores these optimization methods in detail.

In the Beginning...

In the good old days of the Internet - back in that other millennium - the majority of people surfed the World Wide Web over a 56kbs modem (or worse!). Bandwidth was at a premium. Download times were gigantic. Most people were running Windows 95 or Windows 98 on 386, 486, or Pentium I boxes using Lynx, I mean Mosaic, I mean Mozilla, I mean Internet Explorer... [ visit http://www.livinginternet.com/w/wi_browse.htm for a quick and interesting look at Web Browser history ] In short, web browsers were springing up everywhere, there were very few standards, and it took forever to download a web page that was anything more complicated than some text and perhaps an interlaced GIF or two.

During that nascent age of the Internet, web developers were faced with the daunting task of keeping the size of their pages to a minimum. Cascading style sheets hadn't come onto the scene, so everything was based on tables, and images were far and few between. JavaScript, which started to show up in web pages in the late 1990s, never really worked right, and was too slow to be practical for anything but the most basic of tasks. The main concern of web developers, after getting the correct information on the page in an organized manner, was to keep the size of those same pages to a minimum so that people could actually download them in less time than it took to smoke a cigarette.
 

Got Bandwidth - Will Travel

Fast forward from the 1990s to 2008, and more than 80% of all Internet users (and over 93% when you just consider the work force) in the United States are on broadband connections, according to a WebSiteOptimization.com report,and a September 2007 survey by the PEW Internet and American Life Project found that over 50% of Americans have "high-speed Internet connections" at home.

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