Ideaticus.com

I didn’t had much time to work on this project lately but I have many pages with fragments that require some time to clean up and get some good articles on-line. I’m involved in interesting projects and many thoughts will be posted on Ideaticus. Also, I had some interesting meetings with web developers and marketing junkies with some nice conversations about Human-Computer Interaction, social networking, web security and media streaming.

I’m trying to bring some people to write articles on this site but most of them are very busy and I will end up writing their ideas.

More to come this month …

This is a very short post!

Congratulations MySpace! I found few days ago their Developers sections and I think is great. Since august 2006, when Facebook launched their API, I didn’t found any other important development platform on big social networks.

One more thing about APIs: everybody should “open” their application and allow additional modules, but be careful! Sometimes APIs make your life harder. That’s why on a social network I was involved, we will try to keep it simple and close for a while.

As I promise, I’ll write a series of articles about Human Computer Interaction (HCI). The prologue of this series had defined some terms from HCI theory. This article is focused on web interfaces, especially website search interfaces.

First rule: do not return “No results” on any search. Try to find some answers for the user even the keyword is something like “asdsad dfdsf sdf”. If your site sells something, user should always have the opportunity to buy.

Second rule: suggest keywords. There are two ways of suggesting keywords: in the search box and on the site as links.

In the search box: Using javascript you can make your search box smarter by suggesting keywords in the same manner as Apple does on their website.

On the site as links: We found many implementations for this kind of keyword suggestion. One of them is called “tag cloud”. I prefer this implementation because of simplicity. Users easily see a list of keywords: “cat, dog, animal, bird” without any action (click in a search box, type a letter etc.)

Third rule: Do not return too many answers. Messages like “We found 123231 results for your search” are not welcome on sites other then search engines. People rarely browse more the 50 results and it doesn’t make sense to show 1000.

Forth rule: Organize results by importance. If you sell books, for example, you will prefer to return the results ordered by book popularity and not alphabetically or price ascending.

Fifth rule: Offer different sorting and filtering criteria. Allow user to sort books by price, by author or by year, for example.

All those rules will make user’s life much easier and most probably will come back happily.

I like Flixster! It’s a nice community where I can find quickly what movies should I rent for the weekend, I can read stories about actors, I can easily find some pictures with some cool actress or just waste my time with other people. But I’m a developer and now I love Flixster. Why? Because they selected the MySQL Enterprise database to power their businesses.

Let me show you some numbers! In 2007 Flixster had a monthly average of 10 million visitors. Right now are more than 1.3 billion Continue Reading »

Last night I made some research on domain names major domains auction sites and I didn’t found many options. A lot of good domain names are parked and not for sale, but many domains are listed for thousands of dollars even the name is not a big deal apparently. The top bid on Sedo, for example is indian.com, with 150.ooo$ and doesn’t have 1000 unique visitors daily. You can reach this number easily on any domain name without professional search engine optimization in few weeks. On Afternic I found pchs.com listed with 5 million minimum offer. Now, this is a hilarious auction.

This article is not actually about “dot com” prices. If you want to spend thousands of dollars only for a domain, be my guest. I will try a different approach. Continue Reading »