Google's Web Book May Not Help Those Who Need It Most

In an effort to help educate the general public about its browser, Chrome, and the web in general, Google released an online "book" called 20 Things I Learned About Browsers and the Web. Done in the style of an illustrated children's book that allows readers to flip through the pages, it is designed to provide a general overview of the internet and how it works (DNS is fun with cartoons!), all the way down to the browser on your computer. Read about it in the Google Chrome blog post, A curious guide to browsers and the web, from November 18.

While having a conversation with a friend/client, I sent her a link to the part of the book that explains web browsers and why a modern browser is probably a good idea to use instead of an outdated browser. This user is on Internet Explorer 6 and is not allowed to upgrade per corporate policy. What I did not expect was the page to break so forcefully for a user on Internet Explorer 6. She was immediately prompted to download and install some fonts, and declining to do so resulted in a page that could not be read (owing to the text flowing off the left side of the screen) and a curious illustration of a dog and fire hydrants (which she took to be some sort of mean joke from Google):

On a whim, I suggested she reload the page to get the fonts it was pushing down to her, and I can say that the experience improved — albeit slightly. The main copy of the page was visible, but the content was cut off on the first "page" with no way to get to the remaining "pages" in the section. Take a look for yourself:

You may note that there is a caption at the top of the page telling users to download a modern browser (Chrome) or at least install Google Chrome Frame. It says flat-out that the page was designed for HTML5-compliant browsers (which is a small list, and ever-changing given that the spec is not done).

Owing to the growing collection of HTML5-sites-that-aren't-really-HTML5, I was suspect about this one, so I looked under the hood. Lo and behold, among an assault of divs and spans I actually found some HTML5 elements — header, nav and footer. Unfortunately, I think many of the divs and spans could have been better served with the oft-maligned and misunderstood aside, section or article elements, assuming this site really wants to tout HTML5.

If you are going to exclude older browsers because you want to play with the newest whiz-bang, why not just go for the gusto and pepper the site with as many HTML5 elements as you can muster? And while you're at it, why not take out the whole section explaining why you should upgrade your browser? Clearly if you can read and use the book, you are already modern enough.

In case you are curious, that same page above as rendered in Google Chrome:

Related

Some examples of what I've written about people not quite getting HTML5.

• Google Doodle: Bouncy Balls Aren't HTML5


• Google, Arcade Fire Confused on HTML5


• Methods to Select an HTML5 Element


• Does Your Browser Really Support HTML5 and CSS3?


• HTML5 and CSS3 Confusion


• Too Soon to Advocate HTML5?

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Current Internet Use, from Assorted Sources

Today Opera Software released data about how users of its Opera Mini mobile web browser use the web. Opera does this periodically to give some insight into how its users may be surfing, but what we don't know is how much Opera Mini users correspond to the web in general. Opera is certainly motivated to capture as much of the mobile market as it can given its low appearance numbers on desktops. Regardless, the title of the report really distills down Opera's findings: Generation Y chooses the mobile Web. You can get all the details from this and prior surveys at Opera's State of the Mobile Web site. Some of the highlights:

• Almost 90% of respondents in the United States aged 18-27 have used their phones to share pictures. Of the profiled countries, Vietnam &8212; at 67% &7212; had the lowest use of mobile phones to share pictures.


• Respondents in the United States are least likely to have asked someone out on a date via SMS (44%). Respondents in China (84%), Germany (84%) and Vietnam (83%) are most likely to have used SMS texts to ask someone out on a date.


• Generation Y in both China and the United States share a disdain for printed newspapers. 53% of respondents in the United States and 57% of respondents in China rarely or never read physical newspapers.


• Watch your privacy policies. Respondents in South Africa (49%) and the United States (44%) were somewhat to very uncomfortable sharing their personal information online.

Last week ReadWriteWeb reported that YouTube use on mobile devices has been on the rise — 75% of surveyed mobile YouTube users saying that their mobile device is the primary way of accessing YouTube (YouTube Mobile Use Exploding: 75% Report Mobile is Primary Way of Watching YouTube
). This number, however, should be considered in context. Only users of the mobile version of YouTube (typically the YouTube app installed on a phone) were surveyed, so you can expect a far larger percentage of respondents relying on the mobile version as opposed to the general public. This doesn't, for example, track the users who might come across a page on your site with your corporate YouTube video. Since YouTube is often used for casual surfing, not so much business use, it makes sense that a meme discussed over beers with friends might result in a smartphone popping out to track down the video everyone is referencing.

Brian Solis was kind enough to take the data from the Ad-ology report, Twitter Users in the United States, and distill it down to some manageable chunks of data in his post Who are All of These Tweeple? In short, Twitter users tend to range between 18 and 34 (which is a big range) are white and have at least some college education. Again, cross-referencing with the data we've gathered from other surveys, we see a continuation of some trends toward younger more savvy users. There aren't lots of surprises in the report, but there are some numbers that can at least provide a little more detail to what we already expect. For example:

57.7% of Twitter users use the Internet more than three hours per day for personal use (outside of school or work) and are considered "heavy Internet users."

Back in June Nielsen released a report with a telling title: Social Networks/Blogs Now Account for One in Every Four and a Half Minutes Online. Four of the most popular destinations on the web are Google, Facebook, Youtube and Wikipedia. All of these enjoy a lot of use from users on mobile devices (well, perhaps not so much Wikipedia, but people are still looking things up in bars after tracking down the YouTube video). While the article is silent on mobile use, a skilled reader can apply mobile trends to the overall traffic and begin to see part of the reason mobile has been climbing.

If you believe this article from June, Social Media is the 3rd Era of the Web, then you can expect to see the numbers of social media sites to continue to climb and ages of users continue to stay young, even as older users get on board. As part of that, mobile use will continue to climb as people want to stay socially connected wherever they are.

The trick among reports and studies is to figure out how the data was gathered, who performed the gathering, why they did it and who participated. If you can validate that a study has any merit, then you can start to cross-reference it with other reports and piles of data to tease out some meaning.

Related Links

• Social Media is the 3rd Era of the Web, June 15, 2010 at Social Fresh.


• Social Networks/Blogs Now Account for One in Every Four and a Half Minutes Online, June 15, 2010 at Nielsen Wire.


• Who are All of These Tweeple? November 10, 2010 from Brian Solis


• YouTube Mobile Use Exploding: 75% Report Mobile is Primary Way of Watching YouTube, November 12, 2010 at ReadWriteWeb.


• Generation Y chooses the mobile Web, November 24, 2010 from Opera.

UPDATE

It seems the day after Thanksgiving is a good day for people to post more details about Internet use. I won't distill them here (I haven't had a chance to read them in detail), but here are a couple more chunks of stats and data to review while you digest.

• Preview of Mobile Stats to End of Year 2010: 5.2 Billion subscribers, 350M people got their first phone this year, November 26, 2010 at Communities Dominate Brands.


• The Great Wealth Divide in Internet Usage [STATS], November 25, 2010 at Mashable (who still refuse to properly date stamp their posts).

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Thanksgiving and Social Media, Redux

I finally get to eat.

Two years ago I hosted Thanksgiving dinner in my shoebox of a house and managed to pull it off without setting anyone on fire. Back then, my experience with social media was limited and my favorite social media tool was Brightkite.

In addition to a free meal, my family also got to experience some of the potential of social media in the form of the Brightkite wall, which was a constant stream of posts and photos from Thanksgiving meals across the country. Amazingly, they sat transfixed as it scrolled across my TV and they got a kick out of seeing a slice of everyone else's holiday.

Watching the Brightkite wall, waiting for guests.

Last year I wrote up a blog post, Enjoying Thanksgiving with Social Media, that detailed my previous year's experience and it was picked up by Brightkite on their blog: We are thankful for.... They were even kind enough to provide a link to a Brightkite wall with some search terms already selected (Brightkite only). That was back when Brightkite was still enjoying a fair amount of photo postings and had not been thoroughly overrun with spammers.

Mashable, the site for all things social media related, posted an article titled HOW TO: Plan the Perfect Thanksgiving With the Help of Social Media (although the title tag says "social web"). The article, however, has little to do with social media and instead talks about web sites focused on helping you prepare meals, travel, and generally survive the holiday chaos.

If you prefer the idea of a wall showing all the latest Thanksgiving tweets, many Twitter tools allow you to follow specific terms and hashtags, meaning you can build your own if you already have one of those tools. If you want something a little more interesting, the Brighkite wall still works and allows you to aggregate tweets in addition to posts from Brightkite. TwitterFall is another projection-friendly (or TV-screen-friendly) option for viewing tweets in a cascade down your screen. There will be more noise (spam) on it than two years ago, but it's at least a way to see live posts come through. Sadly, there is no way to aggregate all the photos that make it to Gowalla, the various Twitter image services, Facebook, and so on. But then, it's probably better to spend time with the family anyway.

I'm resisting the urge to turn this into a post about the TSA pat-down policies and the opt-out day that many are calling for on the web that coincides with the start of holiday travel, but if you want to cash in on the chaos via a new Foursquare badge, then you may just need to check in to an airport some time over the next couple days. We'll see if I get it when I do an airport run shortly...

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Social Media Policy Lawsuits, Part 2 of 2

Yesterday I covered an example of lawsuits sparked by teachers unions and school boards over social media policies. Today I'll carry it a little further with another case involving unions as well as a professional association.

Complaining about Your Job

An employee at an ambulance company, faced with complaints on her behavior, was denied the ability to have the Teamsters respond on her behalf. Using Facebook, the employee lashed out at her supervisor, using vulgarities and a company term to imply the supervisor is mentally unstable. She was ultimately fired from the company and her Facebook comments were cited in her dismissal. The National Labor Relations Board, formed to protect employees who form unions or discuss working conditions, has stepped in to file suit claiming that the social media policy is too broad and that her Facebook comments cannot be used to fire her. The policy states that employees are not to discuss the company in any way on social media sites.

Since the NLRB is involved and weighing in on this, it's a federal issue that applies across the country. Organizations don't have to have unions to be affected by this, either. The NLRB ultimately felt the social media policy was too broad and infringing the employee's rights to discuss her working conditions, which can have serious effects for companies who have already written policies with an eye toward restricting employees from discussing anything regarding their employers. Any disparaging comments about the supervisor's mental capacity were dismissed by the NLRB as secondary to the issue.

Employment law firms across the country sent out alerts in the wake of this case, urging companies to re-examine their social media policies.

American Medical Association

Perhaps owing to the many private practices across the country that might not be in a position to draft a social media policy, or even care, the American Medical Association has released its own policy: AMA Policy: Professionalism in the Use of Social Media. While it isn't a set of strict rules, according to the AMA release it is designed to help[...] physicians to maintain a positive online presence and preserve the integrity of the patient-physician relationship. An overview from the AMA (not that the policy itself is much longer):

• Use privacy settings to safeguard personal information and content to the fullest extent possible on social networking sites.


• Routinely monitor their own Internet presence to ensure that the personal and professional information on their own sites and content posted about them by others, is accurate and appropriate.


• Maintain appropriate boundaries of the patient-physician relationship when interacting with patients online and ensure patient privacy and confidentiality is maintained.


• Consider separating personal and professional content online.


• Recognize that actions online and content posted can negatively affect their reputations among patients and colleagues, and may even have consequences for their medical careers.

The policy, however, is silent on HIPAA on how it fits into social media. The short and simple answer is that it does not. HIPAA naturally precludes the use of social media for so much patient interaction that any physician following the rules of HIPAA should understand that casually sharing any information with or about patients is a bad idea.

The problem is that without this being explicitly spelled out, physicians who are not technically savvy may not understand that something like a tweet sent to a person (by preceding it with the recipient's handle) or maintaining a venue on Foursquare would be a violation (not everyone should be given the opportunity to check in to an oncologist office).

There are still safe ways to use social media, and examples could be added as an appendix. For example, making a Facebook fan page for your dentistry practice or medical supply store is probably safe, as long as you police it to make sure people aren't posing medical questions or seeking medical advice (and worse, getting it from other patients). This might be too much effort for a small practice to commit, and may not be tenable for many.

Conclusions

Crafting a social media policy is necessary, even if everything covered in it is already addressed in other policies. Providing specifics helps those without technical savvy to understand what they can and cannot do. The trick is be sure a policy isn't too restrictive or otherwise unenforceable. As lawsuits roll back and forth across the country, in time, as with most other policies, a standard set of best practices will shake out. Until that happens, flexibility is important.

Related Links

• Corporate Social Media Policies, September 21, 2009 on this blog.



• Protecting Yourself From Social Media Lawsuits, July 21, 2010 from Social Media Today.



• The Ethics of Social Media – Part I: Adjusting to a 24/7 World, November 11, 2010 from Business Ethics magazine.



• Company Accused of Firing Over Facebook Post, November 8, 2010 from New York Times.



• Groundbreaking Lawsuit: Company Accused of Illegally Firing Employee over Facebook Post, November 11, 2010 from a California employment attorney blog.



• The Perfect Storm-Facebook, Email, NLRB, November 15, 2010 from Social Media Today.



• Company Social Media Policies Challenged, November 12th, 2010 from 1 Good Reason social marketing blog.





• AMA Policy: Professionalism in the Use of Social Media, November 8, 2010 at American Medical Association site.



• New AMA Policy Helps Guide Physicians' Use of Social Media, November 8, 2010 at American Medical Association site.



• The Realities of HIPAA in Social Media, April 6, 2010 from the Lovell Communications blog.



• Sorting Out the Confusion of Social Media and HIPAA Regulations, October 9, 2009 from (e)Merge, a medical marketing company.

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Social Media Policy Lawsuits, Part 1 of 2

Back when I first started pitching the idea of developing a social media policy for an organization, it was really two-fold. The first part was the key part to me — outline a process and rules for your organization to communicate using social media. Having a process for responding to questions, complaints, trolls, etc. from customers directly engaging an organization or from comments found out in the wild of the web is just good business practice.

The second part was, in my opinion, a little less important. Creating a policy for how employees use social media at work and how they discuss work seemed pretty straightforward and already covered by existing confidentiality and defamation policies. Sadly, in a litigious society such as ours, it's never that simple and legal counsel is motivated to create iron-clad legalize tomes of rules.

The end result is that some employees may feel that their rights are being infringed. Today I'll cover a case with a school board in Florida.

Teachers vs. the School Board

In August, the Santa Rosa County School Board posted its revised E-Mail, Internet, and Social Media Acceptable Use and Risk Policy. Parts of the policy make perfect sense, such as protecting non-public student information by requiring parents to sign-off before any of that information will be transmitted via the notoriously insecure method of email.

The social media portion of the document, titled Risks Associated with the Use of Social Media literally discusses the risks of social media and has a sign-off at the end stating that the reader acknowledges those risks. There are cases where specific and non-specific statements are made, such as this one about befriending students and posting information about students:

The Santa Rosa County School Board does not support or recommend any staff member “Friend”-ing a student or parent on a social network. Do not post student pictures, names, or work on school or personal sites unless specific permission to do so has been obtained from parents and site administration. ADDITIONALLY, ANY INFORMATION RELAYED TO STUDENTS VIA ELECTRONIC COMMUNICATIONS MUST BE ETHICALLY APPROPRIATE AND PREFERABLY SCHOOL-RELATED (I.E., HAVE LIMITED ELECTRONIC COMMUNICATION WITH STUDENTS)

The teachers union, however, takes issue with the policy overall. A third grade teacher at the school worked with the union to threaten a lawsuit, providing the following statements:

My main concern is an employer has asked an employee to sign a document that is so lengthy, it required a table of contents. [...] It stated by signing the nine-page document, you agreed to everything in there and were not allowed to edit it, in part or in total. [...] When you sign the form, it says the district has the right to put your name, picture and employment on the Internet, and you have no discretion on how it is used.

While I think she has it completely wrong (the policy is geared toward protecting student data), I am not a lawyer (IANAL™) and not every employee is going to read this kind of document carefully, with its extensive legal references (for self education), and not feel as if a signature is somehow terminally binding on something that may not be understood.

Teachers in Manatee County and Bradenton County, both also in Florida, have also filed lawsuits with similar claims. The flip side, however, is that teachers without a social media policy giving them direction on appropriate behavior may not know where to draw the line. While a policy doesn't prevent poor behavior, it sets parameters and expectations, and protects schools when teachers get out of line.

Just last month New York Post reported on three teachers that were fired for inappropriate interaction with students on Facebook. In the article, the Post reported that the Department of Education has no social media policy in place. The absence of a policy governing behavior with students can lead to lawsuits from parents just as easily as lawsuits from unions for having a policy.

Tomorrow I'll cover another example lawsuit and a new policy from a professional organization.

Related Links

• Corporate Social Media Policies, September 21, 2009 on this blog.



• Could your social media policy spark a lawsuit?, November 15, 2010 from Andrew Careaga's blog on marketing and PR in higher ed.



• Company Accused of Firing Over Facebook Post, November 8, 2010 from New York Times.



• Free speech: Teachers sue Florida school district for social media policy, November 13, 2010 at First Amendment Coalition site.



• Santa Rosa teachers union files lawsuit over social media policy, August 28, 2010 from Northwest Florida Daily News.



• Restrictive Nine-Page Social Media Policy Leads to Lawsuit, August 30, 2010 at Employment Law in the Digital Age blog.



• Teachers union sues district over proposed social media policy, November 17, 2010 from WTSP.



• Teachers fired for flirting on Facebook with students, October 18, 2010 from New York Post.

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Google Instant Preview Overview

It's like I'm running out of novel titles or something.

With the launch of Google Instant a couple months ago, the landscape for SEO changed as now site authors had to consider targeting keywords for search results that appear as the user types (see my post at evolt.org: Google Instant and SEO/SEM). Anyone who thought that Google would still for a while from there was wrong. Just last week Google introduced Instant Previews, which now shows search users the preview of a page before visiting it (see the announcement at Beyond Instant results: Instant Previews). The embedded video from Google below provides an overview of the feature.

To be fair to others, Google didn't exactly pioneer this, but as the biggest player in the market, Google's implementation can have an effect. As a result, expect to see people react to it in different ways. Many users, however, may never know the images are available since they will have to click the magnifying glass icon (or use the right arrow key) to activate the feature.

One key feature of Google's implementation is that it highlights the keywords in the screen shot, showing users just what the search term hit within the page. This is particularly handy to see if your search term is hitting some main content, or just some ancillary content on the page, potentially saving users extra clicks and time spent reading through a site. In looking at my own site, I can see that it highlighted the introductory text instead of the giant h1 with my name in the banner.

Since showing the preview to the end user doesn't get reported in a site's Google Analytics data, it will be very hard to measure how effective the preview is at getting users to visit your site.

Before you get excited that as a user that you can now spot SEO spam sites before clicking a link, don't get your hopes up. Google offers support for a meta tag that allows you to exclude a site from the preview (read the Instant Previews entry on the Google Webmaster Central blog for the scoop on other bits for web developers):

Currently, adding the nosnippet meta tag to your pages will cause them to not show a text snippet in our results. Since Instant Previews serves a similar purpose to snippets, pages with the nosnippet tag will also not show previews. However, we encourage you to think carefully about opting out of Instant Previews. Just like regular snippets, previews tend to be helpful to users—in our studies, results which were previewed were more than four times as likely to be clicked on. URLs that have been disallowed in the robots.txt file will also not show Instant Previews.

SEO spammers will likely use this, including domain name squatters and people who squat on misspellings of common web addresses. In time, users may even come to recognize that a lack of a preview is akin to hiding something.

If your site relies heavily on Flash or third-party plug-ins, you may also need to spend some time testing how it looks in Google Instant Preview. There is a reasonable chance that the preview will have broken puzzle piece icons in place of the Flash element. In the words of Google:

Currently, some videos or Flash content in previews appear as a "puzzle piece" icon or a black square. We're working on rendering these rich content types accurately.

This screen capture of the preview from Lifehacker with an embedded video, which almost ironically show how to use Google Instant Preview with your keyboard, shows what happens when you have plug-ins embedded in the page.

You may also want to skip splash pages or interstitials (the modern splash page for within a site). A splash page may become the preview, and that could end up keeping users from following the link to your site. I've been railing against splash pages for well over ten years (see my article showing developers how to allow users to skip them from over 11 years ago: Let the User Skip the Splash Page), but perhaps this new feature of Google can help push more developers to abandon them.

Time will tell how well this feature is received by end users, and more importantly, how developers consider making changes to their sites as a result. I predict it's just a matter of time (probably backward in time, since I suspect this has already happened) that someone implements a user agent sniffer to detect the Google crawler and serve up different styles to optimize the layout of the page for the preview size and format. If I wasn't writing this post I'd probably be working on that instead.

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How Many Users Support JavaScript?

This is one of those posts I started back in mid-October and sat on, suspecting that there would be more follow-up, backlash, challenges, and general bickering. There has been some, but then it died down a bit. And then I remembered I should post this.

The Yahoo Developer Network posted an article (by Nicholas Zakas) in mid-October asking the same question I have been asking for 15+ years (and so have many of you, even if not for that long): How many users have JavaScript disabled?

The post goes into some detail outlining the methodology for capturing the data, which is worth reading for the follow-up posts, but here is the breakdown:

After crunching the numbers, we found a consistent rate of JavaScript-disabled requests hovering around 1% of the actual visitor traffic, with the highest rate being roughly 2 percent in the United States and the lowest being roughly 0.25 percent in Brazil. All of the other countries tested showed numbers very close to 1.3 percent.

If you've followed me long enough, you know that I have always (15+ years) argued that sites should and need to function without JavaScript, that JavaScript can then be added on to enhance and improve the experience.

The Yahoo article echoes that sentiment and provides some simple math to prove that point: with 300 million users hitting the Yahoo home page every month, 6 million of them don't have JavaScript. Think about that. Are you willing to turn away that many users with short-sighted development practices?

Mike Davies, a former Yahoo Europe worker, took issue with the message and methodology from the Yahoo post and wrote about it on his blog (Disabling JavaScript: Asking the wrong question). In particular he focused in on this snippet from the original post:

First, the overwhelming majority of users has JavaScript-enabled browsers and can therefore take advantage of all of the enhanced functionality and dynamic interfaces developers and designers love to create.

He doesn't address the second point, that 6 million users hit Yahoo each month without JavaScript. Instead he takes people to task for jumping on the first point as justification to continue their own ill-advised development practices that leave non-JS users in the cold. After all, people tend to find data to support their own opinions and discard the rest (we just had elections in the US that bolster that point). This motivates him to suggest other ways that users might not have JavaScript support in their browsers — a browser cannot execute JavaScript it has not received.

Citing network outages, corporate firewalls, band browser extensions, he notes that some users sometimes never receive the code. He goes on to point out poor coding can prevent script from even executing, ranging from browser detection, object detection, poor error handling, and so on. These users wouldn't show up in the Yahoo test as JavaScript-incapable, even though they functionally are.

The author of the original Yahoo post had an addendum to help address the comments received on the first post along with all the other chatter around the web and wrote Followup: How many users have JavaScript disabled?. In it he reviews his methodology for arriving at the numbers in the original post. While I don't agree with some of the assumptions he makes, it doesn't diminish the percentages from the original post and only leaves room for them to be higher.

The rest of the post goes on to expand on one of his points from the first post, that a small percentage of a large number is still a large number. He goes on to outline and defend the Yahoo development approach and outline Yahoo's use of progressive enhancement. Yahoo's own research validated the assumption many of us make, that users do surf without JavaScript.

The takeaway from this entire back-and-forth is that there are still users without JavaScript support, for a variety of reasons, and they are a significant number of users. Neglecting them as you build web sites and applications is short-sighted and just bad practice. This has been true for over 15 years, so it's reasonable to expect it will be true for years to come.

Update: February 11, 2011

I discuss how assuming everyone has JavaScript is probably a bad idea, especially when your JavaScript breaks: Beyond Hash-Bangs: Reliance on JavaScript Is a Bad Idea.

Updated: October 22, 2013

The UK Government Digitial Service outlines how it tracked users who aren't able to use JavaScript (regardless of reason), which turns out to be tricky: How many people are missing out on JavaScript enhancement? Note the numbers 3 years on aren't much different from Yahoo's own numbers suggesting perhaps there will always be a 1%.

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