The Oatmeal SOPA blackout

wired.com SOPA blackout

wordpress.org SOPA blackout

oreilly.com SOPA blackout

mozilla.org SOPA blackout

wikipedia.com SOPA blackout

reddit.com SOPA blackout

google.com SOPA protest

And finally the NON-BLACKOUT of BING

If you are somehow related to web development industry or marketing websites, you should be definitely concerned by the advent of the SOPA bill and whether it goes through or not. Although the bill of act is aimed primarily at websites based outside of the U.S.A, the language in the proposed legislation is intentionally made broad and vague – often referencing “U.S.-directed websites”. So in reality, it does not matter where the website in question really is – websites based in the U.S. could be subject to the same measures and penalties as foreign websites. And of course, forget about the fairness about the “foreign” sites. The SOPA bill is written in a manner so that even if the big companies do not “own” an intellectual property they can force it down from the web just because they thought so. The act also grants overwhelming powers to the U.S. government which is a major cause of concern about government-mandated censorship which is utterly undesirable for the sake of internet freedom.

The moderately good news and a small comfort is that the Bill has been temporarily shelved. Read more about it here. The overwhelming outcry of internet community caused White House to NOT support the bill.  Though its twin brother PIPA - Protect IP Act,  is still very much alive.

SOPA and PIPA are essentially the two sides of the same coin. They have the same goals, and much of the same provisionsl. The wording of each section is often only slightly different, though the meaning is the same, making these differences meaningless in actuality. PIPA lacks a provision that forces search engines (like Google and Bing) to remove a “foreign (outside of USA) infringing site” from their indexes.  PIPA also contains provisions that require stronger and more elaborate court intervention to go after an accused website. PIPA is, in a way, more disastrous because it does not contain any provisions that would penalize copyright holders for misrepresenting the alleged infringing activities of an accused website — a potentially disastrous omission for innocent websites put through the PIPA tunnel. SOPA is slightly better as it does contain a provision that penalizes those copyright holders who “knowingly materially misrepresent” the alleged infringement of a website by making them “liable for damages, including costs and attorneys’ fees, incurred by the person injured by such misrepresentation as a result of the misrepresentation.” The “vigilante” part of SOPA/PIPA, that allows ISPs to voluntarily block access to certain foreign websites without court orders and just, “in good faith,” if they have “credible evidence” that these sites are devoted to illegally distributing copyrighted material is extremely concerning. Both SOPA and PIPA give unbridled immunity to ISPs who take voluntary actions against websites that are believed — but not proven — by the ISPs to be dedicated to the illegal distribution of intellectual property. Because of this the potential to abuse this power is unconscionable and many many will abuse this power.

We do not want SOPA. We do not want PIPA. We want fair use of internet and its freedom. Stop SOPA. Stop PIPA.

Many major websites are  “going black” in an effort to show their visitors what could happen if the SOPA bill was passed.  One of the most vocal voices against SOPA has been Reddit founder, Alexis Ohanian.  Reddit, a site that features socially driven news stories (and 2 billion pageviews a month!) scheduled a blackout on Jan 18th and urged others to do so as well.  Other websites that came on board were Tucows, the Cheezburger network, and Wikipedia blackout.  Though neither Google nor Facebook showed official support for the blackouts, which is kind of sad in my opinion.

The blackouts have been proposed for a 12 hour span (8 AM – 8 PM EST on January 18th), and webmasters have been urged to participate.

Responsive web designs:

As of now, over 70% of the world population owns a mobile device and at least 85% of the mobile devices sold in year 2011 came with a web browser installed. Browsing internet using mobile devices has been on the rise for last couple of years and the trend will continue keeping up not down. The future will see a gradual decrease in Desktop and Laptop usages and mobile devices will dominate. Websites must face the challenge of displaying contents in large desktop screens and small screens of mobile devices alike. Up until 2011, the best solution was to create different versions of websites for different mobile devices. One website version for desktop users, one for iphone, smart phones etc. and even another version for ipads, galaxy tabs etc. But this is very cumbersome and not to mention costly and time-consuming to develop and maintain. Responsive web designs are the latest and most viable solution to this costly nightmare.  The term “responsive web design” can be most simply explained as the concept of designing and developing a website so the layout responds to and gets changed according to a user’s mobile device’s or computer’s screen resolution. It enables the users to avail an advanced 4 column lay out, with the width of 1292 pixels, on a 1025 pixel  width screen, that auto simplifies into 2 columns. The concept was first introduced by Ethan Marcotte on his article “Responsive Web Design” for A List Apart. Responsive web designs are also future proof for emerging new devices. The theory behind responsive, flexible web design involves clever utilization of several grid and layout systems, CSS media queries and image optimization with Javascript plus CSS and therefore, no matter how many different devices are released in the future, responsive websites will always be able to provide a proper response to the device requests. Responsive web designs will slowly become the norm in the upcoming years.

User centric web designs:

Making your website design user centric should always be the main focus. It is not enough to just bring a lot of people to your website. You have to engage them so they spend a lot of time on your website as well as come back repeatedly. If you have any intention of getting profiting from  the traffic and has some kind of conversion of users to consumers in mind, it is all the more important. In 2012 the focus and effort should be doubled and tripled. One of the pressing reasons should be the Search Engines becoming smarter. A lot smarter than the days when they used to just crawl pages in UNIX text browser style and index only your text and rank your pages high on their results based on how many times a keyword text appear on your web page. No Sir. The search engines these days behave like Headless Browsers. They can execute JavaScipt, Ajax post actions, crawl Full Flash websites. They take into account how much time a user stays on your website, how many pages they have viewed,  the bounce rates, which parts of your web page layout are most frequently clicked etc. If you are using the new version of Google Analytics look under Content->In-page Analytics for a compelling evidence.  SEOmoz has a great article on this. Web designers and developers are always becoming increasingly aware of this point and so user centric designs will rule in 2012 to ensure maximum user engagement and stay on the websites.

Death of Flash led by rise of HTML 5 and CSS3:

2012 will see less and less usage of Flash for designing websites, animations and presentations. Usage of html5 and CSS3 for animation will replace Flash as these are supported by iphones and ipads to a great degree. Though html5 was first introduced in 2009 and is still under development to subsume not only HTML 4, but XHTML 1 and DOM Level 2 HTML as well, most latest browsers already support them to a great degree; specifically Firefox and Google Chrome. HTML5 supports new elements like article, aside, audio, bdo, canvas, command, datalist, details, embed, figcaption, figure, footer, header, hgroup, keygen, mark, meter, nav, output, progress, rp, rt, ruby, section, source, summary, time, video, wbr. These will make creating interactive websites without the need for using Flash for animation or other objects and plug in much much easier. Adobe too realised that Flash was unlikely to continue its long standing market share in the future; with the increasing importance of site-speed, lack of iphone/ipad compatibility and YouTube’s shift towards HTML5. As a consequence, Adobe made the move to lose some of its Flash development staff and shift their focus towards HTML5.

HTML5 adds many new syntactical features. These include the <video>, <audio>, <header> and <canvas> elements, as well as the integration of SVG content that replaces the uses of generic <object> tags. These features are designed to make it easy to include and handle multimedia and graphical content on the web without having to resort to proprietary plugins and APIs. Other new elements, such as <section>, <article>, <header> and <nav>, are designed to enrich the semantic content of documents. New attributes have been introduced for the same purpose, while some elements and attributes have been removed. Some elements, such as <a>, <cite> and <menu> have been changed, redefined or standardized. The APIs and document object model (DOM) are no longer afterthoughts, but are fundamental parts of the HTML5 specification

Also deprecated elements like acronym, applet, basefont, big, center, dir, font, frame, frameset, isindex, noframes, strike, tt will be be dropped altogether. So, designers will be forced to use the latest standard so their websites look properly on major browsers. According to a report released on 30 September 2011, 34 of the world’s top 100 websites were using HTML5. The quick and strong adaptation of html5 and CSS3 is led by search engines and social network sites alike.

So, what do you think will trend in 2012? Post your thoughts and comments below.

Video 01

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Video 05

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More coming soon…

Google just launched its Plus service few months ago and have been adding new features to it madly. The main reason Google launched the Plus venture was to get Facebook’s internet content recommendation data without actually having to deal with Facebook at all. Google wanted its own ecosystem where likes, website or content shares and user comments were accessible to them and that they could mix that data in their search engine algorithm to better their search results and if Google+ takes off, they will certainly be successful. Already you can easily +1 any webpage with simple click of a button (either by clicking on a Google+ button on the webpage or Google toolbar). Then those in your Circles will see your preferences reflected in their own search results. Google will keep this trend up and provide personalized results as much as possible. But Google still has over 700 million people to convince to use Plus instead of Facebook. That is a tremendous job and it will certainly keep Google very busy in year 2012. But the ubiquitous Google presence in search and email and a tight integration of Plus with them have given them a great head start.

Facebook just rolled out their new timeline updates world wide so we don’t expect any major interface changes here in 2012. However, we do expect many new applications akin to the Skype integration on the platform. Group video chat with up to 10 friends and mini video profile are on their road map for 2012.  Facebook is also amping up their Geo location features and video and image editing features. Also Facebook is reportedly working on a smartphone with HTC. But the biggest news Facebook will make in 2012 is probably its going public in Stock Market. Facebook is planning the largest IPO in the history for an Internet based company. This will be big and probably even make the stock markets volatile world wide and affect the world economy to some level. This also gives them a very strong incentive to try and keep ahead of Google+ who will undoubtedly be adding new features to their online service on a monthly basis.

It is too early to say if Google plus will beat Facebook in year 2012. Even if they eventually did, it will be a slow transition and will take 4/5 more years.

In general we expect to see the following trends in social media landscape:

• An increasingly tighter integration of social media to corporate websites
• More support being provided through social medias because of its low cost of maintenance and publicity
• Social media influencing more sales – a kind of leader board set up
• Social commerce on mobile devices using HTML 5 and more. The partnership between Facebook and eBay will lead into a new era in eCommerce. You will be able to directly purchase from your Facebook account.
• Social CRMs making ways into larger organizations
• A considerable growth in social media advertising
• A spectacular rise of the branded content
• Increase of Geo location influences in Everything
• Most social media usage will be on mobile devices
• Over half of social media site usages on mobile devices

This is the 1st post for quantumcloud’s blog. We are very excited to start the blog right at the beginning of 2012. 2011 has been an unusual year and a lot has changed in the web technology and social networking landscape. We hope to continue our tradition of keeping up with the new trends and technologies and serve our clients only the very best and latest.

Here is to a new beginning…!