ecommerce

Metaphors That Mislead Us: User, Audience, Visitor, Shopper?

Posted on by John
"I Am" photo by Allison Felus, cc-by (http://www.flickr.com/photos/wrestlingentropy/405308094/)

The metaphors we use to describe digital technology end up misleading us.

We attempt to understand new technologies by bringing the context of previous experiences and hoping to find relevant analogies, but those analogies often carry other unintended meanings and can obscure possibilities.

For example, we think of the urls our browsers request as:

  • Sites we visit (geographic / spatial metaphor, as in cyberspace)
  • Pages we read (publishing / media metaphor, as in web publishing or content management)
  • Applications we use (software metaphor – as in web applications)
  • Communities we join and interact with (sociological metaphor, as in online community management)
  • Stores we browse and shop (retail metaphor)

In turn, this means we think of the people who interact with our digital experiences as visitors, readers, users, members, and shoppers. These get all mixed together in actual usage, and there are complexities in each. (In social networking, for example, we also think of each user/member as a node in a network – drawing on a shared mathematics concept which underlies computer networking, social networking, and graph theory).

The challenge is how to use these metaphors to understand the new experiences while being careful not to let them constrict our thinking about what is possible.
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WPBook 2.1 Beta 2 – Post as Notes, Custom Themes

Posted on by John
Note to self, by S@Z, creative commons license

Just tagged a 2.1 beta 2 release of WPBook, which adds to the earlier release 2.1 beta 1 some new tricks:

  1. Post as Note in Facebook. Based on a patch supplied by sebaxtian in the forums, this option changes the posting type in Facebook from a regular story (an entry in your news feed) to a Note, using the Facebook Notes application.
  2. Custom Themes. Based on a patch from BandonRandon, this functionality looks first for an installed theme named ‘WPBook’ and if it finds that uses that theme over the default supplied theme. This way, advanced users can change the appearance of their WPBook powered blogs inside Facebook and not have those changes overwritten with each new release. I will be sure to note in future releases when any new functions are introduced or significant changes made to the theme files.

I haven’t, unfortunately, gotten much feedback on the beta. I say unfortunately because I think that’s a result of few people testing it – I suppose it’s possible it is just working for everyone but I think it has seen few downloads. (There’s one reported error in the forums, but I can’t isolate what’s causing it).

So please do test this one – remember that if you are upgrading from 2.0.x you will need to make the same changes to your settings as described in the release blog post for 2.1 beta 1 .

Report on your success or failure in the forums – thanks.

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WPBook 2.1 Beta – Open Graph API, OAuth

Posted on by John

I’ve just tagged earlier today a 2.1b1 (beta 1) release of WPBook. Please download it and test it, and report back what you find here or (preferably) in the forums.

Make changes to your Facebook Application settings described below after installing WPBook 2.1 but before trying to visit application pages!. We’ll update the official WPBook documentation once we’ve got a few folks testing the new version and can move to a 2.1 release.

This release is the first to use Facebook’s OAuth-based authentication protocol, Graph API, and new PHP SDK. I know that’s a whole lot of acronyms, but let’s just say it means we’ll stay current as Facebook makes obsolete some of the older ways of integrating to Facebook.
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ecommerce

eTail humor

Posted on by John

I’m a big fan of Criggo, a blog that runs bad headlines, editor’s mistakes, and other humorous ephemera from newspapers. Today I found this entry from a few days ago, appropriate since I’m at eTail West:

Is it really so simple? No need for community and content, no need for exclusivity or behavioral psychology, no need for retargeting and multi-channel customer acquisition strategies: just deals!

One path for eCommerce is certainly to create price leadership and then focus on being found via search and price comparison engines. But it seems to me the more interesting new strategies combine the insights of social psychology together with new forms of interaction technology has made possible to create a wholly different experience, where its no longer about the best deal but about differentiation, exclusivity, curation, and loyalty.

Of course good deals can’t hurt, so the value discipline of price leadership isn’t going away – just being supplemented as the eCommerce market matures.

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WPBook 2.0.13 Released

Posted on by John

Just checked in and tagged version 2.0.13 of WPBook. Thanks to BandonRandon for her patches!

A few quick updates in this release, but fairly minor:

  • Moved and Unhid the infinite_session_key in admin WPBook setting screen. Lots of folks were confused by where that option was located.
  • Fixed attribution line function which prevented %author% from working
  • Added global gravatar setting – otherwise we only filter gravatars inside facebook. (This prevents wpbook from interfering with othee gravatars in themes outside fb).
  • Added DONOTCACHEPAGE constant when pages are viewed inside facebook –
    this should enable WPBook to better coordinate with wp-super-cache, though you will still need to use the “Use PHP to serve cached files” rather than “Use mod_rewrite to serve cache files” for this to work.

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