I’ve been wanting to write this entry for a while now. I haven’t had the chance because I’ve been busy with other things, but I finally found some time.

I’m an avid reader of TechCrunch and usually read only their blog’s RSS feed through Viigo on my BlackBerry, mostly because if I’m on my desktop or laptop, it is very likely that I’m doing something else. A couple of weeks ago they posted an outrageous entry called “Rest in Peace, RSS”. In this entry, Steve Gillmor pretty much said that Twitter is the new RSS.

Twitter is not the new RSS at all.

How they work

RSS is an incredibly useful tool to read exactly what you want and when you want. The way it works is pretty simple: your RSS reader checks the RSS feed every once in a while and downloads the new stuff on the feed. I like to think of it as pull technology.

On the other hand, Twitter is a push product. It pushes every single update to you the instant it gets sent out by the original publisher.

Use & comparison

The main advantage that RSS has is that it is neatly stored in your reader until you have time to read it. It comes to you and waits for you.

Twitter pretty much comes to you and, if you’re not paying attention, it is gone. It is too fast and too dynamic. This is good for several reasons, but not for the ones we’re discussing here. Tweeting out a 140-character message is far easier than writing a 140-word blog post. Twitter is based on immediacy.

RSS is an email; Twitter is a phone call.

If you’re working on something and you get an email, you don’t necessarily have to stop what you’re doing to read it. It is not going anywhere and will be there when you have time to read it.  Twitter is a phone call; it is something that requires your immediate attention or it will go away. It will go away because it will be buried by other tweets half an hour later.

Twitter users & “spam”

Take a user like Guy Kawasaki (@guykawasaki). He’s a very popular Twitter user. He also tweets 39 times per day, on average. 39 times a day! To be honest, I had to stop following him because it would constantly annoy me while working, especially since most of his tweets also spammed me with his website, Alltop. However, if I create my own Alltop channel and subscribe to the RSS feed, I don’t need Guy’s constant Twitter updates anymore. I get the exact information I want and can read it when I have the time to do so.

If you’re a busy person, you cannot constantly monitor Twitter. You just cannot have the luxury of following more than five people that tweet more than ten times per day and not miss out on anything.

The bottom line

RSS and Twitter are too far apart to be able to compare them. While they both serve the function of getting information to you, the way they do it is entirely different.

RSS patches you through directly to the publisher while Twitter patches you a URL-forwarder and then to the publisher. Let’s face it: Twitter is unreliable. It has a history of fail whales and random errors. In fact, as I type this, I’m trying to upload a new avatar to Ahlera’s account (@ahlera) and it doesn’t work, so now we’re avatarless.

RSS is more than practical and wins against Twitter when you compare them in regards to how the exact news you want gets to you. If you’d like to read more points of view on the matter, all you need to do is look at the comments of Gillmor’s post.

All this doesn’t mean that Twitter isn’t an amazing tool for other things, but that’s a separate blog post…

The Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) reported that last year online advertising spending grew over 10%, outpacing other media and reaching $23.4 billion.

It is time for your brand to get on the Net. If it already is, then you might want to consider reviewing what you have and make the necessary changes to keep up with this medium’s pace. Ask yourself if you have a strategy or if you merely have a website.

Having a website just sitting there is not the same as planning and executing a detailed plan to achieve goals. This isn’t the 90s. Websites must be proactive in every way possible to attract new visitors. The website must also be carefully planned to be able to actually make money with that traffic. Neither of these things are easy to achieve, especially if you don’t have a lot of knowledge on how traffic actually works.

The noticeable increase in advertising is a clear indicator that the Internet is an important medium for sales and the accelerated growth raises questions as to the effectiveness of the traditional, poorly-targeted, mass media advertising efforts.  John Wanamaker said once: “I know that half of my advertising dollars are wasted… I just don’t know which half.” Spending on the Internet is a whole different story as you can usually track your ROI much more effectively and know which half is being wasted.

Given these key advantages, can you bring your offline store online and add another distribution channel to your sales plan? We can definitely help you assess the possibility and build it!

During a meeting on Sunday (yeah, our passion lets us work on Sundays), a rumor was thrown out on the table that really impressed me. A supermarket chain built an online version of their store a couple of years ago. At the time, several questions were raised since the local market didn’t seem ready for virtual supermarkets. Today, that store’s revenue compares to the income generated by any of their other physical branches.

Leap into creating or optimizing your online presence. Give us a call!

Oh, and read the 2008 IAB report. You may also opt to read Tech Crunch’s summary on the matter and, while you’re at it, check out the decline in newspaper advertising revenue.

You might be wondering why you’re reading something about Linux in a blog related to design.  I’m about to answer that question.

I’ve always had a geeky side which has led to experimentation with other operating systems, such as FreeBSD, Solaris, and Linux.  I had a brief period about three years ago where I got rid of Windows completely and used Linux for about a year.  I had to go back to Windows to be able to run stuff like Flight Simulator (a secret addiction of mine), among others.  I also got tired of troubleshooting stuff.  When things work, Linux is great.  When something breaks, it can be a nightmare.

One of the things I’ve always thought is that, even though the Linux community is very talented with programming and development, they were seriously flawed in the design department, both in general taste and usability. Dominic Humphries states in his Linux is not Windows paper:

Projects frequently start out as one man’s toy. He does everything himself, and therefore the interface has no need of any kind of “user friendly” features: The user knows everything there is to know about the software, he doesn’t need help.

He’s right. You should see the Ahlera intranet.  Everyone here understands it and knows how to use it, but if you bring someone new they stare at the screen completely clueless.  That’s because our intranet is for our use and we know the level of competence that the people that work here have.  Our intranet does not work for any other company because it wouldn’t pass the minimum usability standards.  And yes, I know how weird that sounds considering that our studio focuses on usability.

This weekend I started to wonder what the Linux community was up to so I headed over to DistroWatch to read up on the news.  A good way of seeing which distros are hot is by checking out the Page Hit Ranking column to the right.  I saw a distro that I had never heard of before in the number 3 spot: Linux Mint.

I headed over to their website and was immediately impressed with the neat web design.  Compared to web designs such as the ones Damn Small Linux, CentOS, or Slackware have, this design is rockin’!  It is also funny to see how the first three third-party ad banners to the right highly contrast with the general design.

I downloaded a copy of their Elyssa release and ran it on VirtualBox.

Here’s Mint’s opening statement in their About Us page:

Linux Mint’s purpose is to produce an elegant, up to date and comfortable GNU/Linux desktop distribution.

The tagline also stated that the distro was elegant:

From freedom came elegance

That’s what I was expecting.  An elegant distro.

When I got to the login screen I remember thinking: “Hmmm, will this be the one?”

A very neat, clean, and elegant login screen

The login screen was very nice and it started the long chain of neatness that ended up in me writing up this post.  As you can see it is very simple and it introduces the pinstripe concept that is present throughout the default UI to the user.

This is what Mints GNOME desktop looks like

The desktop is almost icon-free and very minimal.  The task bar is small and the “Start” button shows the codename of the version.  Notice how the pinstripes are present in the taskbar as well.  Very nice, very minimal, very good.

A clean menu that will let you find what you need immediately

The menu is very clean and elegant, as well as highly intuitive.

Mint has a standard terminal with quotes that can be turned off on installation

Mint has a custom feature added to the terminal with funny quotes and phrases along with simple ASCII art.  Some people might find some of them offensive so they can be turned off at the installation screen.  Notice that the daiver@mint appears in “mint green” color.  Nice touch.

Mint comes with GIMP

The GIMP is also included by default with the distro.  I still can’t use it with the dexterity that I have with Photoshop, but it has come a long way since I last used it.

Mint has an elegant and clean Control Panel

The control panel included with MINT was very intuitive, offering both icons and text.  Those of you used to Windows will feel right at home with it.

Visually, I’d say that this is one of the nicest default themes I’ve seen on a Linux distribution, even though I’m more of a KDE guy because of Amarok mostly, but I have to admit that I love what Mint did with GNOME.

Technically, I also have to say that Mint has been the easiest distribution to install and use that I’ve ever tried.  Up until mint PCLinuxOS was the easiest distro to deal with, but it has been officially displaced by Mint.  There’s a new version of PCLinuxOS coming out soon, so who knows…

Congratulations to the Mint team for putting together a visually appealing Linux distribution that is easy to use. It seems that the Linux community is starting to focus on the graphical aspect of their things, which is great news for everyone.  There’s nothing wrong with functional stuff.  The question is, why not make functional stuff that also looks good?

I think Mint and Ubuntu are two distributions that are working hard on it.