TechnoCloud

The Gmail outage that started and was resolved yesterday seems to have set a new bar for media hype over very little.

From the inevitable mass of hysterical Twitter activity, to an explosion of blog posts, to mainstream media pouring over the story (even making the front page of London’s Metro newspaper), it seems an incredible fuss over two and a half hours downtime.

Web-based email goes down sometimes, even the best ones.

Let’s move on, shall we?

In a nice piece of publicity for Google Earth, Google responded to speculation that the fabled Atlantis had been found just off the coast of Hawaii.

Update: looks like I lost it too, it’s actually off the west coast of Africa, only it’s not if you see what I mean…

The ordered lines certainly looked man-made and it turned out they were - in a way.

A detailed explanation from the scientists involved with the project confirmed that in fact the lines were ’ship tracks’, showing the limited area covered by the ships echosounding the bottom of the sea - a lengthy and labour intensive job as it turns out.

The denial makes a nice story and will encourage others to explore the new Ocean service looking for further anomalies. Nice story, but even nicer piece of marketing.

One of the most popular articles on Technocloud recently was a look into Spotify’s multi-media ambitions in a post called Spotify mobile where I noted a job advert on their site advertising for a Nokia S60 platform software engineer.

Those ambitions are slowly being realised if a video of a potential Spotify iPhone app is genuine (see below). The rumours are that it will allow premium users (£9.99/month) to stream tracks from the entire library as well as access to the all-important playlists and even caching when connected to Wi-Fi.

Streaming music is nothing new to the iPhone, with YouTube a default app and the Last.fm app allowing you to stream its artist radio stations. The key to the user experience are the playlists and the caching.

Alongside the technical challenges of streaming music to mobile, they do of course face one major hurdle. The iPhone app store has the right to refuse any app and is likely to be concerned by an app that streams music playlists to the phone given the potential effect on sales to its iTunes store.

There is also the question of battery life, with a streaming music app likely to consume considerably more power than the in-built itunes software on the phone.

They might overcome the technical challenges, it’s the business challenges that may well prove the harder.

Back in November, I started an experiment to improve the bounce rate on the blog through the related-posts plugin in Wordpress. As below, this typically displays three related posts based on tag, category, body and title.

I’ve been monitoring the changes in the bounce rate each month since the plugin was activated with encouraging results. This has seen the following improvement on a monthly basis over the initial level:

- November: improvement of 7%
- December: improvement of 10%
- January: improvement of 11%

Not huge, but a c.10% improvement in bounce rate for the addition of a simple free plugin is not to be sniffed at and shows the value of presenting contextual next steps to encourage users to delve more deeply into the content you have available.