Thrudigital

So I have a thick head today. We were 45 minutes late to our Christmas party because Ollie was tackling a badly behaved cron job to work on our server. Emily, Ollie’s girlfriend, had been waiting all that time at Waterloo for us but she was kind enough to forgive him when we arrived. We eventually assembled at Namco Station on the South Bank and quickly started racking up the bar tab before having a few rounds of pool to get going. Piers had not told us in advance that he is practically a pro, so him and his girlfriend, Grace, cleaned up. Here is a picture of him about to take a shot – look how serious he is. I’d like to think this shot was a mis-cue, but I’m pretty sure he potted both balls in one go.

Bowling quickly degraded into a competition of creative methodology. We had backwards bowling, sliding on knees, see who can throw it the highest, the furthest before landing, the slowest, get it as close to the TV screen as possible without hitting it, bowl the most balls in one go, knock the next-door lane’s pins over, and run as far down the alley as possible without getting caught. We learned that bowling the ball really slowly helps greatly in improving accuracy (I’ll add that to the wiki).

Eventually once all other options had been exhausted and the diminishing marginal returns commonly associated with drinking were realised, we got ourselves on to the dodgem cars. Twelve months of stress manifested itself in complete carnage on the floor. However the trick became less about trying to thrash the hell out of our fellow work mates but more to try not to laugh any sick up or have it projected out by the seatbelt pulling on impact.

So today is the big day. We have said goodbye to our old brand thruSITES, and rebranded as thrudigital. It’s more than just a name change though.

thruSITES was set up in 2005, with our first clients being a couple of local primary schools (you definitely won’t find these sites on our portfolio!). From these humble beginnings, our team, services, clients, and ambitions, have changed significantly through time. We started out by delivering great customer service and great (albeit simple) brochure websites, hence the old name. By growing through word-of-mouth from satisfied clients, we slowly built a strong portfolio and client base, and a service offering that stretches beyond “websites” to include social media applications, online communities, email and search marketing, and heavy-lifting data analysis systems.

So the time has come for our name to better reflect what we do. As thrudigital, we will still build brochure sites, but our competency stretches much further. We believe in the future of the open web, distributed content, the power of data-driven marketing, the new world of social media, and in multi-platform distribution. We are also taking the opportunity to build on everything that we do for the longer term and develop our own products in-house to help address market needs and provide better value to our clients. And we will continue to deliver superb solutions, with a service built on delivering great customer service, whether they are blue-chip corporates or bedroom entrepreneurs.

This week we were proud to launch a Facebook application for Number 10 Downing Street. The communications team at Number 10 are making fantastic use of social media, in particular Twitter and Youtube and now with this application, Facebook. In addition to announcing the launch, this post is to introduce the core functions of the application to give you an idea of what can be done on the Facebook platform.

The aim of the Number 10 Facebook application was to aggregate content from their existing channels into an easy digestible format for users on Facebook. In the application we aggregate three different types of media (text, photo and video) from three different sources which I will take you through.

The top of the application features the latest tweet from the Number 10 Twitter account.  This auto refreshes every minute to ensure the application features the most up to date tweet, which is necessary given the frequency of updates that are made to the Number Twitter account.

The next content area in the application features the latest news headlines from the Number 10 website. To do this we rely on the RSS feature of the Number 10 site and again refresh this on a regular basis to ensure it features the latest news. Each news item features the headline of the piece, the time it was posted and the first sentence of the news piece itself. To read the full story the user is encouraged to visit the Number 10 site. In addition to the latest news section, the app also features two other RSS feeds from the Number 10 site; e-petitions and Speeches and Transcripts.

As well as text content, the application also features the latest photo and video content. For the photo content, we pull in the latest photos from the Number 10 account on flickr. The application displays the latest 12 photo thumbnails from the flickr account and to see a larger version of any of the photos or to see further back in the Number 10 photo archive the user can follow a link back to the flickr account. For the video content we display the latest video from Number 10 TV. Originally this was a feed of videos from the Number 10 channel on YouTube, but for the final version we opted to use the Brightcove video player from the Number 10 website.

To help the application spread, we have built in two Facebook functions. The first is friend invite which allows a user to send up to 20 invitations to the application while the second enables the user to easily add the application to their profile where, being in a prominent position, it will be seen by visitors to that profile.

On the subject of profiles, the application integrates with three different parts of a user’s profile. The first is as a tab. This allows the user to add a full version of the application to their profile. The second is a box, which also allows customisation of a smaller version of the app which is displayed in the boxes section of the users profile. The final place and possibly the most prominent is the profile box which features the latest number 10 tweet and is positioned alongside a users wall.

Another new feature of the Facebook application platform that we took advantage of was enabling a user to view the application before signing in to Facebook and without installing the application. We felt this was important as following a link from the Number 10 site to the application and being asked to sign in and install an application before knowing what the application is or does wouldn’t be the best user experience.

If you are interested in other Facebook applications we’ve developed, why not check out our portfolio or have a look at the Facebook application services page. If you’re looking for more information about Facebook applications, you can also have a read some of our other blogs posts about Facebook applications. If you are looking to engage with your audience and new audiences on Facebook, why not give us a call to see what we can come up with.

Seeing as the country ground to a halt earlier this week, those of us that managed to make our way into the office had quite a quiet day… that is other than phonecalls from friends tempting us to go and build snowmen or go to the pub!

To put our time (and the snow) to good use we decided to do a little bit of sno’vertising using twitter and a twitter/google maps mashup @benmarsh created.

The picture is taken of the roof of the carpark next to our office.

Once we were back in the office and our feet had thawed we posted the picture to twitpic and posted a tweet containing the hastag #uksnow, the first part of our postcode and a fraction of 10 indicating how heavy the snow was falling.

The tweet was then displayed alongside the uksnow map as you can see below.

A snowy Monday afternoon well spent we think.

The UK Film Council have just launched findanyfilm.com which features information on over 30,000 films. The site, which was built by agency Blue Barracuda, was billed as the UK’s google for film in this article on the Guardian and allows users to search a large database for a synopsis, and links to download, rent or buy the film.In my opinion, I think the site is more of a film database with an extensive affiliate program and aggregation of cinema listings than a search engine but that’s not why I chose to write this article. I think there are a few areas where the site could improve and as we’d like to see it as a success I thought I would post my thoughts here.Idea One: Show more content on the homepageSo lets start with the homepage. The first thing that struck me when arriving on the homepage was the lack of content. This of course could have been intentional as, being termed the UK’s Google for film, maybe they are also trying to mimic the minimal design of the search engine. If this was what they planned I think they’ve done this pretty well as the homepage doesn’t feature a huge amount of content. My opinion though, is on a site that contains so much content, it would be better to feature more of it on the homepage. Take a leaf from amazons book, when online users have a relatively short attention span, you want to be able to appeal to a user pretty quickly and the amazon homepage features a range of products from many different product categories, so it’s pretty likely that whoever looks at the page will see something of interest.Idea Two: Add sharing functionalityA lot of people now are used to, and often expect sharing options so it seems a shame that with so much content there isn’t anyway to share it.  Furthermore, sharing adds an additional marketing opportunity to the site, and as the project is rumoured to be having £500,000 spent on optimising the site for search you can only imagine they are serious about people finding the site, so why not help your users share the content with their friends. Also, not only is this marketing free but the site is also given a stamp of approval by the person who sends the recommendation to a friend.Idea Three: Add other social functionality: favourite/rating/reviewing/list functionalityIn addition to sharing functionality, the ability for users to be able to favourite a film and create lists of favourite films allows a deeper level of interaction in the site. Currently there isn’t a reason for me to register for the site (infact, you can’t register at all), but the addition of reviews, rating etc. would create a reason to do so, while the creation of lists and the sharing of these might give me a more compelling reason to return to the site as well as having the added benefit of further filtering the content for other users of the site which is very important when there is so much content on the site.Idea Four: Better recommendation engineThe other major area that I think could be improved is how similar content is recommended. Recommendations, along with reviews, ratings and lists will, as Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail details, helps users filter through the content which is massively important when a site features so much content. However recommendations, while present on the site, aren’t very accurate. If the page for the Dark Knight was to be used as an example, it would be good to see other films by Christopher Nolan (the Director), other films Christian Bale (lead actor) is in as well as other Batman films. Admittedly the page does offer some related films but they don’t seem to be that relevant to me and unfortunately I can’t rate them accordingly to help the system improve its recommendation algorithm.There is a good chance that for the £500,000 the UK Film Council have spent on the development of the site some of these functionalities are already in the pipeline. I hope the team behind the site have them planned in a later phase as I think they will make the site more compelling.On a final note, if anyone on the team would like to meet to discuss any further ideas, please feel free to contact us and we’d be happy to chat.

Everyday I set aside time to read up on what’s happening in the tech industry but also with innovation & new business generally. Springwise is one site that I try to check regularly as it uncovers lots of exciting new businesses and products and this morning while reading Springwise, I discovered an article about nru, an android application, which has just been released by the labs team at lastminute.com

nru presents the user with location based information on theatres, restaurants and bars. The app makes great use of the GPS and acceleromater features in the G1 phone in an interesting radar-esque interface to deliver relevant listings coupled with user reviews, something that I think will be really useful (especially if they release it on the iPhone too).

The reason I think this is so interesting (aside from the fact that the app is pretty handy and smart) is that lastminute.com have a team working on projects like this. In fact after visiting the labs blog I discovered that they’re working on quite a few interesting projects along with the help of external parties such as City, Imperial and Warwick universities. The existence of a labs team at lastminute.com shouldn’t come as a surprise but I think it’s great that there is one.

For me this type of activity brings a company like lastminute.com a number of benefits. Firstly, they are creating a useful product that helps people find new and interesting places which utilises their content in a new way. Secondly, this is on a mobile, so users are engaging with them on a new platform that they may have done so before.

I believe that we are going to see more initiatives like this coming out of forward thinking companies which can only be a good thing. I think tech based companies like lastminute.com can develop a labs team the quickest but I think media groups could will be pretty quick to follow. In fact I recently heard that The Guardian media group had a hack day/weekend that produced some interesting products and while they may not be publicly released like lastminute labs have released nru, it’s certainly interesting to hear that it happened.

I’m looking forward to companies outside of the tech world setting up a labs team like this or at least opening up their content and data in a way for external developers to innovate and create new products.

You can find out more about the app on the labs blog or by watching the youtube video.