Posts tagged with web
I’m No Social Media Expert, but Dig Our New Blog Platform
Posted by Patrick Moorhead in 10:33 AM
(8 votes, average: 3.50 out of 5)
Loading ...So if I am not the in-house “social media expert”, web guy, or IT guy, why do I care about our new blog platform the team is rolling out next week? Well, I am a strategy guy and social media has been invaluable to have real-time conversations with some real smart folks in the community. I have also used social media to create new relationships and make existing ones stronger. Plus it’s real time and productive, I love the efficiency of 140-character ideation.
So I am excited about some new features in our blogs we are rolling out for readers like you and authors like me. Here is a run-down of the feature highlights you should see next week.
For readers (You):
- Post rating - Ability to rate each post. You can tell me if you like the post or if you think it stinks.
- Polls – Tell us quickly what you think. Participating in polls helps us out, too.
- ShareThis – allows you to send a post to the social network of your choice.
- Look & feel – New look and feel that’s easier to read and navigate
- Video content inside posts – No we didn’t have that before… shame. (head shaking). Look Mom, a real video:
- Threaded comments - Comments are still easy to submit and with threading, you can now see where the conversation is going more easily. There’s a “reply-to” option that notifies you if you want to hear about all replies to a post.
- Easy comment authentication – If you are already signed up on OpenID and Gravatar, login and you are commenting. Asking people to exclusively sign up for your site is “so 2008”.
- Improved smartphone view – View the blog better from mobile devices like the iPhone and iPod Touch. OK, I wanted it optimized for Bold, Storm, and G1 Android too, but maybe later.
For Authors (You and I):
- Posting flexibility- I want to blog the moment I get that “big idea”- no matter where I am.
I get increased flexibility of where I can post, doing it through ping.fm, iPhone, etc. without a SecureID dongle which I needed on our old system. This means I can more quickly start conversations and blog more often and spend less time doing it. I used to go from a)Word to b)LiveWriter to c)LiveWriter and fix broken content to d) old platform tool to e) fix broken content in old platform tool to f) publish. This removes most of those steps.
- Improved rich media tools- I won’t even bore you with how many steps I would need to go through to post media. Don’t get me started. I can do it now and do it fast. You want videos and audio, we got it.
- Comment SPAM filtering- I used to get 50 per day. That’s real productive. I’d hate to look at my inbox in the morning. For the last time, no, I don’t want Cialis or oil paintings.
- Robust tracking & measurement- Let me know what interests you and what doesn’t. Simple. You don’t care, I don’t write.
So we hope YOU like the new blogs and features. Please tell us what you think; we’ve made it much easier to do so.
Pat Moorhead is Vice President of Advanced Marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.
Safari 4 Beta: Stakes are High in Browser Wars
Posted by Patrick Moorhead in 3:37 AM
Competition is good for innovation, and there is certainly competition in web browsers these days. It’s not that there’s much money to be made in the browser itself given these are “free” downloads, but the value of the ecosystem that browsers can control is immense. Browsers are the development platform and gateway to the cloud, thus if you control the browser, you theoretically control some cloud access.
At CES 2009, AMD demonstrated playing through a smartphone web browser, EA’s latest Mercenaries 2: World in FlamesTM. We also demonstrated watching through a smartphone browser a Hancock Blu-ray movie with the full menuing system. Both of these were streamed by the AMD Fusion Render Cloud reference design. So the browser matters.
This makes me naturally quick to try the latest browser or major revision of one. I spent 24 hours with the Apple Safari 4 Beta and wanted to share my experiences. 24 hours on beta software isn’t the complete picture but I can get maybe 85% of my perspective in that time frame.
I want to do some level setting up front- this is a beta and therefore should have bugs, that’s natural and I thank Apple for doing a public beta. Secondly, browser choices are driven by personal needs and preferences like simplicity, speed, familiarity, add-on features, and even enterprise-mandated browser standards for full compatibility. But many people are oblivious and simply use the browser that was installed on their PC bought from a local retailer.
So these are MY views based on my history and usage patterns. I am primarily a PC user but also have two Macs. I primarily use Firefox but use Internet Explorer as the corporate front-end to SAP applications. I use Chrome also. I obviously use Safari on my iPod Touch (no choice) and prefer the integrated browser on my Bold, Storm, and G1 Android versus mobile Opera.
I did my 24 hours of testing on three systems:
- Hand-built desktop with Windows Vista Business Edition 32-bit, AMD Phenom TM 9850 processor, ATI Radeon TM HD 4870 graphics
- HP Pavilion dv5 with Windows Vista Premium 64-bit, AMD Turion TM ZM-80 processor, ATI Radeon TM HD 3200 graphics
- Fujitsu Lifebook 2110 with Windows XP Pro 32-bit, AMD Turion TM 64 X2 TL-58 processor, ATI Radeon TM Xpress 1150 graphics
Plusses
- Easy to install, no error messages. Apple must supercharge this download through a big-time caching service because it was FAST.
- Imported my Internet Explorer and Firefox bookmarks without issues into legible folders.
- Not a single lock up on 100’s of pages from many different sites.
- Full functionality on the many sites I visited with the exception of the two important sites listed below.
Too Early To Tell
- Meaningful speed. Reportedly faster than Chrome and that means real fast. I cannot tell the difference between the speed of Chrome and Safari 4, but folks I follow are citing tests that show it is. CNet UK says it is faster than Chrome while PC Magazine says that it still trailed Chrome on some key tests. But they both say it’s faster than Firefox but yet I cannot tell ANY real experiential difference.
- iTunes-like scroll bar (picture below). This is under Bookmarks. I may end up loving this but right now I just don’t know.
Improvements I Would Like To See
- Add-ons. This is just more of an issue with Safari in general, not Safari 4. Safari has add-ons too, but in my opinion, don’t have the depth or breadth I want. Every cool tool I run across, it seems like Firefox has an add-on immediately.
- Multi-tab Startup. I want to pre-load 10 tabs whenever I open the browser. I use my browser for real work and pong from tab to tab like a day-trader, but I am trading information. I cannot figure out how to do that yet with Safari 4, maybe I cannot.
- Forced application close: On Windows 64 install, shut down Tweetdeck and other browsers without prompting.
- A few bugs: Hey it’s called beta for a reason, to ring out some of the last issues. Blogger: comment validation error with perpetual “loading” message. WordPress: Perpetual loading of a few assets. Its a beta, live with it!
- Forward/Next page drop downs. This is truly personal and out of habit, but I want drop downs, not holding down the mouse button. See the difference below. I miss that.
Firefox
Internet Explorer
Safari
Conclusion
Safari 4 is an elegant and speedy browser and I am certain that Mac lovers will use it in droves — and maybe even a few iPhone/PC users if they see sufficient value in integration. I may fall in love with some of the more visual features at some point, but for right now, Firefox is fast enough for me, is easier for me to open my multiple tabbed workspace, and finally, for the kind of work I do, you can’t beat the Firefox add-ons. What are your thoughts on Safari 4 Beta?
Pat Moorhead is Vice President of Advanced Marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.
Web 2.0 – A New Server World Order?
Posted by Patrick Moorhead in 4:55 PM
You may have seen recent blogs from me on the topic of social networks and their growth. I even subjected my Computex blogs to these media. Why do we spend time with this stuff – we don’t sell software! In the end, it’s because trends in our industry are important for AMD, and personally satisfying to me to stay up to date on these. The creative minds in our industry continue to find new ways to use technology and it’s a challenge just saying current. But what’s equally surprising is the speed that the “under 30” crowd adopts these new media/social networks. This new social model is one of the emerging Internet use scenarios that has come to be known as Web 2.0.
I find a great deal of satisfaction in this fast growing market especially in light of some recent announcements that AMD made regarding the AMD Opteron processor’s web performance. AMD recently announced that Quad-Core AMD Opteron™ processor Model 2356 and Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor Model 8356 now hold the top x86 web performance records for both 2P and 4P servers, as measured by the SPECweb®2005 benchmark. This means that the AMD-based server architecture is able to process and manage more data over a period of time than competing solutions and therefore keep the media rich social networks operating at ever faster speeds. As I was writing this blog, I read a related blog from Nigel Dessau on the subject of workloads and balancing loads. We’ve spent a great deal of time and effort to enable and optimize these new networks but we did not stop there. I blogged recently on 2nd generation notebooks and highlighted the new features that we have enabled through our ATI acquisition including our UVD (universal video decoder) which is optimized to consume rich media such as web video.
AMD continues to focus on solutions. Just to be clear, what this means to us is power and performance optimized silicon, platforms optimized with partners and customers to deliver real benefits. These benefits are provided on the server side as a web backbone and on the notebook and desktop as power/performance optimized clients. So AMD is again leading and enabling major transitions in the industry by leveraging our unique capabilities to create, process, serve up and consume this new-fangled thing called Web 2.0.
Pat Moorhead is Vice President of Advanced Marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.