Archive for August, 2011

Facebook Starts Rolling Out New Features

Friday, August 19th, 2011

Looks like Facebook users are beginning to see some of the new features which Facebook has been testing over the past few months.  It’s been almost 16 months since the social media giant last rolled out a redesign of the newsfeed. It’s understood that this update will bring two brand new features which we haven’t seen before.

Highlighting

Not sure what the purpose of the highlighting feature is yet, however it does show some interesting functionality which allows you to highlight a status or an update and stick in to your news feed.  I predict that this could serve a similar purpose to Twitters favourite feature.

Ticker

The new ticker feature will be situated on the right hand side of your screen and will provide a unfiltered stream of status updates, updates from pages that you have liked, and any applications or games that you may use on the platform. The ticker will be unlimited in length and will be constantly updating. You will also be giving the ability to hide friends or updates from the stream.

Looks like this could be another counter offensive to Google +

What do you think of the new updates ? leave us a comment

Matthew Marley

360innovate

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360innovate Visit The Set Of World War Z

Thursday, August 18th, 2011

Some of you may have heard that they are filming the new Hollywood blockbuster “World War Z” which stars Brad Pitt in Glasgow over the next few weeks. So after following all the buzz on various social media sites like Twitter and Facebook over the past few days, the team managed to pull themselves away from their desks at lunch time to go see what all the fuss was about.

We didn’t manage to see much of the action which was taking place as most of the streets have now been closed off, however we did hear a few gun shots being fired, and the set that they have created to make Glasgow look like Philadelphia was very impressive.

Its nice to see a bit of the the Hollywood magic come to Glasgow.

We managed to take a few pics from the set  which you can find below.

 

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Graduate Business Development Executive

Wednesday, August 17th, 2011

Job Title: Graduate Business Development Executive

Based: Glasgow City centre

Beporting to: Operations Director

The Company

Based in Glasgow’s city centre, we are a dynamic, forward thinking web design and internet marketing company. We provide web design and online marketing solutions to a large variety of clients across the UK.

The role

Due to an increased demand in our service, we are now the position to recruit a business development executive. We are looking for candidates that are ambitious, have excellent communication skills and have previously worked in a sales environment.

Key responsibilities

Responding to sales inquiries from new and existing customers
Proactively generate new sales leads
Meeting monthly sales goals and targets
Producing monthly sales reports
Negotiating the agreement terms and closing sales
Upsell to take advantage of every sales opportunity
Monitor and report on the current market and competitor activities to identify new business opportunities

Essential Skills/Experience

Able to demonstrate consistently meeting targets
Good communication, writing and customer service skills
Excellent problem solving and organisation skills
Able to communicate complicated technical issues, with effective presentation skills
Self-motivated and flexible to work with minimum supervision
Excellent interpersonal, negotiation and communication skills
Should be able to quickly establish rapport
Highly innovative and proactive
Should be able to handle varied tasks

Desirable Skills/Experience

Knowledge of social media marketing
Knowledge of search engine optimisation
Understanding of search engine optimisation
Understanding of PPC marketing
Knowledge of content management systems (Drupal, Joomla,Wordpress etc)
Previous sales experience

If you would like to apply, please send your CV to gordon@360innovate.co.uk

Closing Date: 30th August 2011

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Google Rolls Out Sitelinks Update

Wednesday, August 17th, 2011

Google announced this week in a blog post that it has made a significant update to one of its search features called sitelinks, which you may know as those small links you see beneath the main webpage when you search for certain key terms on Google.

Now when you search, you will find a mini description for each link that shows beneath each result, and the full web address of that page also now appears under each link description. You will also now find 12 sitelinks , instead of the 8 links which would have shown previously. Google also confirmed in the their blog post that they are making significant improvements to their search algorithms, which will see them combine the sitelink ranking and the regular result rankings in a hope to provide a higher quality list of links for the user.

According to Daniel Rocha who is one of the Software Engineers in the sitelinks Team at Google, this feature “is particularly handy for large and complex websites.  Sitelinks can also give you a good overview of a website’s content, and let webmasters expose areas of the site that visitors may not know about.”

Below is an example of how our website is now displayed on Google with the new sitelinks.

SEO Glasgow

The new update will become effective over the next few days for everyone and will be supported in all modern browsers.

Overall the new sitelinks will make the user experience much quicker and easier, and far more relevant from what we have seen before. What do you think of the new sitelinks? And will they have an impact on SEO ?

Matthew Marley

360innovate

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UK Home Secretary To Meet With Twitter, Facebook and RIM

Thursday, August 11th, 2011

A lot has been said this part week on the impact the social media has had on the shocking scenes in London and other parts of England. Today UK Prime Minister David Cameron made a statement in Parliament which will see the Government consider the role that social media has had in organizing the riots and violence which has spread over these various city’s.

The Prime Minister who returned to Downing Street early from his holiday in Italy this week, after the rioting and violence worsened said:

“Mr Speaker, everyone watching these horrific actions will be stuck by how they were organised via social media.  Free flow of information can be used for good. But it can also be used for ill. And when people are using social media for violence we need to stop them. So we are working with the Police, the intelligence services and industry to look at whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality.”

It has also been announced that Theresa May the Home Secretary in the UK would be meeting with some of the various social media outlets that have been used including Twitter, Facebook and Blackberry makes ( RIM ) to discuss their responsibilities in this week’s events.

Should these social media sites be closed during events like these?

Matthew Marley

360innovate

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Realtime Search To Return In Google

Thursday, August 4th, 2011

Some of you may have noticed that last month realtime search was removed from Google after it failed to reach an agreement with Twitter for access to its firehose of data, without the Twitter stream, the product was not very useful so Google decided to turn the feature off.

According to Googler Amit Singhal who was speaking at a search panel at Google’s Mountain Views Headquarters “The value the product was providing was not enough,” and they felt that they had no option to but turn this off for now, Amit was then asked if realtime search would return, Singhal confirmed that the search team is actively working on bring the product back. He also confirmed that the team has been working hard to include Google + data and other social media data. This pretty much confirms earlier reports that Google believes that it no longer needs the deal with Twitter to deliver its realtime results.

Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan also had a chance to speak with the panel, and asked why Google + doesn’t have its own search engines, which would give users access to huge amounts of data much like you can do with Twitter. Singhal replied advising that “we are on it”

Did you use realtime search? If so have you missed it?

Matthew Marley
360innovate

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Dojo drop down menus

Monday, August 1st, 2011

We’re happy to announce the release of BigMenu 1.1, an open source drop down menu system for Dojo.

BigMenu allows you to display a large amount of hierarchical information, without overwhelming the user.

BigMenu has the following features, among others:

  • Options available for animation time, easing, and delay on hide / show
  • Support for declarative or programmatic syntax
  • Keyboard and screen reader accessible – uses plain old semantic HTML
You can see the demo, or download the source from Github. As always,improvements, forks and pull requests are welcome!
(Created by @johnmcc and @todd_unctious)
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