There’s always been a lot of talk online about Internet Explorer 6, and more specifically the perils it brings to web designers.  It seems that when creating IE6, Microsoft decided it knew better than the W3C (the consortium who sets all web standards) and decided against following any rules, instead building a browser that renders code however it sees fit.

Since that day, developers have collected a vast array of tools to combat the problems that IE6 brings, from conditional CSS to javascript browser sniffers.  It still seems that any time a site looks perfect in Firefox, Opera, Safari or even IE7, there’s a developer in tears next to an old dev box displaying IE6.

Here’s a site we’re currently developing, and have not yet ‘hacked’ for IE6, as seen in IE6

Here’s the same site as rendered by Firefox

Notice the differences? Not just the obvious fact that the main image is in the wrong place, but the blue box around the bottom left section?  That’s because IE6 doesn’t support transparency in PNGs.

I’ve read a couple of articles lately discussing when we should set a cutoff for IE6.  After all, IE7 is here, and there’s a wealth of other browsers for users to choose from.  All are free, costing most users nothing to upgrade (unless they’re on a pre-XP operating system) and take a couple of minutes to download.

A lot of the arguments against dropping support for IE6 focus around the fact that the user doesn’t care.  The user couldn’t care less why something doesn’t look right, neither does the client most of the time.  In my opinion, it’s time to educate users that they should care.  The easiest way of doing this?  Drop IE6 support.  Every obsolete technology is depreciated at some point.  Analog television is approaching it’s switch off, no-one makes VHS tapes and it’s become increasingly difficult to find medieval weapons these days.  People accept these because they’re educated that there is something better available to replace them.

It should be easy to explain to a client that it’s worth them dropping IE6, just by showing them how much of our time they are paying for just for us to hack up our beautiful, standards compliant code to make it work on your Nan’s PC.

Here’s how I’d do it:  some kind of alert to users that use IE6 that is a clear and obvious call to action that their browsing experience IS being hindered by their choice of browser.  Direct them to a page explaing that things have moved on, showing them what they could be experiencing and giving them the options of what browser they should upgrade to.  Maybe even mention that if they’re on a pirated OS, they can go for an open source browser and not risk getting in trouble.  Educate them that it’s their stick in the mud attitude that is killing web developers souls.

DID YOU KNOW: these things are YOUNGER than IE6

iPods, The Boss’ Daughter, Facebook, Freeview, Jesus, Fashionable Cider, East Timor

Whilst managing one of our Facebook pages, it’s been revealed to me how important it is to constantly update the content on a page in order to keep people interested.  This is standard practice on the web, if you regularly update your content you will see users returning regularly to check out what’s new.  This is especially important on something like Facebook where users have no genuine reason to visit your page other than out of curiosity.

I can see a lot of brands treating Facebook as a sort of gallery, great to put in a snapshot of their company in the hope that people will see they’re in touch with their audience.

‘People use Facebook? Quick, get on Facebook!  Yeah, that’s right we’re on Facebook.  What do we do on Facebook? Erm,  we have to do stuff?’

In my opinion, the more successful brands on Facebook treat it more as a window into their company.  Their company is constantly working, changing, doing things, their Facebook page reflects that.  Each month they have new content for their page, details of current promotions, events they’re attending, campaigns they support, competitions they’ve won.  This constantly updating content gives users a reason to keep visiting their page, and a reason to become a fan, ensuring that these changes appear in their news feed.

Facebook gives pages the option to add content through ‘Static FBML’ apps, allowing admins of the page to put any HTML or FBML (Facebook’s HTML subset) on a page.  This gives a far greater level of customisation on pages, and has allowed us to implement everything from high score tables for certain applications to mini stores on e-commerce brand pages.  By constantly rotating a selection of best selling products, users are presented with a purchasing opportunity before they even leave the comfort of their procrastination station.

Facebook being used by a business should be the same as Facebook being used by an individual.  The average user doesn’t set up a profile then abandon it, they interact with it, update it and use all it’s features.  Facebook could be a fantastic platform for businesses to interact with consumers on a two way basis, but users will be reluctant to open themselves up to interaction if they don’t expect a response, and will come away with a negative attitude if they ask questions and don’t receive a response.

I think in the future we could easily see brands using web services to relate further to their target demographic.  Starting from Facebook but moving towards services like Twitter, which is fantastic for sending out promotion information, regular blogging, flickr for photo content, the list of services is almost endless, and with aggregation services like Friend Feed pulling all of this content into one place, web marketing could start moving towards an area far more specific and interesting than the standard banner adverts.

One of the important things to remember when developing for platforms such as that that Facebook provides is that, whilst it reaches millions of new users, it is still in Beta.

This whole Beta thing is constantly being reminded to developers every time something goes wrong, but it has had a slightly strange effect this week, with many developers reporting their user count (the number of Facebook users that have added their application) rocketing up by the thousands. One developer was even showing more users than Facebook itself!

As I see it, there are 2 types of Facebook developer, both of which rely quite heavily on these statistics.

1) The Entrepreneurial Developer

These make up the vast majority of developers (at least of those who post on the developer forums) and are generally the guys who come up with an idea, build an app and then sell it at it’s peak. Without the DAU (Daily active users) and Users stats, these guys would really struggle to shift their apps, as most app valuations are based on these figures.

2) The Corporate Developer

I would place myself in this bracket, as a developer who’s primary objective is to increase awareness of a brand through an application. Whilst most entrepenurial apps are branded with banner ads, mine are branded through the applications’ core, and designed with the brand in mind. The users’ statistics are equally as important to me as they are a way of justifying the money a client has spent on my time.

Whilst I am not of the persuasion that Facebook should have perfected the platform before releasing it, I do think that it’s important for there to be more feedback from the Facebook team when things like this do go wrong. This has been discussed on the forum for 3 days now and still seems to have had no official response.

As if to prove my point, I just came across this evidence that Facebook users really are starting to backlash against applications that force invitations. Alongside the rapidly growing groups (like this one), this research pretty much proves what was already pretty clear, that users don’t want to have to pimp their friends to an application just in order to use it.

If a developer makes a decent application that I think my friends will be interested in then sure, I’ll invite them. Forcing viral growth by telling me I have to invite 20 friends before doing anything works in completely the opposite way, as the polls show, in that 61% of users will uninstall the app rather than invite friends. It’s a pity my friends aren’t in that 61%.

Forced invites also applies to those applications that you can happily use without inviting people, until they present you with a ’skip free’ invitation page. For the more computer savvy user it’s a basic case of navigate away from the page, but amongst Facebook’s population of millions there are plenty of people who may not understand that this is not something Facebook is forcing you to do, but something an application developer is trying to force you to do.

Facebook - please stop forced invites!

via Saunderslog.com

As someone who is constantly on Facebook for work, I manage to quite easily stay on top of any requests or notifications that come my way. I had assumed that this was the case with everyone, but had recently started to notice that a lot of my friends were piling up notifications and messages due to the fact that most of the time they’re invitations to applications that someone was forced to send or messages from groups that nobody cares about.

These are very similar to the reasons why most people abandoned Myspace, the endless friend requests from fake users.

Today Facebook took a step towards keeping it’s userbase happy, adding an ‘Ignore All’ button for users that have more than 25 notifications. I can’t help but think this pretty much defeats the object of having notifications, and seems to assume that all notifications are spam, but at least it shows that they are working on something to fight this problem. I think a more relevant solution would be to block applications from forcing users to invite 20 friends before using an application instead, but we’ll see where this one goes.

Via allfacebook

Facebook application developers are continually informed that no guarantees are made as to the status of the Facebook platform so, should any errors occur, there can be no real complaints.  In fact, erros with the platform are frequent, with many developers of more complex applications fearing the weekly “Platform Update” like some kind of plague.

Yesterday, however, there seemed to be an even larger problem than normal, with most applications failing to load 9 out of 10 times.  Facebook generally carry out updates in the dead of night (US time) but for some reason yesterday, the problems continued throughout the day, with users seeing an error message instead of the application.  The problem with the error message is that it put a large amount of blame for the failure on the application developer, who, in this case, was not the one to blame.

As with any piece of beta software, you must expect there to be bugs with the Facebook platform as they strive to introduce great new features that not only improve the user experience but also make things easier for the developer (eg. the latest animations scripts).  However the Facebook platform is different from most other beta software in that there is a great deal of money on it.  Application developers are making a lot of money on advertising and selling source code, and Facebook’s own social ads are flooded with adverts for applications, netting them a fair few quid.

I don’t think yesterdays errors will mark any kind of change in the way things go in terms of Facebook app development, and in fact it may have only got me angry because I was working on the platform at the time, but I thin Facebook need to seriously review the way they update their platform if they want to keep developers on their side.