…we expect our websites will be shutting down on 17th December. We are working hard to make sure that most of the content accessible through web services (such as the source code, kits, wiki, bug database, reference documentation & Symbian Ideas) is available in some form, most likely on a DVD or USB hard drive upon request to the Symbian Foundation.

Ok, Symbian, you’re backing up… but come on, USB sticks? DVD? sent by postal mail? They invented the Internet to send digital informations without the need for a phisical support! Can’t you leave a small website online with links for downloading content?

Content delivery apart, what is the future for Symbian OS?

From the minute of the last meeting it seems that Nokia will continue developing and using the OS.
My guess is that it will be used on feature phones (they seems not to be hot, but still 80% of handset shipped are feature phones) targeting less developed countries and low costs market slice… and that for high-end devices Nokia will go for MeeGo… or try to do so :)

1. No support for open source licenses

You simply can’t submit code licensed under GPL, AGPL and open source licenses in the marketplace. The following is taken from the Microsoft Application Provider Agreement, page 2.

Excluded Licenses include, but are not limited to the GPLv3 Licenses

2. Only C# supported

This means not only that you can’t port apps from Android or iPhone, but also that all the apps that were developed for windows mobile 6.5 are gone. You have to rewrite everything from scratch. (Except from things from XBOX. Oh, well. Games. Amazing. Microsoft is creating a new NGage -.-’)
Imagine you’re a windows mobile 6.5 developer and you need a new version of your app. Are you going to learn C# to port your app to windows phone 7, or to learn Java and move to Android, with his 25% of the market share?
Well, I know. You probably have already ported your app to Android/iOs.

3. Missing APIs

From a developer point of view, this is the worst one… you simply have no access to some APIs

• Camera API: third party apps can’t access the camera. They can take pictures, but nothing more. Forget about Layar or videochat on Windows Phone 7.
• Socket API: you simply can’t go beyond http. No socket API, no ETA for them to be released. The only solution are hacks like http tunneling or proxy or whatever. Nonsense.
• PIM API: you can’t access contacts or calendar information. This API is not available. No ETA also for this. Forget about getting your calendar or contacts data in a 3rd party app.

This are three things that hurt developers, but there are a missing features that are expected in a 2010 mobile OS:

• copy & paste
• tethering
• 3rd party multitasking
• VPN support
• Flash support
• USB mass storage mode
• Connecting to hidden wireless networks

We’re used to get APIs released later or with flaws (calendar APIs were released in iOS4, and there are still major bugs in the calendar APIs on Android 2.1… Funambol devs and community members know it well since they’re developing and testing workarounds all day ;) ), but I was hoping that the latecomers (such as MS in the new paradigm of mobile OSs) would have tried to get to the market in a better shape than the pioneers. You can’t compete with a product that’s less appealing than Android and iOS, and hope to get it better later because you can update the software OTA.

For sure Microsoft will add support for the missing functionalities and APIs: they were late (years late, to tell the truth) and they needed to get to market on time for Christmas… but I guess users will be disappointed by the SW, and developers will sit and wait, not considering Windows Mobile 7 a serious OSs until a new release is out.

Symbian is a dead man walking

nobody was positive about the future of symbian foundation, even before Lee Williams resignation. Imagine how it was after he resigned.

It’s very difficult to opensource your code if your company is not open source since the beginning

I talked about this with Hal Steger (our VP Marketing in Funambol) at dinner before the show.

The day after Thomas Miller (Head of MeeGo Ecosystem at Nokia) said that one key differentiator between Symbian and MeeGo is that MeeGo gathers code from well known open source project (eg gnome) so the improvements are depending on the directions this projects are taking. (in the meanwhile Symbian was loosing his CEO…)

The day after George Martin (Software Product Manager, Wireless Business Unit at Texas Instruments) said that is not easy for them that are not selling software (to say it with his world “we do coding because we have to. If it would be possible to sell silicon without writing code, we would be happy”) to jump open source, e.g. they had their programmers complaining about “this guy from the community that said my code sucks”. He said that Open Source is not something you can embrace if you have soft skin. “it’s more like rugby, you have to be tought. If you expect tennis, do not go Open Source” he said. I like the methaphor :)
But they’re selling silicon, not software, It’s even harder for a software-based company.

Mobile operators are trying everything they can to avoid being a dumb pipe, but they seem to be quite confused

The overall impression is that they are moving around in different directions and with no exact clue on were to go. They’re creating standards, trying to get open push protocols, setting up app stores, talking to developers all at once, but I do not see any Master Plan behind this frenetic work.

A few mobile operators are starting their own app store. I hate this. They’re trying to get revenue for free, just because they can. They see money moving from their users to the developers and they try to get in the middle and get some of it. Unfair for users and developers.

Others keep on saying that their network simply can’t handle that much traffic and developers have to learn to optimize network usage (this is nothing new, developers always optimized network usage, not for the operators but for the end users!), and they say that to limit network usage traffic based billing will be back (“let’s go back to a few years ago, when we were making money!” they are saying. Nice move!).
At the same time they know perfectly, and they say it, that apps will be always on to get data from the cloud (woohooo everybody like to say “cloud”!) and we’re going towards more web based apps.
I understand why they are scared :)

Developers are happy, they see opportunities ahead

finally someone desperately needs them (manufactorers and operator) but they know that in the short term this means more fragmentation, since everybody is trying to set up his own app garden and each of this solutions means you have to spend time to get your app in each app garden and support it. More overhead to publish your app, less time to do real development. That’s not something they’re happy with.

• 3 Reasons Why Alexa Sucks (And They Know It!)
  This is the result of a bit of research I did on Alexa some months ago. It received some citations and recently some stumbleupon attention.
• .htaccess Hacking for Fun and Profit
  This was one of my first articles, and is still one of my top 3 entry pages
• Change Title of Your Older Posts to Target Popular Search Terms
  A simple tip that received a lot of attention from stumbleupon
• Bonus Search Tip: Finding mp3 files with Google
  This was just a pointer to my ultimate google guide, but it receive a lot of visits on his own from reddit searches (don’t know why, but there are a lot of searches for “mp3″ on reddit that returns this story)
• 10 Tips for Italian Espresso
  this is 100% off topic, still is very appreciated by readers. We all need caffeine, after all! ;)

Here’s my tag list… Stefano, Chris and…
YOU! t
This means that you, the one that’s reading this right now, have to keep this meme alive ;)
No excuses!

Looking forward for your entries!

Check it out and let me know what you think about it :)

But too often we look at the popular search terms that took visitors to our site, and forget about the less popular ones.
Our own long tail.

Digging into our own long tail can be effective in many ways:

Find inspiration for future posts

Long tail search terms are uncommon groups of keywords.

This means they often point out non-banal relations between concepts and they can offer inspiration for future posts, because they raise questions or point out something you may want to investigate and write about.

Understand your visitors better

Tipical long tail search term is a long sentence, and it’s focused, so it let you know exactly what the visitor was interested in.

Since a blog is a source of information, knowing what type of information the visitor wants is the key for offering a better service.

Optimize posts with side keywords

There are some pages that does not rank well for their main keywords, because the top spots in the serps are crowded with different sites, but they rank well for a couple main keyword + side keyword.

Looking in the long tail is a great way to find this “side keywords” and optimize the pages (or future posts on the same topics) using together main keyword and side keywords.

What do you think?
What are the other advantages of long tail digging (apart from finding out google oddities and funny search term you rank for)?

I’ll be back in a couple of weeks… stay tuned! :D

Video

Probably the most impressive feature is the recording of each movement the user made on your page. Each mouse gesture, page scroll, click and input is recorded and can be reviewed as a video.

here’s a quick example from one of my visitors

Impressive, isn’t it? The video was scaled down for youtube and the speed is 2x the real speed, but clicktale allows you to see movies in full size and normal speed.

Attention and Visitors Heatmaps

Heatmaps measuring the attention time and the number of visits received by a section of the page are provided

Click Metrics

Each heatmaps can include different click metrics, including

• click count
• hover count
• hover time
• hesitation (how much time passed between hover and click)
• average hoover order (order the link was hovered by the visitor)
• etc.

User Segmentation

There is a promising beta feature that that uses the data collected to perform user segmentation, allowing you to see visitors with given behaviors, like

• lots of clicks
• lots of mouse gestures
• percent scrolled
• …

or using traditional informations (O.S., browser etc.).

Sounds Great. Is this Free Stuff?

It depends.
The free subscription to clicktale analytics allows you to track up to 100 visits / week for free, if you want more, you have to pay.
100 recording / weeks are not that much, but it’s enought to have a look at how your site is used and how powerful can be ClickTale.
Subscription plans are not cheap, in my opinion:

• $19 / month (100 recordings / day)
• $49 / month (400 / day)
• $99 / month (1000 / day)

I’m happy with the free package ;)

Opportunities

This metrics, the heatmaps and the videos provided by clicktale can add a real value to your analytics tools, offering a new way of looking at your website and a lots of hints about usability, driving attention and in-page optimization.

Adding tools like Clicktale to your “analytics kit” can help you to better undestand how users interact with your site and what section and aspects can be optimized.

The free version can give just a hint of how your website is accessed, but I think it can be really useful for usability and user behavior analysis.

I’m trying to get the most out of this tool, and I believe it can really help me to understand how my sites are used and what catches the user attention and why.

Being new at this type of analysis, I’m still trying to understand what are the main aspect I should consider… If you tried clicktale, or you’re gonna to try it, I’ll be happy to know what your experience is and what metrics you think we should look at…

Let me know in the comments how you think we can get the most out of Clicktale!

That means that if you leave comments or link to one of my posts, the link to your site will be seen as a “vote” from my site to your by search engines, giving you some help for better ranking in SERPs. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you should read this introduction and a brief explanation on how pagerank works)

I want to encourage comments and trackbacks and to reward the readers that with their contribute helps the discussion to grow, and since I added the math question antispam plugin, I feel confident I’ll be able to handle comment spam.

The Top Commentators plugin remains active, to give an additional reward to the most active users that receive a link from each page of this blog.

Comment Policy

A comment will be deleted if:

• Contains links to splogs or MFA (Made For Adsense) sites
• Contains racists statements and stuff like that
• Adds no value to the discussion

Keep in mind that I accept and am happy to receive constructive critics… so don’t be afraid to criticize me, and I love to have fun, so jokes (in small quantities ;) ) are welcome… just use your brain when posting a comment!

Moderation

Comments containing more than one link in the comment body are moderated.

I check comments quite often, so you should be able to see it in a few hours, but sometimes I have to sleep, too.