After writing my recent article on Growth Hackers, I’ve been asked by quite a few folks on how to learn the discipline. The best answer is, learn from someone who’s already good at it – if you’re technical and creative, it’s well worth the time.

I would encourage everyone to also read Andy Johns’s Quora answers on What is Facebook’s User Growth team responsible for and what have they launched? and
What are some decisions taken by the “Growth team” at Facebook that helped Facebook reach 500 million users?- it lays out a lot of the key activities used in a well-run growth team.

The web is evolving. After a few years of iteration the WebSockets spec is finally here (RFC 6455), and as of late 2011 both Chrome and Firefox are SPDY capable. These additions are much more than just "enhancing AJAX", as we now have true real-time communication in the browser: stream multiplexing, flow control, framing, and significant latency and performance improvements. Now, we just need to drag our "back office" - our web frontends, app servers, and everything in between into this century to enable us to take advantage of these new capabilities

Were you a big Gowalla fan? Did you like Dodgeball? Did you think Trunk.ly (gasp!) was better than Pinboard? Did you make a lot of contributions to Nextstop? Do you miss Aardvark and EtherPad? Did "I Want Sandy" change your life?

These projects are all very different, but the dynamic is the same. Someone builds a cool, free product, it gets popular, and that popularity attracts a buyer. The new owner shuts the product down and the founders issue a glowing press release about how excited they are about synergies going forward. They are never heard from again.

Create, integrate and track QR Codes. Promote your real-world campaigns with rich & mobile optimized content to attract new fans and customers.

Recent events have shown how inadequate the standard web 2.0 vocabulary can be. See a few examples below, from liking someone’s death, to liking the Oslo bombing, to Amy Winehouse passing away being “most popular”.

If you haven’t heard (it’s not for lack of me trying), I’m moving my family to London for 2 years. As part of the transition I bought all of my kids tablets that they could hold all of their music and books on and that they could also access email, skype and their own blogs. It has been an interesting experience, especially since my kids are all at such interesting ages.

When I was growing up I moved around a fair amount early in life and even a move across town meant that I wouldn’t see my friends anymore. Especially if you were grade school age, you just didn’t use the phone much and unless your parents were friends with their parents, cross-town “play dates” just didn’t happen.

But now, moving my kids to another country isn’t that big of a deal. Like I said they all have email, blogs and Skype, as do most of their friends.

Is it hard to build, market and maintain a web app that makes at least $1000 a month?
For a single, skilled web developer.

It's Friday January 16th. On Youtube, the user 'boxxybabee', has 21,800 subscribers, 1.4 million video views and over 38,000 comments on her videos and channel, yet she only signed up 8 days ago, and has only 3 videos. Many people were, and are confused. How did this happen? By documenting what I personally saw, I will show you.

“Flickr isnt doing it for me anymore and it hurts to say that out loud.” - bijan

Bijan’s post struck a chord, which is really hard for me to talk about too. I’ve been a paid user of Flickr for many years. Flickr was the first web2 company I fell in love with. It made it easy for average people to share photos publicly and privately, and it built a community that encouraged people to push themselves to take better photos. It was the first prism with which I looked at how a community website could subtly use game mechanics to drive behavior without building “a game.”

But at this point it feels overly clunky in too many ways. I’m curious what folks feel like is missing in their Flickr experience, but for me the next Flickr would have one huge difference and a few smaller ones.

When Should I Visit? finds the least busy time to visit the museums, galleries and theatres of London. It states the quietest day and provides a glanceable graph to judge the relative popularity of different days. The site is intended to show the data in the simplest possible way with no unnecessary detail.

Quora has taken the tech and entrepreneurial world by storm, providing a system that works so fluidly that it is sometimes hard to see what the big fuss is all about. This slick tool is powered, not only by an intelligent crowd of askers and answerers, but by a well-crafted backend created by co-founders who honed their skills at Facebook.

In this blog post I will delve into the snippets of information available on Quora and look at Quora from a technical perspective. What technical decisions have they made? What does their architecture look like? What languages and frameworks do they use? How do they make that search bar respond so quickly?

Users expect websites to work on their mobile phones. In two to three years, mobile support will become standard for any site. Web developers must add mobile web development to their skill set or risk losing clients.

How do you make websites mobile compatible? The answer is obvious: By testing them on all mobile phones, and by solving the problems you encounter. But, that’s a useless answer. It’s impossible to test your designs on every mobile phone out there. Within the mobile phone landscape, there are at least ten operating systems (OSs) and fifteen browsers that require consideration. Mobile devices are expensive, and not every web developer can afford to buy five to ten of them. Testing “on all mobile phones” is impossible for most web developers.

In this article, I’ll give you an overview of the mobile web market, as well as phone platforms and their browsers, so that you can decide which mobile devices to test on. Then, we’ll look at how to set up a mobile test bed.

What I’ll be showing you is how to have perfect working web forms with stunning visuals to produce the desired form for you every time!

I’ll be taking you through the core principles, and making your web forms stand out from the rest! At the end of it all you can see many examples of stunning web forms across the net.

The men’s lifestyle publication Thrillist has rolled out a new site design. Thrillist’s design team put its 12 million-user website under the microscope for nearly a year before unveiling the new look.

A complete redesign can be high stakes for a large site. Digg 4 earlier this year showed what can go wrong in the rollout of a new user experience (in Digg’s case, a noisy uproar and traffic dive). Twitter, on the other hand, this year launched a redesign that enhanced user experience with few snags.

Mashable got a sneak peek at Thrillist’s new design, along with the scoop on what the inside of a massive art project looks like. Read on for the anatomy of this full web makeover.

One challenge at yesterday’s CTF was a seemingly-impossible SQL injection worth 300 points. The point of the challenge was to submit a password to a PHP script that would be hashed with MD5 before being used in a query. At first glance, the challenge looked impossible. Here’s the code that was running on the game server:

The importance of colors can be described by only one sentence – “Color to life is like salt to food”. Colors can change your mood, determine your attitude, whenever you see color you can feel its pleasing effect within your soul. In other words, in life colors express a lot of meanings without saying anything.

Today we have collected some captivating examples of elegant colorful web designs for your inspiration. Have a look.

One of my first icon projects for Campaign Monitor was to create a set of Apple iOS icons for our mobile web application. These are the icons that show up when you bookmark our mobile site to the ‘home screen’ on your Apple device. Now, with all of the iOS devices floating around out there, you can do things the easy way by creating one large icon which is then scaled down for that particular device, or you can do it properly by creating a pixel-perfect icon for each device. For the iPod Touch/iPhone 2.5/3G/3GS, the icon size is a miserly 57 pixels square. For the iPad, it’s 72 pixels square, and for the newer iPhone4, it’s a whopping 114 pixels square.

Welcome to another edition of Guru Speak. I believe that one of the hallmarks of a good writer is the ability to mold a complex topic into something both palatable and interesting. These are the characteristics I strive for in Guru Speak, and I hope you consider my efforts to be a success. Please be sure to let me know what issues tend to trouble you the most or in what areas you would like to expand your knowledge and understanding. I am happy to cater to my readers.

This edition's topic is storing sessions in a database.

Everyone knows that SmugMug is a heavy user of S3, storing well over half a petabyte of data (non-replicated) there. What you may not know is that EC2 provides a core part of our infrastructure, too. Thanks to Amazon, the software and hardware that processes all of your high-resolution photos and high-definition video is totally scalable without any human intervention. And when I say scalable, I mean both up and down, just the way it should be. Here's our approach in a nutshell...

XPath is used to navigate through elements and attributes in an XML document.

XPath is a major element in W3C's XSLT standard - and XQuery and XPointer are both built on XPath expressions.

Here's an interesting promotional video from Gatorade, which extols their ability to monitor social conversations, apparently using Radian6 and IBM technologies.

iPad web apps are websites that are optimized for the multi-touch device. This page is constantly updated with the best iPad web apps available. Is there a great web app that we missed? Please contact us and let us know.

If the absence of Flash on iPhone and iPod Touch for three years and its current incompatibility with iPad left any room for doubt, then Steve Jobs’ recent tirade to employees made clear the depth of the Apple CEO’s ill-feeling toward Adobe’s ubiquitous media platform. But more than mere dissatisfaction with the internet’s most pervasive mode of serving multimedia content, including webgames, Jobs’ support of the new web standard, HTML5, shows Apple’s deeper, more aggressive goal: to bring about the downfall of Flash by shifting the very source of how we experience games and watch videos on the net.

Dies ist die leicht überarbeitete schriftliche Fassung eines Vortrags, den ich am 5. Juni zum Abschluss der 3. Berliner Mediensucht-Konferenz gehalten habe. Der vollständige Titel meines Vortrags hieß: “Immer und überall online – ein verheißungsvolles Leben mit Facebook, Foursquare und Co?” Ich werde den Vortrag wegen seiner Länge in drei Teilen auf diesem Blog veröffentlichen. Hier geht’s los mit Teil 1: Warum das Internet kein Zukunfts- sondern ein Gegenwartsthema ist – und für manche Nutzer das Thema Nummer 1 überhaupt.

Einführung in Canvas

About a month ago or so, Amy and I release a little (literally, it’s about 5k) HTML5 iPad App for looking up time zones. I don’t mean select-box wasteland like all other time zone sites (who likes select boxes anyway?!), I mean a nicely polished, touch-enabled UI that works offline, too.

Search engine for icons and icon sets

Tool to test designs & web pages on multiple browsers automatically

My name is Jeffrey Rowland and I am an actual dude.
I used to live in Oklahoma but now I live in Northampton, Massachusetts.
I got problems like everybody does. I got a few stories to tell you.

There are several ways to backup MySQL data. In this article we’ll look at how to backup your databases using different methods, we will also learn how to achieve an automatic backup solution to make the process easier. Starting with the mysqldump utility that comes with MySQL, we will review several examples using mysqldump, including the backup of your database to a file, another server, and even a compressed gzip file and send it to your email.

FREAKANGELS is a free, weekly, ongoing comic written by Warren Ellis and illustrated by Paul Duffield. Drop by the Whitechapel Forum to discuss this week's installment.

With the help of Prezi you can create maps of texts, images, videos, PDFs, drawings and present in a nonlinear way. Move beyond the slide, it only takes 5 minutes to learn how to use Prezi.

Below we present over 50 excellent navigation menus — we feature CSS-based design solutions, CSS+JavaScript-based menus and Flash-designs. However, they all have something in common: they are user-friendly yet creative and perfectly fit to the style of their respective websites.

My name is Tina Roth Eisenberg. I am a 'swiss designer gone NYC'. swissmiss is my visual archive of things that 'make me look'. I am a graphic designer and run my own studio in Brooklyn. Contact me if you would like to team up, have a link suggestion or just want to say hello: submissions {at} swiss-miss.com.

Here you find links and information about nearly 175 free
PDF mags from all over the world with main focus on art, design, illustration and culture...

First Monday is one of the first openly accessible, peer–reviewed journals on the Internet, solely devoted to the Internet. Since its start in May 1996, First Monday has published 960 papers in 151 issues; these papers were written by 1,207 different authors. In addition, eight special issues have appeared. The most recent special issue was entitled A Web site with a view — The Third World on First Monday and it was edited by Eduardo Villanueva Mansilla. First Monday is indexed in Communication Abstracts, Computer & Communications Security Abstracts, DoIS, eGranary Digital Library, INSPEC, Information Science & Technology Abstracts, LISA, PAIS, and other services.

Die Flickr API kann von anderen Entwicklern zu nicht kommerziellen Zwecken verwendet werden. Eine kommerzielle Nutzung ist nach vorheriger Absprache möglich.

I recently finished Outliers: The Story of Success, the latest book by Malcolm Gladwell. More than any other writer, Gladwell can take any topic, even the most dry and boring, and turn it into compelling reading.
The entire Outliers book is good, but Chapter 7: The Ethnic History of Plane Crashes, is amazing. It’s worth the price of the book just to see how Gladwell stitches this chapter together. In it Gladwell tells the story of several plane crashes and uses the last radio conversations between the pilots and the control tower to paint an incredible picture of how they happen.

Jürgen Scheible, author of the book 'Mobile Python - Rapid prototyping on the mobileplatform' (Wiley) is a researcher, music and media artist. At the Media Lab of University of Art and Design, Helsinki he runs the Mobile Hub, a prototype development environment for mobile client/server applications with a strong focus on artistic approaches and creative design.

Meine Kollegen in Australien haben ein wahrhaft schönes Gebilde in die Welt gesetzt: den Velociroflcoptersaurus. Er ist eng verwandt mit der Hommingberger Gepardenforelle, hat aber eine noch kürzere Lebenserwartung. Und da dachte ich mir: so was muss unterstützt werden. Attack of the Velociroflcoptersaurus!

Die Jagd nach dem Vieh ist eröffnet - Das FFM-Office ist so was von dabei!

After so many shoddy sites, pop-up windows and forced registrations, the truth is that if people don't find your website easy to use, they won't come back. Worse, they'll tell their friends just how clueless you are.

The answer is, of course, to design everything around the needs of your users. We've known this for years, but there's still resistance to even the most basic usability testing.

Mozilla Labs is launching a series of experiments to bridge the divide in the user experience between web applications and desktop apps and to explore new usability models as the line between traditional desktop and new web applications continues to blur.

Simple. It's a twitter monitor, it lets you "monitter" the twitter world for a set of 3 keywords and watch what people are saying.

Conferences about the Web, Web2.0, Design and Development all over the world

All content from FOWA London 2008

Tim Bray gives amazing advice on what techies can do when times get tough.

IQONS is a fashion community highlighting creative talent. It is pop culture through the eyes of fashion.

berlinblase started out as a little team-based tumblelog, covering live all the things happening in Berlin around BarCamp Berlin2 and Web 2.0 Expo in November 2007. Now, our spontaneous raw’n'uncut style will be continued during forthcoming european web-events.

Roll back the clock by two years. That’s before AJAX, before Web 2.0, before Rails. Where were we then? Well pondering whether MVC was really such a good idea after all. Continuing from there…

In this TechTalk, Mike Andrews will look at how web applications are attacked, walk through a testing framework for evaluating the security of an application and take some deep-dives into a few interesting and common vulnerabilities and how they can be exploited.

Digital NASA TV has four digital channels: NASA Public ("Free to Air"), featuring documentaries, archival programming, and coverage of NASA missions and events; NASA Education ("Free to Air/Addressable"), dedicated to providing educational programming to schools, educational institutions and museums; NASA Media ("Addressable"), for broadcast news organizations; and NASA Mission Operations (Internal Only) Note: Digital NASA TV channels may not always have programming on every channel simultaneously.

ASCII is a weblog of computer history, punditry and trivia from Jason Scott, proprietor of the textfiles.com family of websites, and creator of the BBS Documentary.

Create easily your own ajax loader icon : Select the type of indicator you want Enter the background code color you want (tick "Transparent background" if you don't want one Enter the foreground code color you want Press "Generate it"

Auf dieser Webseite werden die für Webmaster wichtigsten Fragen beantwortet: Wann unterliege ich der Impressumspflicht? Was gehört alles ins Impressum? Wie muss es angebracht sein? Unter "Impressumspflicht erklärt" finden Sie hierzu juristische Erläuterungen. Für diejenigen, die sich nur einen kurzen Überblick verschaffen möchten, sind die wichtigsten Informationen in einer Kurzversion zusammengestellt. Diese kann auch unter Nennung des Autors und Setzen eines Links jederzeit kopiert und verbreitet werden.

Flash Online Magazin

The Dumpster is an interactive online visualization that attempts to depict a slice through the romantic lives of American teenagers. Using real postings extracted from millions of online blogs, visitors to the project can surf through tens of thousands of specific romantic relationships in which one person has "dumped" another. The project's graphical tools reveal the astonishing similarities, unique differences, and underlying patterns of these failed relationships, providing both peculiarly analytic and sympathetically intimate perspectives onto the diversity of global romantic pain

Marketing mittels Mundpropaganda ("Word of Mouth Marketing"), Buzz Marketing, Viral Marketing oder Virus Marketing sind Ansätze, die immer weiter Verbreitung finden und zunehmend von großen Marken (P&G, Bacardi, Coca-Cola, Toyota oder Ford) angewendet werden. Hinzu kommt, dass durch die anwachsenden Inhalte im Web 2.0 auf Blogs etc. die digitale Mundpropaganda im Internet an Bedeutung gewinnt. Dieses Blog diskutiert diese Themen und gibt Anregungen dazu. Der Begriff Connected Marketing basiert auf einem Buchtitel, an dem Martin Oetting mit einem Kapitel beteiligt ist: Connected Marketing. Martin Oetting arbeitet bei trnd, der ersten deutschen Agentur für Mundpropaganda Marketing.