The net went crazy this week when Facebook let the cat about of the bag about its new service, Facebook Lite. According to Facebook the new service is aimed for mobiles and more areas with slow connection speeds i.e. the developing economies. Although Facebook boasts 250 million users worldwide, over 70% of those are based in Europe or North America where broadband internet is common place.

In developing countries where infrastructure for broadband is limited, mobiles phone are fast becoming the most attractive way of developing the internet. Take Pakistan as an example who is seeing 2 – 3 million new mobiles being registered every month. These economies present a significant growth opportunity for anyone who can get a foot hold early, as Twitter already are in the process of doing.

With the word out everyone is rushing to try and reach conclusions about what Facebook Lite is. The speculation has been fuelled by the rivalry that has grown between Facebook and Twitter, as to who is actually the hottest social media property.

It has to be said that screen shots of the new application do look suspiciously like Twitter.

So are Facebook trying to copy twitter? Realistically, no, not at the moment anyway. The site is aimed a countries with huge population centres and poor internet infrastructure. Think about how slow full Facebook is on dial up speed connections. The fact that testing has been based in India also goes a long way to support this conclusion.

So are we likely to see much of Facebook Lite in the UK over the coming months? Probably not as the plan is to roll the application out to Russia and China next. It may be possible that in the future Facebook Lite is released to the rest of the world for people who want speed over functionality but I wouldn’t believe the hype that this is a ‘’twitter killer’!

In recent months the Search Engines business has become a little more difficult for Google with the release of Microsoft Bing, the Microsoft / Yahoo deal and newer players to the market such as the revamped Ask Jeeves and Wolfram Alfa. Google also faced competition from Facebook with their acquisition of the much heralded Friend Feed, praised for its ‘real time search’ engine.

In many ways although Google have been dominant in market share, when it comes to innovation they have consistently been a poor performer, especially over the last few months. Back in May Google Founder Larry Page even admitted that they had fallen behind the likes of Twitter that boasts 45 million users worldwide.

However today Google lifted the lid on its answer to all of the above, Google Caffeine, as it has been knick named. The change lies under the hood of Google and as such we will not see any change to the way that Google looks. Although still in testing phase, it is the beginning of a major change to the architecture of Google providing the “first step in improving the speed, accuracy and comprehensiveness of search results".

The Golden Goose of the Search engines has always been relevance. This is the reason why real time search is such a popular concept. Its lets you know what is happening right now on any given subject. That is what Google promise to offer with Google Caffeine.

While only in testing at the moment this new development promises to put Microsoft’s Bing in the shade. The trouble with Bing is that is it an alternative to something that users are happy with. Can Google deliver on its promise of something new?

Why not try for yourself and let us know www2.sandbox.google.com

Facebook certainly know how to pick their battles. In the past 24 hours, there have been 2 major announcements in the form of acquisitions to challenge Google and a new lite service to take on Twitter.

Yesterday saw the social network site buy the content sharing service FriendFeed, snatching the company from right under Google’s nose (It was expected that Google or Twitter would buy FriendFeed.) The reason a content sharing service attracts the attention of Google and Facebook is due to its impressive real-time search engine – something Google has fallen behind in.

FriendFeed allows you to synchronise with a
whole range of social networking websites.

Facebook and FriendFeed have had quite a close relationship in the past, with Facebook using (and improving on) some FriendFeed features, and FriendFeed importing/synchronising Facebook updates to their user profiles. The FriendFeed development team are also all ex-Googlers, which is a great addition to the Facebook team.

There have also been reports of a new Facebook Lite service, which will most likely line itself up against with it’s stripped down, straight-to-the-point interface focusing on status updates. (This may also work well with Facebook’s username functionality that was added a few months back.)

Combining all of these new features sounds like a great idea. A Twitter-esque profile pointing at http://facebook.com/phcreative showing a public version of my profile, which then utilises the new FriendFeed technology to synchronise and publish real-time status updates, links, photos and blog posts from Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Delicious, Last.fm, BrightKite, etc. Combine all that with a mobile / iPhone app and you’re on to a winner!

Ph.Creative have been awarded the Website of the Month award as voted for by other website designers & developers on www.webdesignerforum.co.uk for EH Joinery

Web Designer Forum is a Community of Web Designers & Developers who like to share tips and advice as well as show off their latest works for feedback.

As a regular visitor myself, I like to show what the team at Ph have been doing.

One of our latest projects EH Joinery was nominated for the award and took almost 35% of the votes against 7 other sites.

Well done team!

Twitter confirmed today that it’s currently defending itself against a malicious DDoS attack, resulting in the social networking site to go offline for a few hours.

A DDoS attack is a distributed denial-of-service attack which essentially floods the target’s web servers with so many requests that it causes delays or failed requests when trying to visit the website. The attacks can be carried out with by an individual or by organised ‘cyber gangs’ using many servers to increase the severity.

There have also been reports of Facebook going down today, but at the moment there doesn’t seem to be a connection between the two issues.

07/08/09 Update - The attack now seems to have escalated and has now affected other large sites like Google and Live Journal (as well as Facebook as I mentioned yesterday) in what is being described as a "massively co-ordinated attack". Reports are suggesting the attack is being targeted towards a single Internet user (who has accounts on all affected websites) to force his silence over the 2008 South Ossetia war between Russia and Georgia, which broke out exactly a year ago today.

Over the last few months there has been more and more chatter in the industry about Google being broken. Could it be true and could this be the break that the newly formed Yahoo / Microsoft partnership are looking for to break into the UK?

Let’s be fair it’s going to take a lot to dislodge Google as the dominant force in the UK. Google breaking could well be a real opportunity.

Over the last few months we have begun to see Google return strange results that include a multitude of irrelevant overseas websites. Take for example the search term ‘rent a tennis court’. We see not only a Singapore listing at position 2 but a gaggle of US based apartment websites taking up the top 10 positions.

Is it only that UK companies have not optimised their websites to appear on such a term? In the past .co.uk domains and websites hosted in the UK have taken precedence over .com’s and foreign websites.

So how can we account for the change – or is Google just broken?

Could it have anything to do with the Vince Update?

Around the beginning of March SEO’s and web masters began to see significant changes in how Google were rerunning results for certain sets of keywords. The industry felt that big brands were getting a push in the rankings. However Google’s Matt Cutts was quick to head off speculation over a major change in Google’s SEO rational.

Matt said the change was not necessarily an update but rather what they would call a minor change. One of hundreds made every year.  In fact, Matt told us a Googler named Vince created this change and it had been dubbed the Vince change. This was not about pushing big brands but about factoring more trust into the algorithm on generic search phrases, having little effect on long tail search results.

The answer could be as simple as the fact that no UK based websites have the relevancy or authority to rank well. The US pages returned certainly were from higher page rank sites in much more competitive sectors. 

If we also remember of course that Google results come from well over 100 different data centres on different IP addresses, it’s not surprising that glitches and instability come from updates being made. Tennis courts are far from a core revenue earner for Google and in the UK Tennis is not exactly in the league of Football. So if a small, insignificant section of Google is not returning the same A1 standard we have some to expect, is that really an issue??

Have you seen any more drastic examples?

A year ago today I joined Ph.Creative! Time flies they say...
So what have I done what have I learnt and what about the year ahead?

I’d currently worked for an ICT company and was in sole charge of their website, as well as designing and developing client websites, but one thing stood out when I joined Ph, the quality. 

My role changed from my previous job, no long was I responsible for designing websites; I was now fully focused on web development, coding HTML and CSS. Which is just as well, as the design team at Ph, blew anything I’d ever created right out the water. 

Ph.Creative use their own Content Management System, PhUse, which was new to me. I was thrown in the deep end on my first day and was asked to code up a site from visuals, which I then had to integrate into PhUse to give clients the ability to update their own sites. You have to take into consideration what the client can and can’t edit, and at the same time make it easy for them to do so, by carefully naming Styles for Header Tags, Images, Downloadable Documents and much more. During the process of learning PhUse, I improved my skills in SQL Server, IIS and ASP. I also leant lots of tricks and shortcuts in Photoshop while working with the Designers PSDs.

One of the handiest tools I’ve discovered has to be jQuery. Once jQuery was introduced into Ph websites we began to push barriers, it’s really useful at tweaking CSS and giving sites a little creative edge. 

Learning new skills has made me a much better developer, but I’ve also gained knowledge in the power of Social Networking and Internet Marketing. PhUse’s Marketing Manager is a great tool for clients to collect data from users and create email marketing campaigns.

I would not have learned these new skills so quickly if it wasn’t for the close knit team around me that we have at Ph.Creative. Hopefully over the next 365 days I’ll learn just as much...

Hi guys,

Just letting you know about the first Ph.Tools service to go live is the Google Maps Coordinates tool. A must-have for web designers is a good tool to help you find coordinates in Google Maps, the problem I've had in the past is finding one that's user friendly and easy to use. I hope this fills the gap.

Features include scroll wheel zoom, point and click functionality and precise click and drag support. Let me know what you think, and please report any bugs to me directly at craig@ph-creative.com.