Everyone seems to be going mad about Pintrest at the moment so I thought I’d give it a go.

I’m not one for the most abundant content on there (flowers, arty photos, dresses and various haircare products) so I made one about something I am interested in (and do know something about) – F1 cars.

So far I have found numerous problems with their website:

• Popup modals are visually nasty, difficult to pick out from the background when they’re popped up and often get their events bound multiple times if you do it more than once on the same page
• Following links seems a bit weird, sometimes it follows redirects and sometimes I end up with feedproxy URLs on the “pins”
• There doesn’t seem to be a good way to get to one of your boards – you have to click just below its title?!
• Generally buggy picking images – several times I tried to pin the second or third image from a URL and it still rendered the first one
• Their CDN is sloooooow to propagate – first few page loads and the image isn’t there
• Have to log in with Twitter or Facebook (at least you can turn it off again later)

Let’s hope the experience improves a bit.

New blog design means new sharing. New sharing means fiddling around with code provided by the platform providers – some of which is (vastly) better than others.

Due to constraints in the design, buttons may need to be reloaded on the page. For a “single” page with one post, this doesn’t matter. However, I wanted share to work on pages with multiple posts, such as the homepage. Due to the design (in the modal popup) the buttons would have to be regenerated depending on which share button was clicked. Easy enough to do with the data, but what about the buttons themselves?

This may seem overly complex but it has a number of advantages. The platform providers get less data about users by the buttons being rendered on-demand. It also means the page loads quicker, and we can load up the buttons while the fancy modal animation is happening, resulting in a much better experience for users.

LinkedIn’s is the worst button in this regard. You have to load the same two scripts to get it to render a button each time. One of these scripts binds itself to window.IN, and won’t let you load it twice unless you unset this in between. Bit impractical. There is also no Iframe implementation which could work around this problem.

Facebook and Twitter both have JavaScript implementations, but these don’t work when you try and re-render them. Therefore I used the Iframe implementations. Unfortunately the Twitter button seems to ignore some of its parameters in the Iframe mode (such as the large button size, despite their docs saying otherwise). Both of these result in an experience that is less than perfect – the JS implementations give you nice modal popups, whereas the Iframes generate popup windows. Fairly easy to re-render though.

The Google +1 button is by far the best code. You only need load one script on page load, then you can call a global function to re-render buttons at any time. So you simply need to drop a new element and then call the function to get it rendered (very quickly, as a matter of fact) and you’re done.

+1, Facebook and LinkedIn all support extra information from pages for their posting. Facebook and LinkedIn both use OpenGraph, which is reasonable as it only uses meta tags. LinkedIn is a bit picky about thumbnail size but not too bad. +1 uses Schema.org, which requires a bit more effort and some more elements (you also have to modify the HTML opening tag) but it’s also fairly easy to implement. Twitter’s share button doesn’t do any of this and accepts parameters into the Iframe, which seems ok but it doesn’t automatically shorten the text to the right length of the tweet for you which is a bit annoying. LinkedIn seems to have some problems picking up OpenGraph data from the share button too, if it hasn’t been crawled before – it just doesn’t populate any data in the popup.

All in all, a relatively painful experience for what should have been as simple as what you have to do for the +1 button four times over.

I’ve been using Google+ for a couple of days now, and I really like it. While I have not yet had a chance to give every feature a full run through it’s paces, I have very much liked what I have had a go with. Here’s why I think it has promise.

I am pleased to announce the free online release of my review of the impact of the social web for 2010.

This work was completed as part of a University module entitled “Social, legal and ethical aspects of engineering” (and known as SLEASE). Entitled “Social, Legal and Ethical Aspects of online Communities and Social Networks”, the report focussed on the main issues facing social networking online in the last quarter of 2010.

The report presents hundreds of reference sources, from Reddit conversation threads and TechCrunch articles through to research papers and Anonymous press releases. The report then gives a succinct summary of the activities of the Reddit Political Action Committee, Twitter’s community, the Yahoo/Delicious debacle and all of the important events of the end of the year.

A note on licensing: this report is free to download and share, but please do not extract parts from the main body of the document. A note to fellow students: this report is provided for information only – plagiarism will get you thrown out of University.

Download the report

I was reading this interesting (and bravely-titled) post on cross-browser testing earlier and scrolling down this memory-jogging infographic detailing the history of modern web browsers when I got to the bottom where Chrome came into existence and thought back to that day in early September 2008 when Chrome was first leaked then announced and the internet went wild. Now where was I that day?

I was deep inside the heart of Microsoft UK. And the reaction was priceless.