It’s been an interesting week, with part of our team working off-site. But the best thing about working for an internet company is that you can work anywhere you’ve got the internet! Check out what the team shared this week for Resource Friday.

Site of Personality

Steve Wolgemuth, Principal

It isn’t rocket science to understand that the best websites are built with a “who’s coming to the site and what’s on their mind” reference. But that goal becomes more and more complicated as you peel back the layers of a hypothetical audience’s characteristics. Early on, we’ve built sites ready for each (imagined) persona: middle-aged businessman, thirty-something housewife, etc. With the help of Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg’s Call to Action, I’m encouraging the team to drill down even deeper by carefully considering personality types of our target(s).

As we considered the Methodical, Spontaneous, Humanistic and Competitive types, we ended up identifying our own styles of searching. Recognizing the diversity in the room made me understand why it is so difficult when we are all in the room giving opinions about one webpage! We all have different things that are important to us. The Methodical wants detail and needs things “business-like.” As representative of the Spontaneous searcher, I tend to emphasize that sites must be (above every other trait) be quickly understood and relevant to what I want (now!). Our resident Humanist seems to think the need to be personal, relationship oriented and somewhat open-ended trumps my need for “easy and fast.” The Competitive surfer wants information served up in a rational manner, and looks for probabilities and guarantees. Building websites that perform is no easy task, but drilling down into the psychological characteristics, motivations and fears of our potential audience allows us to make sites for our clients that out-perform their competitors’.

PC, Phone Home?

Jonathan Arndt, Programmer

This week, I brought the team up to speed on OpenVBX, which is a phone system for business. OpenVBX can help developers build rich, high quality Internet phone and SMS applications.

While YDOP may not be in the position to use a full-featured call center operation, it could still be helpful in certain circumstances to help us automate certain common or repetitive calls.

The Keys to Network Security

Mike Newswanger, Lead Programmer

Today, I described how to use public and private key sharing for individual users to access SVN repositories stored on a local machine. This allows for full security implementation (each user has his or her own account), while allowing a hassle-free check-out and check-in process.

The public and private key sets are like a lock and key, with the public key stored on the server and the private key stored on the user’s local machine. When a connection is attempted, the private key is compared against the public to determine whether or not the user has correct permissions to access the server. If the user’s key matches, there is no further interaction involved, and the user can securely connect to a server.

(Social Media) Potpourri for $100, Alex

Daniel Klotz, Social Media Strategist

This week the Chronicle of Higher Education reported on a study from Bloomfield College concluding that “only 15 percent of prospective students” use Twitter to learn about colleges. My reaction? “What do you mean, only 15 percent? That’s huge!” We’ve long been advising our clients that Twitter is the place for engaging a small but elite group of digital influencers. Whereas many Facebook users do not also have a Twitter account, almost all Twitter users also have a Facebook account. And a blog, and a YouTube account. Twitter users are the kind of people most likely to leave comments on your website. They’re most likely to spread the word about your brand. And, importantly, they’re likely to be heard and respected. So fifteen percent of incoming students is a large pool in which to find significant influencers. It’s a bigger pool than we had expected.

In other news, YouTube announced this week that it is now offering a “YouTube Ready” designation for vendor companies that offer the service of transcribing videos. This designation will make YouTube more powerful than it already is in search, by instilling confidence in content producers toward the companies that offer to transcribe captions for their videos, and also by elevating trustworthy vendors who will transcribe accurately, rather than writing inaccurate captions simply for the sake of SEO.

Google has officially announced that it is developing a social network to rival Facebook, to be called Google Me. When I told the rest of the team that Google says they’ve learned important lessons from the releases of Wave and Buzz, my words were met with laughter. If Google learned its lesson, my colleagues said, they would stick to search and stay out of social networking. So it goes. Facebook continues to threaten Google with their Open Graph, and Google is now threatening Facebook with Google Me. The fight between these giants is worth watching.

In survey results released this week, 59 percent of respondents said they check e-mail first in the morning before doing anything else online. Eleven percent said they check Facebook first.

No Time Like the Present

Jeff Burkholder, Engineer/Analyst

Big news out today in the realm of website statistical analysis. And yes, numbers-focused people like me only enhance our air of geekiness by getting excited about news like this. Google’s blogging platform, Blogger, just gained a new feature: near-realtime statistics.

Big whoop, you say? Yeah, maybe. This sort of thing is probably only useful for the blogs that update multiple times an hour with breaking news and whatnot. However, if Google can bring this information to the Blogger platform, there should be little difficulty in bringing this realtime information to their regular Analytics offering for all websites. That’s where this gets a little more interesting. Up until now, Google’s subtly hinted that they believe that users simply aren’t interested in realtime stats. This seems to fly in the face of that; so is a broader roll-out on the horizon? Time will tell…