Weekly Wrap-up: Great User Experience, Pinterest, and Corporate Blogs

Richard MacManus explores the characteristics of great user experience design. Alicia Eler explains what Pinterest is doing that Facebook should emulate. David Strom notes the decline of corporate blogging. All of this and more in the ReadWriteWeb Weekly Wrap-up.

After the jump you’ll find more of this week’s top news stories on some of the key topics that are shaping the Web – Location, App Stores and Real-Time Web – plus highlights from some of our six channels. Read on for more.

5 Signs of a Great User Experience

Great user experience is the result of thoughtful design. Richard explores 5 signs of great user experience, including examples from Path, Pinterest, Rdio and Fitbit. While he explains that great user experience isn’t the deciding factor for success, it plays an important role and just may help a company gain initial attention and widespread adoption.

What Pinterest is Doing That Facebook Isn’t

News of Facebook’s IPO had many tongues wagging this week, but Alicia Eler focused on something Pinterest is doing that Facebook isn’t: impacting purchases. While Facebook has tried to make social commerce work, Pinterest is delivering traffic that results in sales. Facebook conflates the social graph with the interest graph, and Alicia says that’s a mistake.

Blogging Declines Across the Inc. 500

A new study indicates the number of corporate blogs amongst the Inc. 500 has significantly dropped in the past year. Conversely, the number has stayed virtually the same for the Fortune 500. Instead, of blogging, the Inc. 500 seems to be focusing on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

From the comments:

Lorne Pike – “I can’t help but feel that any conclusions being drawn about blogging having peaked because of one year’s change are very premature. We know the Inc. 500 is a volatile and ever-changing group of companies. Many of the names on the list will change from one year to the next. How many of the companies that at first glance seem to have “stopped” blogging simply weren’t on the list last year?

The chart also shows that just a year ago we saw a considerable rise. Should we have concluded from that that the best days for blogging were still ahead? Blogging has many benefits, as do the other channels shown. To me, while it may be an early sign of things to come, the numbers shown here are hardly a sign that blogging is dead or dying or even has a slight cold. It’s just changing, like marketing always has and always will.”

More Top Posts:

Amazon S3 Reports Staggering Growth in 2011

Amazon Web Services just reported jaw-dropping growth in the number of objects stored in Amazon S3 year over year.

“As of the end of 2011, there are 762 billion (762,000,000,000) objects in Amazon S3. We process over 500,000 requests per second for these objects at peak times,” AWS Evangelist Jeff Bar wrote on the company’s blog tonight. The company reported 262 billion objects in storage in Q4 of 2010. More

Anti-Patterns for Technical Leaders

What’s the difference between a CTO and a vice-president of engineering (VPoE)? According to Jason Hoffman and Bryan Cantrill of Joyent, the lines are blurry. At the Monki Gras conference in London on February 1st, Hoffman (CTO) and Cantrill (VPoE), shared the stage and talked about the differences in their roles. More

How To Pimp Your LinkedIn Profile

I like using Twitter. I tolerate Facebook because I have to. And I’m on Google+ because everyone says I should be.

So that has left little time to give love to my profile on LinkedIn, which is, depending on how you look at it, either the biggest niche social network or the smallest of the big, all-encompassing social networks. Some people will tell you that sooner or later, all of our networking, social and professional, will be centrally located on Facebook. More

Red Hat Quietly Joins the OpenStack Effort

Word is that Red Hat refused to sign on to OpenStack when it was announced, because it didn’t like the governance model. Red Hat also has its own cloud management software projects. But the company that once dismissed OpenStack seems to be coming around. Look closely at the OpenStack community and you’ll find quite a few Red Hat engineers, including some that have become core contributors to OpenStack projects. More

How Lanyrd Uses HTML5 for a Great Mobile Web App

When it comes to HTML5 mobile Web app development, a lot of developers are waiting for a blue print of success to follow before jumping into the deep end. Sure, HTML5 mobile Web apps have the potential to change the entire mobile app ecosystem, but right now native apps are a tried and true channel that developers have come to trust. It will take several prominent and successful HTML5 mobile Web apps before the rest of the ecosystem jumps on the bandwagon. More

[Infographic] Google Apps Has Some Big Paying Clients

SaaS backup provider Backupify has recently examined its own customer sample to do some demographic profiling of Google Apps users. The results are somewhat intriguing, as you can see in the infographic below. If you remove .edu domains, Google Apps still has nearly 40% of all of its seats used by businesses with more than 10,000 employees. The company surveyed their customers who have at least 30 users. More

Twitter Upgrades Will Include Analytical Tools

Twitter will unveil a series of new tools in the next few months, including sophisticated analytical tools, according to Erica Anderson, Twitter’s manager for news and journalism.

Anderson said the analytical tools will better help publishers track the reach of tweets sent through the microblogging service. She made her comments Saturday at Columbia University’s social media weekend in New York. More

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