The big news in ecommerce this week is consumers' growing expectation of free shipping from online retail sites. It's no longer seen as a perk; people are instead planning their shopping around free-shipping promos.

This, of course, is leading to a big game of cat and mouse. Ecommerce sites are setting hurdles for purchases to get free shipping, hoping to make up the $7 or so in costs with increased sales. This in turn frustrates consumers, who look for ways to stock up on items, leading to lower purchase frequency, or who become frustrated and abandon their carts. (I watched my wife fall $0.04 short on free shipping last week and yell at the retailer's website.)

I'm curious to see where this goes in 2010. Does free shipping become de rigueur among mainstream ecommerce sites instead of promotional? Will hurdle levels shift? Or will discount programs alter to accommodate shifting margins?

Steve Rubel: Five Incredibly Useful Things You Can Do Without Ever Leaving Facebook. "I am discovering that it's becoming a one-stop shop for many of my day-to-day activities," he writes.

The post strikes me as a retrograde observation. Not because Steve Rubel is any kind of Luddite, but because the online industry has, for more than 20 years, been trying to create a one-size-fits-all website. It still is. Indeed, it seems every big site aims to recapture the glory days of America Online.

In the 1980s, Compuserve and Prodigy and the like created online dialup communities. The winner in this space, of course, was AOL, which dominated for years. It became a destination for users and businesses alike. Every company in America needed an AOL presence and someone who could code in Rainman.

As the web's ubiquity overtook AOL, websites began cropping up that attempted to reinvent the paradigm by ... emulating AOL. Yahoo and MSN (and many smaller peers) created integrated online presences where features and options abounded and stickiness became the prime measurement.

Then search came to prominence and splintered people's site use. Google's success as an ad platform allowed Google Labs to create dozens of experimental services, all of which served to make Google more of a catch-all, and more like ... the old, closed-wall AOL, just with outbound links.

Which brings us to 2009, where Facebook has captured the exact same mindspace as, yep, AOL. What makes Facebook interesting these days? Basically the same things that made AOL a star a decade earlier.

• private messaging without an external email client: just like AOL!
• live chat: just like AOL!
• integrated games and shopping: just like AOL!
• every company feels a need to be there: just like AOL!

AOL was eventually done in by a lack of openness and charging for options that were free elsewhere. So far, Facebook has avoided those mistakes. It will be interesting to see what social and economic forces drive its future--and whether it ultimately becomes something other than The Next AOL.

Paul Carr published a terrific opinion piece on TechCrunch about the pitfalls of the real-time web. In short: people are spending a lot of time in the land of meta, making note of their presence without actively participating. Or, as he puts it, "LOOK AT ME, LOOKING AT THIS."

It's a great point, and one worth contemplating. Sites like Twitter actively encourage such activity. Indeed, Twitter utilities like Tweepi actually give people extra credit for posting more links and retweets and less original content. Somehow, connectedness doesn't include originality.

At the same time, social media has its logical limits. The old joke, that no one needs to know what you had for lunch, is probably true (unless you're, say, Sam Sifton). Sooner or later, we're going to crave a hierarchy: content creators, the doers and the makers, will need to rise above the redundancies and inanities. But then, we've been saying this about the Internet since the rise of Geocities, and we're still here. Let's see where this goes.

Things Magazine (which, by any measure, has been a fantastic blog for nigh a decade) recently mused on image-curation blogs and the coming demise of the 'thing'. I've read the post several times--Things posts demand as much--and while the concept is compelling, I'm not sure I agree.

Things takes to task the continuous nature of websites that focus on visual presentation. To them, the individual item is losing its individuality: "There is no space for contemplation, just clicking, scrolling and flicking. This leaves the solitary object somewhat adrift, only embodying meaning when it is juxtaposed or collated or slotted into a larger collection."

Certainly, the web lends itself to curation, and good curators stand out. Witness the collections of news links on Drudge; the photography saturation of The Big Picture or the Ai-designed Air America; and the linklog happiness of old-school blogs like waxy.org. It's a presentation style that Things acknowledges works well, even for them.

Where Things gets upset is in the loss of isolation. Because unlike, say, an art gallery, a visual blog or tumblr feed lacks the space constraints that force tight curating and clever presentation. Art on a wall gets both its own white space and a finite amount of visual competition. Visitors know the show has n number of items, and that each one is there for a reason, and that they should spend an accordant amount of time on each piece.

Meanwhile, viewers of a visually oriented blog are disinclined to pause, because there's always more, always another item behind the link, waiting for exploration. And with the invitation to sprawl--and to publish frequently; for frequent posts generate traffic--the curation can be more about inclusion than selection.

Still, I don't think the synopsis that "the 'thing' is in danger of imminent extinction" is accurate. People will always pause to explore and enjoy that which is worth exploring and enjoying. The difficulty lies in quantity and curating. The blogs that get this will continue to thrive, and the items within them will find the audiences they deserve.

"First there was email. That wasn't fast enough, so everyone started texting. That wasn't enough, so now everyone is Twittering. Before you know it everyone will be on the phone."

Having been very skeptical of any usefulness I (or society) could derive from Twitter, I recently began finding real-world benefits.

Lost?
This morning a friend's tweet scrolled across my screen:

So apparently there are 5 W hotels in NYC. The conference is not at the one I went to. In cab.

New Business
I am responding to an RFP that a former employee broadcast to his network on Twitter. I don't keep in touch with this colleague too often, and this was a great way to reconnect and talk about the opportunity.

Advice
The other day I was researching hosting options for a client. I could have spent several hours googling, reading online reviews, or researching options. Instead, I sent a tweet to my friends and received advice back from three trusted sources within moments. Soon after I chose my web host.

G-T-what?
A significant downside to my recent love affair with Twitter is the sharp decline in my GTD/Inbox Zero Zen. I fanatically adhere to my system that shuts off all digital distractions when I need to get work done: I empty my inbox, close extraneous applications, and hit the trusty CTRL-o keyboard shortcut (an applescript that puts Entourage into offline mode, closes iChat, and turns my desktop background to a soothing gray that says, "get your sh*t done now!"). Except recently I started using Tweetdeck, an application designed to push every last bit of digital Twam right under your nose. While trying to do work, and laden with guilt, I secretly leave Tweetdeck running. What if I miss something? (Admission: I responded to a tweet while drafting this post.)

So we'll see where my recent Twitter obsession takes me...and for the time being, I continue to enjoy the strange irony of following the very active streams produced by @hotdogsladies and @gtdguy.

Update: CTRL-o now silences Tweetdeck.

The New York Times reports ecommerce is shrinking this month, the first time since the industry began.

This is distressing news as we head into the holiday season. What can the industry do for 2009?

1. Improve incrementally. Test pages and categories at length. Small victories can lead to substantial gains in an economy looking for good news.

2. Improve correspondence. Talk to customers more often. Survey them, get their feedback, respond to their requests and suggestions. Because....

3. UX is king. Any degree of user experience improvement will be welcome at this time, and the easiest place to try harder is in customer service. Flexible, friendly assistance will create good impessions and loyalty, minimizing acquisition costs. And "minimizing costs" is the magic phrase right now.

Techcrunch posted a great item on online video penetration earlier this week. The numbers are both inspiring and sobering.

Among them:

• YouTube is streaming 5 billion videos per month
• Only 4% of those videos support paid advertising
• Online video is generating ad revenue at one-tenth the CPM of television ads
• So far, only 1.4% of video watched by Americans is online
• The online component is expected to double by 2010

I am pleased to announce the release of Ai's first whitepaper, Free Shipping: Holiday Hit or Headache. As the title suggests, this paper summarizes the research and opinions across the ecommerce industry about free shipping for the 2008 holiday season.

Following the research is an eight-point list of suggested holiday strategies. We cover free shipping, as expected, as well as discounting, loyalty programs and repeat-purchase incentivization.

Since this is the blog, I can tell you I had great fun researching and writing the whitepaper, and that I have more topics in the works. Look for them here and on the Ai news page in the coming months.

Google's announcement of its Chrome web browser is a potential game-changer in the browser industry. But the team feeling the impact will be at the Mozilla Foundation, not Microsoft.

Internet Explorer remains the dominant Web browser and there's little reason to doubt its continued majority presence. Between personal users who are content with a brand they trust (Microsoft, if not directly IE) and companies whose installed bases are running complete Windows environments, the inclination to shift practices is not present. It's why Netscape died quickly and why Firefox, despite all its accolades and encouragements, still has less than 20% market share. The same goes for Safari, whose usage rate closely mirrors Apple's market share as a whole. Most users are content with what they're given, so long as it works.

Instead of another great user migration, Google will see its first million or so downloads coming from the same advocates who swear by Firefox. Mozilla's market share will dip accordingly. Don't be surprised if the browser split, currently 74/19/6 for IE/Safari/FF, spins down to, say, 73/13/5/8 for IE/Safari/FF/Chrome next year. Firefox's gains could slow by a third if Chrome is any good.

But Google is taking the long view with this project. With the continued splintering of access between desktops, phones, gaming systems and other devices, Google is likely working on a fully platform-agnostic browser. Much as Apple has done with Safari on the iPhone, Chrome will be easily inserted into Treos, Playstations, and anything else requiring web support. Over the next few years, Google could develop a strong presence in the market. This is where Microsoft, And Apple, will ultimately have to pay attention.

1. Whats hotnewwebsite.com?
2. Are you on/do you use hotnewwebsite.com?
3. We're building the hotnewwebsite.com for our obscure niche.
4. Whats hotnewwebsite.com?

The tech team at Ai is split into two parts. Roughly two-thirds of our staff are developers, the behind-the-scenes programmers and creators of software and rich applications.

The other third are front-end engineers, handling the HTML, CSS, and scripting languages rendered by browsers. Both teams are tight-knit and collaborative, particularly the front-end team.

In this spirit the smaller crew coined itself a little ways back: they are the Fenders, short for "front-enders" (obviously). They take great pride in their work, compete for compliancy accuracy, and play some mean foosball. Most importantly, they work as a team. With a great name.

By extension, the developers are Benders, for back-end, although the term hasn't made the same impact. The Fenders, on the other hand--or "Fendas," as our Bronx-style lead Fender likes to say--are really making a name for themselves. Two of our clients have started using it regularly.

The next time you hear about web page creation, don't think simply in terms of client-side coding or web design. Think: fender.

So quite recently, the Ruby on Rails open source web framework announced that they would be migrating from the Subversion code repository they had to a new one managed by Git.  Git is a version control system created by Linus Torvalds to manage the Linux kernel.  Linus had several requirements in mind when he made Git, requirements that involved specific sets of features, scaleability, stability etc.

My life has been previously sliced up into distinct, and mostly non-overlapping chapters. I've lived in Toronto, Montreal, San Francisco and New York (and a couple of adjacent suburbs that I won't get into). In each place there have been a number of people that I've known. In time, I've moved on and only marginally keep in touch with friends from the old 'hood. I'm what they used to call a lousy letter-writer.

It's not so bad. I have great memories from each place, and my life is organized into distinct chunks. I've gotten used to the idea of thinking in terms of  "so-in-so from my former life at location X". Frozen in time, these memories provide a nice back drop for my identity.

Now, however, Facebook is screwing it all up. My entire life (in people) since high school has all been sucked into Facebook. Everyone I've ever known is already there. And they're all friending me (or I them). Twenty years of time, compressed into nothing.

When yet another mysterious figure from my past "friends" me, I'm suddenly privy to some very disturbing photographs, where I can see the effects of 10 to 20 years of aging all at once. ("Dude, you have no hair! What happened?") Often they're accompanied by mysterious young short people in these photographs. Short people that weren't there before.

I feel like I've fallen into a time warp, or maybe am watching my life flash before my eyes. Except it's the life that I didn't live, all the paths that I didn't go down, with people that I didn't keep in touch with. They're all back. They're on Facebook, they're my friends and they've escaped from their neatly delimited chapters in the past to invade my present.

How do you find the information you're looking for on the Internet? This, of course is the original reason the Web was created - as a publishing platform for the physicists at CERN.

As the web matured, people constructed websites with tree-like structures, viewable as a site map. As web sites grew in size and complexity, we started referring to a large amount of information organized in a tree structure as a taxonomy. Some people (I'm looking at you, Yahoo) tried to taxonomize the entire web. Here's what we found out about taxonomies: they don't scale. Once they get too big, they start to collapse under their own weight. Historically it was a mark of a professional that they could navigate a large taxonomy, such as the Dewey Decimal System, or Scientific Classification. I don't believe that we'll see many new taxonomies of that scale adopted by the world at large.

So that leads us to search. Search, of course, is the other method we have to find the information we're looking for, especially when all we want to do is get to the information, and we don't give a rat's hiney how it's catalogued. But since the average search length on Google is something like 1.3 words, we need to infer a tremendous amount of information from very little input.

To me, this seems like a tremendously deep opportunity for the developers of websites to shape how information is presented via the establishment of business rules modeled within search. I call this Search Design, and I see it as a critical part of how websites with large volumes of information should be built.

Search design is currently implemented primarily in terms of how information on a website is indexed. This indexing controls the relative importance of information, and the relative importance of different structures inside the information, and is generally implemented by the developers who built the website.

However, at a higher level, search design is something that can be expressed as a series of business rules. Say you have a newspaper site with articles and authors. You could establish the following business rules for search:

• Articles have higher priority than Authors
• Weight of an article should be, in order of priority: Article Title, Article Author, Article Tags, Article Body.
• Weight of an author should be: Author Name, Author Department, Author Tags, Author Bio

It could be a lot more sophisticated than this of course, it could contain relative numeric values for the indexed values, and the business rules surrounding relative importance of information could also be far more sophisticated.

Search scales. It can handle a LOT of information, but as implemented on individual websites, the presentation of it to date has been relatively naive. Search design could grow to be a profession in itself, much in the same way that information architecture developed over the last decade. For many sites it is search, not a taxonomy structured navigation, that is the primary means of navigation for a website.

A fascinating study was released last week that observed people find expensive items more desirable simply because they're more expensive. The same bottle of wine is more appealing to consumers who believe it's worth $90 than others who are told it's worth $10.

Pricing reactions also rely on contextual cues. Panasonic has found midprice items sell better when shown next to pricier models. The "reference prices" around a product significantly affect their perceived value.

These discoveries are not really new. Consider the make-up artist my wife hired for our wedding five years ago. After agreeing on a price, he forgot what they had decided, and quoted a second rate 80% higher. When my wife expressed shock, he quickly reverted to the original price. He explained that many of his clients were upper-class women who wouldn't think he was as good a stylist at the rate we were paying. Raising prices actually appeals to his audience, the cost verifying the talent on offer.

These theories are particularly interesting with regard to online merchants. As noted in the New Yorker article, websites create price transparency, which makes for savvier consumers both online and off, and forces retailers to compete in other ways.

The most intriguing question is raised by reading the two articles above as a single unit. In the first, The Economist argues that prices create emotional response, which could be used to sellers' advantage. In the second, James Surowiecki suggests almost the opposite: that the Internet has eliminated much pricing opacity, creating empowered consumers who understand right-priced items. Observing which one proves more accurate--or whether these theories work in parallel--will help define a generation of sales strategies.

What's the value of talking to someone face to face? Why is it so easy to mis-interpret the emotional tone of an email? How is it that some messages just play better through some media than others?

Marshall McLuhan introduced the idea of the "heat" of a medium as its ability to communicate meaning and value without effort from the observer. The more effort an observer has to expend to derive meaning and value from a medium, the cooler that medium is.

I'd like to incrementally build on that idea, and suggest that media that enables person-to-person communication has varying degrees of presence built into it. If we define a person being physically in the room as "perfectly present", then presence is defined as the degree to which perfect presence is approached by the medium in question.

Presence, and specifically the absence of it, has many more faces than in times past. At one point in history you could be in a room with someone, or you could write a letter. That was about it as far as options were concerned. One was perfectly present, the other was fairly distant. The means of communication were so distinct from each other that they were characterized by significantly different cadences and patterns in their content. This is the "lost art of letter writing" for which some still pine.

Now, however, the two distinct poles have smeared into a continuum across where dozens (and perhaps hundreds) of possible modes of communication lie. Interestingly they all pretty much fall in the space between the letter-writing to in-person gap: they're more "present" than writing a letter, but not as "present" as actually being there.

This brings me to (cue grumpy old fart voice) the web's latest fad : Twitter. Using its web interface, or WAX apps like Twitterific, one is given an opportunity in 140 characters to post whatever they happen to be doing in that minute. You are encouraged to make it activity based ("what are you doing right now?") and to keep it short and sweet. This post is called a "tweet".

Its kind of like being there, with the person. Sort of.

In the weird way that technology does, it has increased the presence of the person on the other end - way past email, past IM, and with more longevity than session-based tools like Skype or video conferencing. It is an ongoing trickle of information about a person, like one would get if they were in the same room with them. Twitter is a presence app, and the tweets are the McLuhan-hot packets that convey that presence.

Unfortunately, presence starts to look like presence is the speed of light: we can get close to the experience of someone actually being there, but never equal or exceed it. There's always some kind of generation loss - our brains can tell the difference between a stream of tweets and the huge amount of information that someone gives off just by being there.

Or maybe its just a bandwidth problem, and someday we'll come up with a medium hot enough to be truly present. Tweet.

Oh yeah:

http://twitter.com/LorenDavie