blog.untrod.com: January 2011

Thursday, January 20, 2011

Facebook Single Sign On

Facebook's JavaScript API is a pleasure to work with. Here is a fully functioning implementation of Facebook single sign on. Couldn't be easier.

<html>
 <head>
  <script src="https://www.google.com/jsapi"></script> 
  <script>google.load('jquery', '1.4.4');</script> 
 </head>
 <body>
  <script type="text/javascript">
   function showLogin(){ $("#logout").hide(); $("#login").show(); }
   function showLogout() { $("#logout").show(); $("#login").hide(); }
   $(document).ready(
    function(){
     $('#logout').click(function(){
      FB.logout(function(response) {
        alert("Logged Out");
      });
     });
     FB.getLoginStatus(function(response) {
       if (response.session) { showLogout(); } else { showLogin(); }
     });
    });
  </script>
  <div id="fb-root"></div>
  <script src="http://connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js"></script>
  <script>
   //Your facebook app key replaces the ##s below
    FB.init({appId: '###############', status: true, cookie: true, xfbml: true});
    FB.Event.subscribe('auth.sessionChange', function(response) {
      if (response.session) {
        FB.api('/me', function(response) {
       alert(response.name);
     });
     showLogout();
      } else { showLogin(); }
    });
  </script>
  <div id="login"><fb:login-button></fb:login-button></div>
  <div id="logout" style="cursor: pointer; border-style: solid; display: none; border-color: black; color: white; background-color: blue; width: 100px;">Logout</div>
 </body>
</html>

Thursday, January 13, 2011

Self-hosting is the future? I don't think so.

Doc Searls has an interesting post called "What if Twitter Fails?". While he makes some salient and interesting points, he also says:

"Self-hosting is the future we’ll have after commercial hosting services like Flickr start to fail. Fortunately, self-hosting is what the Web was meant to support in the first place, and the architecture is still there."

Come again? Everything, everything, everything about the web so far says that isn't true. Back in, say, 1995, it was painful to host your own website. Buy a domain, find a hosting company, change dns records, create your html, ftp and upload. But there were few other options, so self-host we did. And now, 12 years later...it's just as painful to self-host. But there are tons of other options! Wordpress, tumblr, flavors.me, blogger, etc, etc. There are literally thousands of SaaS services to get your website up and running in a few minutes, with no technical knowledge needed.

I agree with Doc that the architecture is still there, and it's still just as difficult to use today as it was 15 years ago. With all the revolutionary changes that have taken place online (and seemingly everyone carrying the battle cry of "To the cloud!") why on earth would self-hosting be the future of the web?

Thursday, January 6, 2011

Opportunities for Online Giving or, Watching the World Move Online

I put together this chart, showing how dollars in different industries (advertising, retail, philanthropy) have moved online over the last eight years. You can find the source data as a Google Docs spreadsheet.

There are a few interesting things going on. First, I was surprised to see that online charitable giving had surpassed online retail as a percentage of total activity in that sector. With all the hype about e-commerce over the last decade, I was not expecting that such a small percentage of retail activity actually occurs online. Now, faced with the data, I think I know why. There is a decided advantage to shopping offline: you can handle the goods in person, and it's a more immediate experience. There are also some things (like food) which will simply never move online en masse.

Online giving and advertising, on the other hand, don't have a corresponding physical component and can move online more easily. Online advertising, in particular, is a very pure form of capitalism. It's highly measurable and directly generates ROI. If it doesn't work, it gets cut immediately. In fact, online advertising is so efficient that I would posit that the allocation of advertising dollars to the online space is probably close to optimal. In the mean time, giving significantly trails advertising as a percentage of the whole that takes place online, but the curve itself is nearly identical to advertising.

I work in the non-profit space, and I know anecdotally that some organizations punch above their weight with their online fundraising efforts while others barely do anything. I strongly suspect the 80/20 rule applies to the online giving line - 20% of organizations are responsible for 80% of the dollars raised online.

All of this tells me there is a great opportunity here for non-profits. To recap:
- Online fundraising parallels online advertising
- Online advertising is extremely efficient and probably deployed at a near-optimal level
- Online advertising is expected to continue to grow along a similar curve in coming years
- This means that there is a tremendous opportunity for savvy non-profits to capture a disproportionately large number of online charitable dollars.