Stefan's Naturally Aspirated Blog

A recently disclosed data breach for some 500,000 Google+ users seems to have been the last straw for Google’s faltering social network. I wrote about Google Plus’s launch back in 2011 under the title ’Google takes aim at Facebook again - 3rd time lucky?’. And it’s incredible to see how much the interface has changed in the intervening years.

Truth is that much like Apple, Google has always been off the pace when it comes to social networks, and both of ...

Facebook dropped roughly $123 billion in share value / market capitalisation after disappointing earnings for Q2 this year were revealed. Much of this has to do with the new GDPR regulations - which restrict what Facebook can legitimately do for advertisers and sponsors, but also there seems to be a noticeable backlash following revelations that Facebook sold on customers’ privacy details and contact lists to various suspect parties - including groups of supposed Russian Hacker types.

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Kanye West’s latest opus, name-changed for the 5th time to ’The Life of Pablo’ (after Picasso) was engineered to help sign up more subscribers to Jay Z’s Tidal streaming service. This comes hot on the heals of exclusive releases by Rihanna and Beyoncé which featured for advance screening - solely on that platform. In order to drum up even more support, Kanye announced that the album would never be made available for sale / download on any other platform - that ...

Pretty much since the start of this year, perhaps earlier even, I have noticed that Facebook on Desktop seems to freeze up and crash the browser after about 5 or so minute of regular scrolling and perusing. I’m not doing anything unusual here, and have been a Facebook user from the earliest days with plenty of experience on how things should work - I can’t quite recall it ever performing as poorly as this. First I thought it was my preferred browser - Chrome, but I’ve tried ...

Regardless of the many predictions of Facebook’s imminent demise, I still use the site on a daily basis to keep tabs on friends and family. The beauty of the desktop version is that everything is seamless and together (well almost everything). Conversations usually evolve around a recently posted photograph (often via Instagram), event or video, or shared topical / amusing social media. The main thrust being that Facebook on the desktop holds together the context and the conversations. ...

In my definition, the essence of Retail Social Commerce is not just the ability for customers to interact with ecommerce catalogue items and convey their likes and recommendations - it is the ability for other customers to correlate those recommendations with their own personal preferences.

The above illustration touches on the 4 key areas in my opinion, and I will reference examples of each here below:

LIKES - largely popularised by Facebook, these are now pretty much ...

Doing business online is much bigger than any one website. You have to be where the people are, integrate your business hub with all the key sites out there, and make sure that everything integrates effectively with your back-end systems that you use day in and day out to get things done within your company.

Affino 7 integrates with over 100 systems, and of those 60 are out-of-the box integrations that you can simply enter your settings and connect to Affino. Affino also has a great ...

An enormous amount of input goes into every major Affino version release, and Affino 7 is no exception. Front and centre to all our considerations are our customers’ ongoing requirements and feature requests - Affino almost wholly evolves along collaborative lines between the Comrz Team and every single one of Affino’s users.

It’s frequently a tough job consolidating all the different diverse requirements into a single streamlined system, but this is what we do every ...

I’m an avid follower of the world’s leading music festivals - specifically how they are broadcast and ’packaged’ for the digital audience. I’ve kept tabs on the BBC’s and YouTube’s coverage of music festivals over the last few years, and reported back on how each has evolved their offering - benchmark events have been Glastonbury in the UK and Coachella in the US. In this Olympic year, there is no Glastonbury, so we will use BBC 1’s Big Weekend ...

Last year I blogged about catching the year’s first big music festival courtesy of YouTube - who broadcast live form the 5 stages over the 3 days. I raved about the really clever interface - how they included hashtags into their live updates - and how slickly the whole thing worked, including the uninterrupted streaming broadcast itself.

This year the layout of the interface was even better - with the current and upcoming bands listed in the centre, and the updates off to the ...