Google Knowledge Graph and Search Rankings

A number one search engine ranking is worth about twice the traffic of a number two search engine ranking and the traffic diminishes quickly from there. This is perhaps a sad commentary on how people use search engines, but be that as it may, it is true.

Anytime there is a Google change or modification, webmasters become concerned that their traffic will drop along with their income or popularity. Often, these concerns are valid. Sometimes, these concerns are selfish and have nothing to do with concern for actual readers.

Consider a low-quality, garbage, ad filled, website. If a Google update figures out how to drop this site out of the rankings, the owner of that site will be negatively impacted. The users doing searches, however, will not. In this case, you can be sure that most people won’t care if the owner complains.

In other scenarios, a Google change actually boosts such content ahead of good content. This is bad for everyone concerned. The owner gets less traffic, users find less helpful information, and Google’s reputation takes a hit.

The latest hubbub is about something called the Google Knowledge Graph. I’ll call it GKG from here on, but I don’t know if that will stick.

Essentially, the GKG actually answers certain kinds of queries rather than pointing you at a website that might do the same. For example, if you search on Albert Einstein, a new area to the left of the traditional search results appears. This is the GKG that everyone is talking about.

As you can see, the information there is rudimentary, but potentially very helpful for certain kinds of searchers. For example, if you are searching to find Mr. Einstein’s birthday, it is right there for you to see. This kind of GKG is potentially most detrimental to encyclopedia types of websites such as Wikipedia. It may also hurt websites like Huffington Post that routinely crank out any page, any time, that might pull in a few page views.

One common example is people searching for something like SuperBowl start time. In the past, the Huffington Post would publish and article with a dozen questions listed at the top in order to garner as many search matches as possible and then use its high-traffic website as all the link juice needed to push its page near the top of the search results. Assuming GKG answers these questions right on the search page, the some of those type of sites might lose traffic.

Fortunately, for many website owners and writers making money online with websites, this addition won’t have much impact on their traffic. These search results only show up for very specific queries, those where specific factual information is at hand from any number of sources. Incidentally, these types of searchers are generally looking to buy anything, so these are low click through advertising opportunities anyway. (They are valuable to big websites that generate a lot of cost per view types of revenue.)

Anyone writing useful detailed information probably will continue to draw just as much traffic since GKG only supplies basic details even on someone as famous as Albert Einstein. You can bet that not much will show up to siphon away traffic on your Colorado Dads website, for example.

For users making basic informational searches GKG will be a welcome addition. For everyone else, except the big web traffic slurpers, there won’t be much impact.

Google Knowledge Graph Big Deal or Not? is a post from Best Hubris. All content exclusively written by Freelance Writing Business of ArcticLlama, LLC

For some reason, the auto-update feature of many software programs fails from time to time. On my computer, the number one culprit is the Thunderbird email client. I don’t think it properly tries to get admin permissions when it should and therefore the update doesn’t work. I think this is particularly true if Firefox (another Mozilla product) is already running. Whatever the recovery mechanism does, doesn’t work any better.

It gets so boggled that when I try and manually install it, from inside the program via the Help menu, or by downloading and re-running the installed from Mozilla, it STILL doesn’t work.

Ninite Review – Online Software Install Service

Enter Ninite. I can go to www.ninite.com and click Thunderbird (and a bunch of other software, if I want) and get an installer. When I run the installer, it checks to see if I already have the software, and if so, it updates the installation. Whatever process Ninite uses, it doesn’t get hung up in the same way as the official Mozilla installer, most likely because it does not bother with whatever version check or recovery file the original erred installation generated. It just goes in and updates all the files, without any checking or asking.

Which, brings me to the other amazing thing about Ninite. The installers are all fully automated. There is no user interaction required. The defaults are all used for a new install, or the update leaves all of your previous settings intact. Obviously, if you want to do some customizing, this isn’t the route for you, but in 90 percent of the cases when I install software, I just click Next, Next, Next, Finish, anyway.

There is one exception. When I install software with toolbars, or that wants to make Bing my default search engine, or whatever, I click NO. Sometimes, developers get tricky and that isn’t enough. Foxit Reader, a PDF reader, pulled a stunt like that a while back where you had to make some very unintuitive clicks to avoid getting some junkware toolbar with your installation. Fortunately, Ninite is run by good guys, for good guys. All toolbars and other extra software, no matter how “valuable” are automatically declined with a Ninite installation.

Ninite Tips and Tricks

At this point, Ninite is already a golden member of the Go-To online service club, but wait– there’s more

Ninite does more than just install one software program. Using the super simple check box interface, you can select one, two or even dozens of software packages to install. The file Ninite delivers will install all of the selected software with a single execution and not a single second of user intervention. This comes in very handy to install lots of software on a new computer or to re-install a ton of programs on a restored machine.

It gets even better. Remember how I said that if you already have the software installed then Ninite will just update it for you? Well that works for multiple software installations as well. So if Thunderbird is updating, but Spotify is new, Ninite knows enough to update Thunderbird and do a new installation of Spotify, again with no user interaction.

Now, here is the best software upgrade method you will ever use. Create a Ninite installer of all your usual software programs. Save that file to your desktop, or other handy spot on your computer. Now, just run that installer every so often to keep ALL of your software up to date, with no hassle and no junk toolbars other other garbage. Any software already running the current version is just skipped. You don’t have to create a new Ninite installer file. The installer automatically connects, downloads and installs the most recent version of software available.

For example, if you update Java via the package from Oracle, you’ll get a vampire process installed on your computer that runs at startup and keeps running 24 hours per day, seven days per week. It’s sole function is to occasionally check for Java updates. Turning it off takes a lot more than you might think thanks to a bug that prevents you from turning off the Java updater unless you manually launch it with admin privileges. The problem is, once you kill it, it will come back with EVERY SINGLE UPDATE. But, if you update via Ninite, they’ll keep that little junkware app from re-installing on your computer.

Obviously, Ninite only works with free or open-source software, but that covers a lot of ground on my machine, ranging from web browsers to email clients, to image viewers to developer tools. Unfortunately, Microsoft’s Windows Live suite isn’t available which means you’ll have to watch out for seaport.exe getting installed and then kill Seaport on your own.

Give Ninite a try, you won’t be sorry.

Easy Software Installation Online is a post from Best Hubris. All content exclusively written by Freelance Writing Business of ArcticLlama, LLC

While Google’s hands may (or may not) be pretty clean in these respects, the company continues to press ahead with initiatives that may be more likely to generate the kind of legitimate, hard evidence, formal complaints that regulators will use to exert control over Google’s stranglehold on the internet search process.

Google Linking Product Usage

One of the things the legal system hates to see is when giant companies use their power to force services or products upon other companies or consumers. This not only limits innovation, it costs other potentially powerful businesses in ways that neither politicians nor judges approve of. Intel, for example, was forced to refine the way it sells computer chips after forcing manufacturers to accept terms that made it impossible to use AMD chips, even if they were better for a specific usage.

Google has made a subtle change to the way they handle results from their dominate search platform. Although the company claims it is making the changes for privacy reasons, there is an exception big enough to drive a truck through that points directly to the beginnings of tying less dominant products to the company’s monopoly product in order to stifle competition.

Users logged into Google will have their searches encrypted by default. On the surface, this sounds perfectly reasonable. However, what this means is that the owners of websites visited by users from searches will not longer be able to see what the exact keywords were that led to the visitor finding the website.

For example, these days, if someone searches for freelance writer and they end up on my freelance writing website at ArcticLlama.com, I get a report that says the user came to my website from Google and that the search that led him to my website was freelance writer. This is useful information for me, because it shows why and how people end up at my website. It can also offer a reason for unexpected things that happen.

My freelance writing business is named ArcticLlama, so when I found a funny joke in the form a Llama Font, I wrote a little post about it and put it up on my website. A month or two later my site got a lot of extra traffic. Since I hadn’t done anything, that I was aware of, out of the ordinary, I wondered why there were more traffic to my website. Had a popular website linked to me? Was there an article I wrote that went viral? Was there a serial killer our there with the same name? Had Brian Nelson just won a million dollars and people were desperately trying to find me?

As it turns out, it had nothing to do with me after all. Upon looking at my traffic logs and Google Analytics, I was able to see that one of the top keywords for users coming from search engines was "llama font". The joke font had gotten popular and people were finding my article about it on Google. It was good information to know so that I didn’t make wrong assumptions.

As a website owner I have no inalienable right to a person’s search keywords per se, and therefore, Google’s decision to encrypt outgoing traffic in such a way that I will no longer see why keywords bring visitors to my website isn’t something that I have any standing to complain about, except Google isn’t doing it properly.

Instead, Google has a very big exception to the rule. If you are a paying advertiser on Google and someone comes to your website from a Google search, then the company gladly hands over the keywords that brought that user to your website.

In other words, If you buy something from Google, then Google will give you something free that no one else can give you and that no one else gets unless they buy from Google AdWords.

Note to Senate committee: If you don’t want to look like you are just chasing after the biggest kid on the block for no reason, start paying attention to these kinds of things. Keywords are valuable SEARCH information and Google just locked them down so that only the people who buy from Google’s ADVERTISING group are allowed to see them. Vertical integration by monopolies is a no no.

Google Abusing Monopoly Power? is a post from Best Hubris. All content exclusively written by Freelance Writing Business of ArcticLlama, LLC

Essentially, I use HubPages as the place where I publish stuff that doesn’t fit on any of the other websites I write for, or occasionally, to post something that links to content I want to provide a little boost to.

In other words, despite a HubPage Author Rank consistently over 90, I am not a big HubPages users, nor would anyone consider me a power publisher there. You can check out my HubPage Profile if you are so inclined.

HubPages Rise in Google Search Rankings?

What is interesting is not how I do or do not use the HubPages platform, but rather what has happened to the traffic there over the last few months. It seems as if HubPages may be recovering in Google’s rankings.

Like most other content mills, HubPages got hit hard by Google’s Panda algorithm update. One of the interesting things about writing for HubPages is  that they allow you to include your Google Analytics information, and thus, get similar analytics to those that you get from your own websites. I noticed a substantial decline in my HubPages traffic when the Google update hit earlier this year. Traffic to my hubs dropped about 50 percent.

Keep in mind that I don’t get a ton of page views at HubPages so this is hardly definitive, but it does match up with what was reported. Lately, however, things have picked back up.

I haven’t published a new hub in a quite a while, so there has been little or no change made by me on my end. Whatever HubPages is doing, however, might be working.

On July 24th, my traffic was at the same reduced level it has been since early this year after the Panda update. On July 25th, traffic increased substantially and has stayed at the new higher level ever since. Traffic has doubled, back to where it was originally. The former high peaks on my analytics graph from March to July are now the low points on the graph since July 25th.

Again, I don’t have enough traffic or hubs to say anything definitive, and it is entirely possible that HubPages overall is still down while my own content has been judged worthy, but the most likely explanation is that whatever HubPages did to “fix” things after the Google search update is working. Either that, or Google changed the algorithm again and HubPages is out of the dog house.

Anyone else have any experience with this? Is there a domain-wide HubPages recovery going on?

Update: Thanks to the reader that pointed out that there was a confirmed update to the Google Panda search algorithm at about the time of my HubPage traffic improvement. Have other HubPages users seen the same improvements in their overall traffic?

Google Search Update or HubPages Improvement ? is a post from Best Hubris. All content exclusively written by Freelance Writing Business of ArcticLlama, LLC

I’m Brian Nelson on Google Plus if you are interested.

Well, actually, there has been a lot of noise in the echo chamber of the techie dome. It turns out that none of my family members, nor any of my no-IT friends have even heard of it. Even less are interested in doing anything with it. Many of them get to see pictures from friends and family on Facebook and keep up with what is going on with those same people via Facebook status updates. Unlike the Scoble’s of the world, they don’t want or need anything beyond that.

What seems to make this all the more interesting is the difference between the techie impulse to be on the leading-edge of technology and the I already have what I need impulse of non-techies.

Facebook versus Google Beginning

There are plenty of technology writers out there comparing the nuances of Facebook to Google Plus to Twitter. There are those who already have crowned one of them the champion and proclaimed that it is only a matter of time. Plenty of pundits have already whipped out their terminology bag and written about the either insurmountable network effects of Facebook or the over-hyped network effects of Facebook.

For those of you without a techno-speak / business babble dictionary, network effects is the concept that by having a lot of people already in place (your "network") you are more likely to start using, or keep using, a particular service or technology.

For example, a grandmother may be on Facebook for no reason other than to see pictures of her grandkids. Nothing Google does will make that grandmother sign up until someone in her network (one of her kids, in this example) starts posting pictures of grandchildren over there.

Which brings us to all of the noise.

Compare Twitter to Facebook, for example. There are millions of stories about your (or someone you know) mom wanting to be your friend on Facebook. Ever hear of a mom who wanted to follow you on Twitter? Despite having millions of users, Twitter is not as mainstream as Facebook despite a huge number of users and a commanding spot in the field of social networking. Google+ is neither Facebook nor Twitter yet. It is simply new. It is not, however mainstream in any way.

Techies love to rush to the next big thing and then pronounce how it will change our lives and everyone will be using it in the future. It rarely works out that way. While most technology types spend plenty of time online, and therefore have plenty of time to try and use numerous services, most non-techies have a more limited interest in what happens on the internet. In fact, the entire value of Facebook comes down to not what it does, can do, or will do, but that it has drawn in the mainstream population as users. That didn’t happen quickly, it took years.

Google+ has a big head start in that most people who use the internet at all have heard of the company and use its search service. But, it is a much smaller part of the population that use its ubiquitous email service and and even smaller part that use any of its other services. For them, "another Facebook" is not something that they need or want, no matter who is behind it.

As of today, that is about all you can say. Anyone predicting the assent or demise of Google+ is missing the boat. If, and only if, Google+ can extend beyond the internet-savvy population will it have any affect on Facebook. For that to happen, it will take time and some non-techies to get on board.

Is Google+ Worth It? is a post from Best Hubris. All content exclusively written by Freelance Writing Business of ArcticLlama, LLC

As an added bonus, I can double check and make sure that the right-half has olives and the left-half has ham, or vice versa, and not just hope that the person who answered the phone in a noisy restaurant got my overly complex order correct.

However, today I ran into a bit of a snag with Pizza Hut’s website. It seems the folks who designed it are from 1990.

Don’t Use Pop-Up Windows on Legitimate Websites

When I finished entering my order, I clicked to finish by entering my credit card information and clicked the button to submit my order.

Nothing happened.

This is a problem because clicking the order button more than once can end up submitting your order more than once.

I’m betting that the guys at Pizza Hut would probably notice that two identical orders for the same address came in seconds apart, but that doesn’t mean that the computer wouldn’t charge my credit card twice anyway. I waited a couple minutes to see if anything happened and then clicked the submit order button again.

Nothing.

Now, I’m frustrated and worried. Did I just order twice or did I not order at all?

Fortunately, Pizza Hut sends confirmation emails when I order online, so I checked my email. Finding no confirmations, I checked my spam folder to be sure and then tried again.

Still nothing.

At this point, I would guess that the average potential online Pizza Hut customer gives up. If the company is fortunate, those people call and place their order, but there are, no doubt, plenty of instances where potential customers are irked enough that they just don’t bother to place their order at all.

On a hunch, I tried one more thing. I went into the settings for my browser and added PizzaHut.com to my exceptions list for the pop-up blocker. When I clicked the order button, a small window popped up saying that my order was processing.

ARE YOU FREAKING KIDDING ME?!?!

Everyone Blocks Pop-Ups

Dear Pizza Hut,

I know that you guys make pizza, but I assume that you have an IT guy on staff somewhere that handles some of that “computer stuff” for you. You either paid someone a lot of money for your website ordering system, or you built it in house with some full-time employees. Either way, someone doesn’t know their head from their butt when it comes to building usable websites. I suggest you get them some training right away, or at the very least, that you remind them that EVERY SINGLE WEB BROWSER THERE IS currently blocks pop-up windows by default.

Signed,

The Customers Who Actually Use Your Website

Seriously.

• Internet Explorer blocks pop-up windows.
• Firefox blocks pop-up windows.
• Google Chrome blocks pop-up windows.
• Opera blocks pop-up windows.
• Safari blocks pop-up windows.

See the pattern?

The worst part is that the pop-up window on Pizza Hut’s website does NOTHING. It’s a dialog box that says it’s processing, only this is an online application and not a desktop application. Apparently, if that window won’t display, the order won’t process.

At least when other companies insist on using pop-up windows, they are smart enough to tell you that you need to allow pop-ups. Pizza Hut’s website just sits there.

Don’t Use Pop-Up Windows

I already “dumb down” my web browsing when placing online orders with non-online companies like Pizza Hut. I make a special effort to use Internet Explorer with no plug-ins or add-ons and not Firefox or Chrome because I have had too many experiences where the clowns who end up designing and implementing big brand websites never bother to test anything other than IE.

In other words, pop-up windows are so out of date, and considered such bad practice that even Internet Explorer blocks all pop-up windows by default. That means that Pizza Hut’s online ordering system is failing for everyone who has a recently purchased computer but who doesn’t know that they have to go in an make a special settings configuration change for Pizza Hut online orders to work.

Note to Pizza Hut: If you are wondering why there are an abnormally high number of users who fill in an order but never complete the transaction, turn on some tracking to show whether or not the pop-up window fails to display. You’ll find that is a major contributor.

Or, just get with the program. No one uses pop-up windows anymore.

What other websites do you use that require pop-ups be enabled to function properly?

Pop-Up Windows in Online Ordering is a post from Best Hubris. All content exclusively written by Freelance Writing Business of ArcticLlama, LLC

This NY Times article shows, yet again, major retailers engaging in link spam by buying numerous paid links in order to boost their position for popular internet search terms. In this case, a list of florists attempted to boost their search engine rankings by buying links to Mother’s Day related keywords. When contacted by the newspaper about the paid links that violate Google’s terms the search engine giant blew it off saying that the paid links had no effect.

In other words, Google will not penalize you, nor take any action against you for intentionally violating its Webmaster Guidelines if it thinks that what you tried to do didn’t work.

If you try to rob a bank, but you don’t get into the vault, the police will just let you go. Does that make ANY sense whatsoever?

It’s just another example of how Google’s reliance on counting links can only continue to produce increasingly bad search results as more and more companies and web publishers deliberately game Google’s search results for profit.

Pop-Quiz: What strategy would be more effective at protecting the long-term value of your company’s most prized asset?

1. Letting people attempt to ruin it without consequence as long as they fail
2. Quickly and harshly penalizing anyone who even tries to mess with it

Can you imagine what would happen if Google actually penalized 1-800 Flowers or FTD during the week before Mother’s Day for violating the rules against link buying? No legitimate company would ever try it again for fear of triggering a severe penalty that could actually harm its bottom line. Instead of company’s playing innocent and blaming SEO consultants, they would aggressively monitor the tactics being used on their behalf. The battle against paid links would be won in a single move, but alas, Google has decided to use the wet noodle strategy instead.

Google seems to grow more naïve by the day when it comes to its search engine rankings. The recent Panda update deflected the uproar about search quality earlier this year, but the march toward every #1 search result being the webpage with the most paid links or the most spambot created links continues unabated.

Google Says Cheating OK? is a post from Best Hubris. All content exclusively written by Freelance Writing Business of ArcticLlama, LLC

Ever since Yahoo’s business strategy was leaked on some PowerPoint slides, people have been expecting this, but I hadn’t heard anything.

Now, you either have to except to move to AVOS or Delicious is shutting down in July 2011.

Check out the blog post here: http://blog.delicious.com/

Or, log out and back into your account to see this screen:

Yahoo Sells Off Delicious is a post from Best Hubris. All content exclusively written by Freelance Writing Business of ArcticLlama, LLC

Various web traffic measuring firms published winners and losers from the original Panda update showing that sites like Suite101.com and HubPages had been hammered while eHow and others had emerged mostly unscathed.

Lately, another round of complaints have come courtesy of those who escaped Panda I but were subsequently slaughtered by Panda II. The second Panda update affects even fewer websites than before, according to Google. The most notable hit this time around was eHow.

What Changed In Google Panda 2 Update?

That eHow parent Demand Media escaped mostly unscathed from the original Panda update was a head-scratcher for many. After all, if the update was to go after the so-called content mills, then shouldn’t the mother of all content mills be hit?

The quick re-update released by Google may have been in response to such criticism. It may have been that no one was more surprised than Google that SEO content generation master eHow slipped away from the original Panda update.

What changed between Panda 1 and Panda 2?

Google, of course, has been only vague about what things were changed to update its all-important search algorithm.

What many people have seized on is Google’s statement that having lots of low quality webpages on your website can hurt the high quality webpages on your website.

That’s a nice theory, but there is a major problem there. Google has admitted that they cannot algorithmically determine what is high or low quality on a single page of text. That means that Google is using other factors to determine, by proxy, what is high or low quality. What are those new factors?

One Google source mentioned that having too many ads, or too convoluted of navigation, things that deliberately put the monetization of a webpage above its usefulness could be a factor. This makes sense if that was how the first wave of Panda was implemented.

Consider that among its many sins, the one thing eHow does not do is complicate its webpages. Sure there are plenty of ads, but the content runs uninterrupted down the center of each page. Likewise, reasonable content based navigation takes prominent places on each page. The top-left placement is links to other content, for example, not an ad (which is below). Likewise, at the end of the articles are more ads, but they are Google’s own text ads, right where the company recommends placing them. The graphics are all normal and natural based on the content. There are no garish, giant graphics or other usability sins. In fact, the quality of content (which cannot be judged algorithmically, yet) aside, there are no real design issues with Demand Studios.

What Google Penalizes In Panda 2 Update

What Google may be penalizing in its second round of updates is likely to be less about what is on the page, which is what they did their best to judge in the first round of Panda, but rather what is not on the page.

Consider a site like eHow. With millions of pages of content, there is one thing that makes website like eHow different than other websites: links.

Don’t get me wrong, eHow has plenty of incoming links, it makes sure of that. And, that, is precisely what Google could target.

Consider that eHow has a dozen articles, or more, about many topics, each with a title that differs by just a few words, and each cranked out quickly and cheaply by freelancers who get a flat-rate fee for each published article. How could such webpages ever build up any incoming links? How could they ever be found in the first place if traffic was not sent there directly by Google?

The front page can’t hold every article published each day for more than a few seconds each. Writers get a flat-rate pay with no additional revenue sharing or other reason to build their own links. And eHow isn’t exactly a site that you brag about writing for.

In other words, the only links going to eHow articles are eHow links. Tons of them. Tons and tons of them.

Google has always counted incoming links from the same place as worth less than links from multiple websites. That makes sense. Internal links are like your mom saying that you’re cool. Sure, she really believes it, but that doesn’t make it a worthwhile assessment.

But sites like eHow can overcome reducing internal link worth with sheer volume. Assume that each “same site” link were valued at 1/10th of a unique site link. In that case you need just 10 of your own links to equal 1 “real link”. Even a 1/100th or 1/1,000th, eHow is one of a handful of sites on the Internet that can send that many links to each and every webpage it has, and it can do it dynamically to ensure that every page gets incoming links of some sort.

With Google’s over-reliance on the title tag to determine any webpage’s relevance, only a handful of link power is needed to push a webpage to the top of the search results when the title is an exact match to the search performed, and eHow has more than enough links for that.

Of course, ignoring internal links can be a bad move. The more times the Washington Post links to its own article, the more likely it is that webpage is a definitive source of information about the topic. The catch is, that the same article is also  likely to have several of incoming links from non-Washington Post websites. That gives Google a way to separate “good” internal links from dime-a-dozen computer generated internal links.

As we’ve seen, giving internal links a lower value cannot overcome massive internal linking. But, what if Google tweaked its algorithm to count external links, judge the relevance, and ONLY THEN count those internal links. That would make those exact match titles that eHow depends on so impotent to overcome “real” content, no matter how many internal links it throws at them.

Another possibility is that Google stopped counting links that are computer generated. Crawl the same page more than once and only count the links that haven’t changed. That would take a lot more power than the above solution, but it would ensure that only “real” links were counted. Of course, that would diminish the power of worthwhile lists of dynamic links like “Most Popular” or “Most Commented”.

Regardless of how it was actually done, what Panda II did was to change how internal links were used in determining the quality or relevance of a webpage. Having done that, eHow’s millions of pages all became members of that sad group of webpage unlinked by anyone but their own website.

Still, SEO experts and technology writers around the web insist on harping on the Panda I update news about low-quality content somewhere else on your site. They might be right, but the way Google is judging low-quality is now very different than it was just a few weeks ago.

How Google Panda 2 Update Hit eHow and Others is a post from Best Hubris. All content exclusively written by Freelance Writing Business of ArcticLlama, LLC

Top 5 Keys To a Successful Android App

1. It can be moved to the SD card.
2. It can be moved to the SD card.
3. It can be moved to the SD card.
4. It can be moved to the SD card.
5. It can be moved to the SD card.

I hope that was clear enough.

You see, when your app MUST be installed on the phone, it has to compete with all of the must-have apps that are already on my phone. After you install the Google Maps app, a weather app, a navigation app, and a handful of others like maybe the Facebook app. When I run low on space, and I will run low on space, which apps do you think get deleted first? It’s not Google Maps, I’ll tell you that much.

Widgets Prevent Moving to SD Card

I know what you’re going to say. You’re going to say that if you have a widget that it can’t be moved to the SD card.

Code your app so that it CAN be moved to the SD card if we don’t use the widget. I don’t need anymore widgets. I have plenty.

If you want your app to get a fair shot, make it as small as possible and make it movable to the SD card.

After spending a month getting Seesmic Desktop, Seesmic Web, and Seesmic App all setup just the way I want them, I am very happy with the software. But, I downloaded TweetDeck to my phone, because if I can move it to the SD card, I would switch without hesitation.

(Unfortunately, TweetDeck will not move to the SD card. However, it clocks in a 1.84 MB for the application and Seesmic is 4.01 MB. Looks like I’ll be moving from Seesmic to TweetDeck unless TweetDeck is missing some function I can’t live without.)

Key To Successful Android App Development is a post from Best Hubris. All content exclusively written by Freelance Writing Business of ArcticLlama, LLC