10 Qualitative Tools to Improve Your Website

If you run or manage a website, you probably have experience with a web analytics package (like Google Analytics). These tools are great at answering the quantitative questions, the “what?” questions that every good webmaster should ask themselves. Questions like, “How many visitors did I have last month?”, “How many conversions?” and so on. However, they aren’t so great at giving you qualitative insight, the “why?” questions that are just as important. Questions like, “Why is my bounce rate so high?” and “Why are conversion rates so low?”.
The list below represents a compilation of some of the best qualitative tools out there, all of which you can start using to improve your website today. These tools will help you understand how users interact with your site and, most importantly, why they act the way that they do.

Qualitative Tools to Improve Your Website

This list is certainly not comprehensive, nor is it meant to be. However, it is meant to give you a sampling of the wide variety of qualitative tools available. So what are you waiting for? Pick one from the list that you haven’t used before and give it a try, I guarantee you’ll discover a new way to improve your site.

01. Concept Feedback

The Rundown: Concept Feedback is a brand new community for designers, developers and marketers. Members can upload a concept (a website, logo, advertisement and more), specify an objective and start receiving constructive, actionable feedback from other members. A system of reputation points keeps users honest and helps prioritize advice. Sensitive concepts may also be posted privately for client or co-worker review. Best of all, it’s free!
The Benefit: Getting a second opinion on your work is never a bad idea. Concept Feedback hosts an active community with a lot of talented members willing to give you quality advice. Oftentimes, the reviews spark new ideas and provide a unique perspective that can help you improve your projects. The interface is easy to use and rather addicting!
Official Link

02. Userfly

The Rundown: Userfly gives you the ability to watch videos of real users on your website. By adding a single line of JavaScript to your code, you can see every mouse movement and click your visitors make. The interface is easy to use and well designed. You can try it for free, but you’re limited to 10 captures per month. Basic plans start at $10 per month.
The Benefit: While watching videos of your users may seem a little creepy at first, it can provide you with insights that you would never have come up with using a quantitative analytics package. The first time I used it, I noticed a user get stuck on a page with a bad link. His mouse wandered back and forth until he finally abandoned ship. Needless to say, I quickly corrected the issue.
Official Link

03. Five Second Test

The Rundown: Just like it sounds, Five Second Test is a “simple online usability test that helps you identify the most prominent elements of your user interface”, according to Angry Monkeys, the founding company out of Melbourne, Australia. Once you’ve posted a visual, random visitors can take part in a test where they are asked to write down the top 5 things they remember from your piece after only 5 seconds.
The Benefit: The concept is great, and the tool is easy to use and very simple. If you get enough people to take your test, you start to see some interesting patterns, including what people noticed most, and perhaps more importantly, what they didn’t. The only problem is, after 45 days, I only had 12 results. This could stem from a lack of users, or an overabundance of concepts. So, if you do try this tool (and I recommend it – it’s free!), make sure to take advantage of the invite tools to give your concept more visibility and better results.
Official Link

04. Usabilla

The Rundown: Usabilla is a nice tool that allows you to collect feedback on wireframes, mockups or webpages. Participants point and click to share their opinion using markers and notes. Usabilla provides visual feedback as well as the reports and statistics to analyze the results. In their own words, “Usabilla provides you insight in the attitude and opinion of your users.” Although it is currently in beta, it’s also free, so get it while it’s hot!
The Benefit: The great thing about Usabilla is that it provides visual feedback. The tool is easy to use and administer, plus you can customize the questions asked based on your needs. One drawback is that, like Five Second Test, you are required to invite your own participants to provide feedback. If your network is relatively small, you may not be able to come up with the results you’re looking for.
Official Link

05. Loop11

The Rundown: Loop11 is an online tool for gathering unmoderated usability testing. In a nutshell, the system is an overlay on your website which allows you to present specific tasks on your website to participants. For example, you might say, “Find the contact information on this website”. The user can then navigate the site and either select “Task Completed” or “Abandoned”. Reporting tools give you the ability to see statistics like task completion rate, time per task and most common navigation path. Sound valuable? It sure is, but it also comes with a $350 price tag. Fortunately you can try it once for free.
The Benefit: Loop11 provides the context that both Userfly and ClickTale lack, however, by its nature, participants must be invited and are not live visitors. Despite that, Loop11 helps you understand typical behavior on your website and is great for improving navigation and conversion paths. If nothing else, give the free trial a spin and see what you can discover about your site and how people use it. What you find may surprise you.
Official Link

06. UserTesting.com

The Rundown: Like Loop11, UserTesting.com provides unmoderated usability testing, except this time they provide the users. The premise is simple, you provide the demographic you’re looking for, the number of users you would like and what tasks you want them to perform on your site. When the testing is over, you can access videos (usually 15-20 minutes each -watch a sample) that allow you to watch and listen to the participants, as well as read a written summary describing the problems they found. Prices start at $29 for a single user.
The Benefit: UserTesting.com is great because it makes live user testing affordable. I recently used it on one of my websites and came across some interesting insights that I would have otherwise overlooked. It’s not fully disclosed as to how they find their participants, but fortunately they provide a one-year money-back guarantee.
Official Link

07. Crazy Egg

The Rundown: CrazyEgg is an advanced heatmap tool. For those of you unfamiliar with heatmaps, they provide a visual representation of where your visitors are clicking. Over time, you start to see how your users are interacting with your site. With CrazyEgg, you add some JavaScript to your website and setup a test for a specific page on your website for a defined amount of time. Once the test is complete, you can view the page in a variety of formats, including overlay, confetti, list and heatmap (see a demo). Basic plan starts at $9/month which includes 10,000 visits across 10 different pages.
The Benefit: Unlike the heatmap offered in Google Analytics, CrazyEgg shows each and every unique click on your page. It also allows you to segment clicks by traffic source, giving you some powerful information. The best thing about a visual is that you can come to an educated conclusion quickly, without wading through data and numbers. I was able to make some minor, but important, changes to my homepage after just a few minutes in CrazyEgg. So whether you use CrazyEgg or not, you should give heatmaps a chance.
Official Link

08. Kampyle

The Rundown: Kampyle is a small tab that sits at the edge of each web page, allowing you to collect, analyze and manage your website visitor’s feedback. The feedback form is easy to use and its simple structure lets you organize feedback in to various categories, like bugs, suggestions, compliments and site content. Real time reports let you analyze the data and a built-in response system makes it easy to respond to customer inquiries. The free package includes 1 form and 50 items. Basic packages start at $99 per month.
The Benefit: Whether you are interested in actively administering usability tests or not, Kampyle is a passive tool that gives your users the opportunity to provide feedback on each page of your site. With Kampyle’s reporting tools, you are able to get feedback 24/7 from real visitors. Having it present on every page gives you a better understanding of your website, it’s bright spots, as well as needed improvements. Unfortunately, for those of you with a pretty website, the large orange tab might not be a welcome addition.
Official Link

09. ClickTale

The Rundown: Like Userfly, ClickTale gives you the ability to watch videos of real users on your website. However, ClickTale also provides a number of extra features, including heat maps, link analytics and form analytics. The reporting tools are impressive, and go in to great detail, sometimes more than you need. While they do offer a free plan, paid subscriptions start at $99 per month.
The Benefit: One drawback, and common complaint about both Userfly and ClickTale, is the lack of context (meaning audio or user intent). While it would be ideal to understand why a user chose the path that they did, something is better than nothing. In the end, ClickTale provides a lot of bang for the buck if you can take advantage of the data it provides.
Official Link

10. Google Website Optimizer

The Rundown: Google Website Optimizer (GWO) is a free website testing and optimization tool that lets you test and optimize site content and design. Upload a few variations of a web page and GWO will serve them in an alternating pattern to your visitors. Behind the scenes, GWO’s reporting tools are monitoring which combinations lead to the highest conversion rates. At the end of the test, you’ll have a definitive result, allowing you to continually optimize your designs and improve site performance.
The Benefit: While GWO may not be a purely qualitative tool, it should be one of the most important in your toolbelt. Using some of the tools listed above, you can come to better conclusions about which designs and layouts should work best, but GWO provides a real-life litmus test. GWO takes the guesswork out of design and gives you a virtual laboratory to test your assumptions.
Official Link

Resource Link worth Mentioning

• Main Post Image Source: VladStudio

The History and Evolution of Social Media

Social media has become an integral part of modern society.
There are general social networks with user bases larger than the population of most countries.
There are niche sites for virtually every special interest out there.
There are sites to share photos, videos, status updates, sites for meeting new people and sites to connect with old friends.
It seems there are social solutions to just about every need.
In this article, we’ll review the history and evolution of social media from its humble beginnings to the present day.

Precursors to Social Media

BBSs (Bulletin Board Systems)

The first BBSs came online in the late 70s. Originally these were primarily hosted on personal computers and users had to dial in through the host computer’s modem. Only one person at a time could gain access to the BBS.

While there were legitimate BBSs, most were at least somewhat involved in illicit, illegal, or other shady practices. Adult material, virus code, information and instructions for hacking and phreaking (phone hacking), and materials like The Anarchist’s Cookbook were commonly hosted on BBSs.
But BBSs were the first type of sites that allowed users to log on and interact with one another, albeit in a much slower fashion than we currently do.

Online Services

After BBSs came “online services” like CompuServe and Prodigy. These were the first real “corporate” attempts at accessing the Internet.
CompuServe was the first company to incorporate a chat program into their service. Prodigy was responsible for making online service more affordable (CompuServe had been prohibitively expensive for many, with charges of $6/hour plug long-distance fees that often made the service run $30/hour or more).
AOL started as an online service too and made great strides at making the Internet more universally accessible in the U.S.

IRC, ICQ, and Instant Messaging

IRC (Internet Relay Chat) was developed in 1988 and used for file sharing, link sharing and otherwise keeping in touch.
It was really the father of instant messaging as we know it today. IRC was mostly UNIX-based though, limiting access to most people.
ICQ was developed in the mid-90s and was the first instant messaging program for PCs. It was at least partly responsible for the adoption of avatars, abbreviations (LOL, BRB) and emoticons. Other IM clients soon followed.

Dating Sites

Dating sites are sometimes considered the first social networks. The first dating sites started cropping up almost as soon as people started going online. They allowed users to create profiles (usually with photos) and to contact other users.

Early Social Networks

While many people consider dating sites or sites like Classmates.com to be the first social networks, they don’t really fit the definition.
Dating sites rarely allowed you to keep a friends list, neither did Classmates in its early years (and profiles were severely limited). The following sites were the first true social networks.

Six Degrees

Six Degrees was launched in 1997 and was the first modern social network. It allowed users to create a profile and to become friends with other users.
While the site is no longer functional, at one time it was actually quite popular and had around a million members at its peak.
In 2000 it was purchased for $125 million and in 2001 it was shut down.

AsianAvenue, MiGente, BlackPlanet

These sites cropped up in the years following SixDegrees’ launch, between 1997 and 2001.
They allowed users to create profiles and add friends (generally without needing approval to add people). Users could create professional, personal and dating profiles on these sites.
While they were some of the earliest social networks, there were few innovations among them.

LiveJournal

LiveJournal started in 1999 and took a different approach to social networking.
While Six Degrees allowed users to create a basically-static profile, LiveJournal was a social network built around constantly-updated blogs.
LiveJournal encouraged its users to follow one another and to create groups and otherwise interact. It was really the precursor to the live updates we see in social networks currently.

Major Advances in Social Networking

The early 2000s brought some huge developments in social networking and social media.

Friendster

Friendster was really the first modern, general social network. Founded in 2002, Friendster is still a very active social network, with over 90 million registered users and 60+ million unique visitors each month. Most of Friendster’s traffic comes from Asia (90% of it).

Friendster operated by allowing people to discover their friends and then friends-of-friends, and so on to expand their networks.
Its goal was to be a safer place to meet new people than in real-life, as well as being faster. Friendster was, in part, a new kind of dating site.
Instead of matching complete strangers based on shared interests, it operated on the assumption that people with shared friends and acquaintances would have a better chance than those who had no shared connection.
Friendster was most popular with three different groups: gay men, attendess of Burning Man and bloggers.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn was founded in 2003 and was one of the first mainstream social networks devoted to business.
Originally, LinkedIn allowed users to post a profile (basically a resume) and to interact through private messaging. They also work on the assumption that you should personally know the people you connect with on the site.

Gradually, other features have been added, including groups, question and answer forums, and advanced profile features, including real-time updates.

MySpace

MySpace was founded in 2003 and by 2006 had grown to be the most popular social network in the world.
MySpace differentiated itself from competitors by allowing users to completely customize the look of their profiles. Users could also post music from artists on MySpace and embed videos from other sites on their profiles.

Originally MySpace allowed communication through private messages, public comments posted to a user’s profile, and bulletins sent out to all of your friends. Blogs are also a big part of MySpace profiles, with each member automatically getting a blog.
In 2006 MySpace introduced MySpace IM, an instant messaging client that lets users chat with their friends.
Other recent additions to MySpace’s functionality include the addition of real-time status updates and a news feed showing friend activity.

Facebook

While Facebook started out as a Harvard-only social network back in 2004, it quickly expanded to other schools, then to high schools, businesses and eventually everyone (by 2006).
In 2008 Facebook became the most popular social networking site, surpassing MySpace, and continues to grow.

Facebook doesn’t allow the same kind of customization that MySpace does. Facebook does, however, allow users to post photos, videos and otherwise customize their profile content, if not the design.
Facebook has added a number of features over the past few years, including instant messaging/chat and apps (and their developer platform).
Users have a few different methods of communicating with one another. Private messaging is available as well as writing on another user’s wall. Wall posts are visible to that user’s friends, but usually not to the general public. Users can easily change their privacy settings to allow different users to see different parts of their profile, based on any existing relationships (the basic privacy settings are “only friends”, “friends of friends”, and “everyone”).
Users can post notes that are visible to all of their friends. Users can also comment on or, more recently, “like” the posts of their friends, and conversations often occur within the comment sections among multiple people.

Niche Social Networks

As social networking grew, niche sites began cropping up for specific interest groups. There are now social networks for virtually every hobby, passion, interest, industry and group that you could imagine.

Ning

Ning is a platform for creating niche social networks. Networks are hosted by Ning but can take on their own personality and can even pay to have their own branding instead of the Ning brand.
New users can either create social networks for any niche they choose or join any of more than 1.5 million existing networks.

Ning was the first widely-used social networking platform. It’s biggest advantage in the market was that it made it incredibly simple for even non-technical users to set up their own social network.
While most other social networking platforms required coding and programming knowledge, Ning required neither of those.

Company-Sponsored Social Networks

A number of niche social networking sites have been developed by corporations in all sorts of industries.
Authonomy is one example; it’s a writers’ network hosted by the UK division of Harper Collins that has attracted thousands of hopeful writers from all over the globe, but plenty of other companies have created their own networks.
While some of these have active groups, many do not, and end up being shut down due to a lack of activity.

Media Sharing

Social media isn’t just limited to social networking sites. Sharing photos, videos, and other multimedia content is also a popular social media activity.

Photobucket

Photobucket was the first major photo sharing site, launched in 2003.
Photobucket allows users to share photos publically or in password-protected albums. They allow users 500MB of storage (lowered from 1GB in August of 2009).
Pro accounts get 10GB of storage (lowered from 100GB to 25GB in July of ‘08 and then to 10GB in August of ‘09). Photobucket also hosts video content.

In 2007, Photobucket was purchased by Fox Interactive Media (a News Corporation subsidiary). It was rumored to have sold for as much as $250 million, though terms of the sale were never disclosed.

Flickr

Flickr has become a social network in its own right in recent years. They claim to host more than 3.6 billion images as of June 2009.
Flickr also has groups, photo pools, and allows users to create profiles, add friends, and organize images and video into photo sets/albums.

One of Flickr’s major advantages is that they allow users to license their photos through Creative Commons, as well as retaining all copyrights.
Flickr has also recently launched a collection called “The Commons”, which features archived photos and images from a variety of museums and other institutions under a “no known restrictions” license (basically meaning the photos are believed to be in the public domain).

YouTube

YouTube was the first major video hosting and sharing site, launched in 2005.
Users can upload videos up to 10 minutes long and share them through YouTube or by embedding them on other websites (social networks, blogs, forums, etc.).
YouTube now allows users to upload HD videos and recently launched a service to provide TV shows and movies under license from their copyright holders.

YouTube’s major social features include ratings, comments, and the option to subscribe to the channels of a user’s favorite video creators.

Revver

Revver took a slightly different approach to video hosting and sharing.
While YouTube, Metacafe, and most other video sharing sites let you post videos for free and didn’t pay content creators for any advertising revenues their videos generated, Revver has been sharing revenue from the start.
Revver splits the revenue generated by a video 50/50 with that video’s creator. Some other video sharing and hosting sites are moving in the direction of revenue sharing, but Revver still remains the primary one that does it with all content on the site.

Social News and Bookmarking

Sharing photos and videos wasn’t isn’t the only kind of information sharing happening with social media.
The advent of social news and bookmarking sites in the mid-2000’s brought about a whole new way of see what’s going on in the world and discovering interesting content.
News became more widely available thanks to sites like Delicious, Digg, and Reddit, who allowed users to share any news or other content they found interesting with a much wider audience than they might have otherwise had.

Delicious

Delicious (aka, Del.icio.us) is a social bookmarking site founded in 2003. It allows its users to bookmark any content they find online, tag that content, and then share it with other users.
Users can search for bookmarks or browse for them via tags. Delicious also allows users to view the most popular content among other users, as well as up-and-coming content, not unlike most social news sites.

Digg

Digg was founded in 2004 by Kevin Rose, Ron Gorodetzky, Jay Adelson, and Owen Byrne.
Digg users can share links to anything online and other users can vote that content up (”dig”) or down (”bury”). Users can also comment on content posted by others and keep a friends list.
Digg has undergone a lot of controversy in its day, including criticism about the power the top 100 Digg users have over what becomes popular on the site.
The “Digg Effect”—when content makes it to the front page, thereby sending a huge influx of traffic to that site, often overloading its servers—is also well-known and often frustrating to those unprepared for the sudden popularity.

Reddit

Reddit is another social news site founded in 2005. Reddit operates in a similar fashion to Digg, allowing users to vote content up or down.
Users can view popular items, new items, and “controversial” items (presumably those items that have received a lot of both up and down votes). Reddit, like Digg, also allows users to comment on posted items.

Real Time Updates

Real-time updates have become the new norm in social media. With the advent of Twitter in 2006, status updates have become the new norm in social networking. Virtually all major social networks now allow real-time updates.

Twitter

Twitter was founded in 2006 and gained a lot of popularity during the 2007 SxSW (South by Southwest) conference.
Tweets trippled during the conference, from 20k per day to 60k. Twitter has developed a cult-like following and has a number of famous users (Ashton Kutcher, Demi Moore, Soleil Moon Frye, MC Hammer, Oprah, Martha Stewart, and many, many more).

Twitter has also spawned a number of third-party sites and apps, turning it into more of a platform than a single service. There are Twitter clients for updating and managing followers; services that track Twitter trends; and services for posting photos and videos directly to Twitter.

Other Services Adopt Real-Time Updates

As mentioned before, virtually every social networking site now allows for status updates. Facebook has incorporated status updates into their interface for years. MySpace adopted the practice more than a year ago. And most recently, LinkedIn has started to allow users to update their status.
Real-time updates allow users to stay connected to their friends and family on a constant basis and often improve relationships between people.
When you constantly know what’s going on with friends and family, it’s easier to discover shared interests, activities, and other information that might never have come out in real-life conversations. This can lead to stronger relationships offline.

The iPhone’s Role in Real-Time Updates

The iPhone can be largely credited for the rise in popularity of real-time updates. Prior to the iPhone’s launch, mobile browsers were clunky at best, and virtually unusable at worst.
But the iPhone made it easy and even fun to browse the web from a mobile device. Add apps for virtually every social network to the mix and it became possible for users to update anytime, from anywhere.
Other phones have followed suit and there are now mutliple devices available that let users easily update their status on the go (including posting photos and video updates).
The iPhone has taken such a huge role in social media that there are now social networks only available on the iPhone. iRovr is a social networking app specifically for the iPhone/iPod Touch.
It allows users to post photos, updates, links (including to YouTube videos), create polls, subscribe to RSS feeds and more. It was launched in 2007 and is still going strong two years later.

Lifestreaming and Lifecasting

Real-time updates have led to an increase in the number of people who are now lifecasting or lifestreaming virtually everything they do. While some opt to lifestream by aggregating their online activities in a single place (such as with FriendFeed).

Ustream.tv

Ustream was founded in the summer of 2006 and has become the streaming video host of choice for celebrities like Ashton Kutcher and Soleil Moon Frye.
While most Ustream users only go live occasionally, there are channels that are live around the clock (mostly security cameras, animal cameras, traffic cameras, and other stationary feeds).
Ustream allows viewers to post comments and ask questions directly to the feed host during live broadcasts, and this interactivity often engages users to a greater extent than other video sites where videos are posted after they’ve been filmed instead of being streamed live.

Justin.tv

Justin.tv is a streaming video host founded in October 2006 that lets lifecasters and live show creators to broadcast to hundreds or thousands of Internet users.
iJustine is probably Justin.tv’s most public user, lifecasting practically her entire life on the site at one time (she appears to be lifecasting a bit less recently, though she’s still very active on the site).
There are more than 400,000 channels on Justin.tv, and they get more than 41 million unique visitors each month.

FriendFeed

FriendFeed, which launched in 2007 and was recently purchased by Facebook, allows you to integrate most of your online activities in one place (Twitter, RSS feeds, and Flickr, among others).
It’s also a social network in its own right, with the ability to create friends lists, post updates, and otherwise communicate.

Other Lifestreaming Sites

There are a number of other lifestreaming sites out there that people are using. Most can be integrated into your blog or website to show your visitors all of your activities around the web.
There are even some dedicated blog plugins for lifestreaming. WP Lifestream is one such plugin, specifically for WordPress. It lets you integrate your profiles from Facebook, Flickr, Last.fm and Wordie right out of the box, and you can add additional modules for integrating more feeds.
Profilactic.com is another lifestreaming application that lets you integrate feeds from 190 different websites, including Blippr, Delicious, Digg, deviantART, Dopplr, Facebook, Flickr, Last.fm, LiveJournal, MySpace, Pandora, Revver, StumbleUpon, Twitter, Tumblr, and more. Sweetcron is a similar app, though it’s opensource and you host it on your own servers.

Social Everything

It seems that nowadays there are social and user-generated sites for just about every activity you can imagine. There are social shopping sites. Social financial planning sites. Sites for getting book, movie, app, and other reviews. Sites to share your goals and meet like-minded people. Sites to plan your travels and share them with others. And sites to help you make decisions on just about anything.

Social media has become a huge part of the lives of millions of people worldwide. Whether it’s something as simple as looking up reviews of movies from real, live people (instead of professional movie reviewers) or getting advice on major life decisions, there are social sites out there to provide you with the information you seek.
Even on general-purpose social networks and social media sites like Twitter there are thousands of ways to get input on just about anything.
Instead of using Google the next time you have a question about something, try asking on Twitter. A lot of the time you get better information from the crowd there in less time than pouring over pages of search results.

Social Media Concerns and Criticism

As social media has grown in popularity and become mainstream, it has been faced with growing controversy and criticism.
The main criticisms seem to fall along a few lines: Social media can be used by stalkers; Social media can be used by child predators; and, Social media sites open up privacy and security concerns.
While there is only so much social media sites can do about the first two, there is a growing trend among many sites to bolster the privacy policies and make users feel more secure.

Social Media Used by Stalkers

Facebook and other social media sites have come under attack for making it easier for stalkers to track their victims or even to find new ones. This kind of accusation is not entirely unfounded.
Many social media users don’t take advantage of privacy settings and leave their entire profiles public. While this is often a good idea for professional profiles where you want to make connections with people you don’t necessarily know, personal profiles can benefit from hiding some information from public display.
Social networks make these privacy settings available to users to help prevent stalkers and predators from being able to see their updates.
But they can’t force users to use them, so in the end much of the responsibility falls to the individual users, not the networks themselves.

Social Media Used by Child Predators

MySpace is the most publically attacked social networks accused of being a haven for child molesters and pornographers, but the site, and other social networks, have made great strides in protecting the identities and information of minors using their sites.
Again, this is one of those situations where much of the problem came from users not making their profiles private.
MySpace took a major step to prevent predators from friending underage teens by requiring friend requesters to know the email address or another personal identifier in order to send a friend request to a minor.
They also require the profiles of teens under the age of 16 to be private, not allowing non-friend users to view them. Other sites have taken similar steps.

Privacy Concerns

Facebook recently came under attack for changes to its privacy policy that were worded ambiguously enough to effectively grant rights to Facebook to use any of your content, private or public, for their own purposes (such as advertising) even after you’d delected your profile.
While the company maintains that was never their intent and it was simply unfortunate wording, the backlash was severe enough that Facebook changed their privacy policy back to its previous version and then solicited user input for revisions. It was a harsh lesson in how concerned many users are about the information they provide online.
When you consider that many people post information about all aspects of their lives online, mostly on social media sites, it’s no wonder many are concerned about what companies can do with that information.
Social networks and other sites have to rapidly respond to user concerns over privacy and security. With the information in an average social media profile, it would not be inconceivable for a hacker to illegally gain enough information about a person to steal their identity or otherwise cause problems.
Security concerns have also cropped up as average people have found their profiles hacked and embarrassing information posted about them.
While this type of thing was once relatively confined to celebrities and well-known people (or people who had a personal vendetta against them), it has become more widespread and it’s not unheard of for regular people to be targeted (such as this woman on Facebook recently).

The Role of Social Media in Pop Culture

Social media has, in the past year or two, become a mainstream online activity. In 2007, social media activities overtook pornography as the most popular online activity in the U.S. (the two industries continue to battle it out, alternately gaining or losing ground on a monthly basis).
Celebrities now use Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks on a regular basis. And it’s not just their publicists—stars are updating their status themselves and interacting with fans on a daily basis.
It’s not uncommon to see Twitter-inspired t-shirts, and there has been at least one “fail-whale” tattoo (I’m sure there are more out there).
When Twitter and Facebook both suffered a DDOS attack in early August ‘09, there was a real sense of loss among many users until the sites were back up.
Social media has become an integral part of how people communicate, stay in touch, keep on top of new developments, and otherwise connect with the world around them.

The Evolution of Social Media

Social media has come a long way since the days of BBSs and IRC chats. And social media continues to evolve on a daily basis.
With major social networks and social media sites making changes and improvements on an almost daily basis, it’s sure to keep evolving in coming years.
The one thing we can be pretty sure of at this point is that social media is not just a phase, and likely won’t go away any time soon…at least until something better comes along.

Further Resources:

• A Brief History of Social Media
• The history of social media in a blink
• Mashable: The Social Media Blog
• Wikipedia’s Social Media article
• 6 of the Best Lifestreaming Solutions
• Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship

Making of “Robot Earth 3009″ Typographic Illustration – Vector Plus Tutorial

This Vector Plus Tutorial is Filled with Creative Techniques

During this tutorial, I'll show you the process for creating one of my illustrated type posters. I love to work type into all of my illustrations for the balance and rhythm it provides to a layout, but I especially love creating images out of type itself...the graphic designer inside of me compels me to do it!

Tutorial Details

• Tools: Mechanical Pencil + Sketchbook
• Programs: Adobe Illustrator CS4 and Adobe Photoshop CS4
• Difficulty: Advanced
• Estimated Completion Time: 3-4 hours

Plus members can Log in and Download! If you're not a member, you can of course join today! You can view the final illustration below.

This is a Detailed and Professional Tutorial

Plus members can Log in and Download! Otherwise, Join Now! Below are sample images, which show some of the development of this tutorial.

Secondary Dominants and How to Use Them

In the previous harmony tutorial, The Basic Functions of Harmony, we introduced the idea that harmony is about a balance between tension and release. If you haven't yet read that tutorial I suggest you do before moving on to this one.
For this tutorial we're going to explore the idea of Secondary Dominants and how they can be used to create tension and release in more harmonically complex and interesting ways. We'll discuss what they are, some of the different ways they can be used, and then show some examples from real music.

Author: Ryan Leach

Ryan Leach is an LA based composer, arranger and producer. His music has been heard on NBC, ABC, CBS and MTV, and other credits include additional music for Jerry Bruckheimer's hit series "Cold Case", technical assistance on "The Simpsons Movie", "Bee Movie", and "The Dark Knight", and original compositions for Disney Interactive. He is also co-owner and producer of Short Order Strings.

It is critical that you not only read the tutorial but that you listen to the examples. Reading about music theory is meaningless unless you can hear and internalize what the ideas actually sound like in music.

What is a Secondary Dominant?

A Secondary Dominant is a Dominant 7th chord that is the dominant of a diatonic chord other than the tonic. Yes I just used the word "dominant" three times. Let's see if we can clarify that a little.
You'll remember from last time that in a given key the tonic is the I chord and the dominant is the V chord. In the key of C the tonic is C and the dominant is G. Going from G to C feels like a very satisfying move from tension to release.
We'll call the chord that the secondary dominant lands on the Target Chord. So in the key of C the Target Chord of a G is C. Since a Secondary Dominant is the dominant of a chord other than the tonic, it is the dominant (V chord) from the Target Chord's key.
Let's say that we want to figure out the secondary dominant for the Target Chord Am. In the key of Am the dominant, or V chord, is E. We also said that a secondary dominant is a Dominant 7th chord, so the secondary dominant of Am is E7.

Similarly if our Target Chord is G, the dominant or V chord in the key of G is D, so the secondary dominant of G is D7.

Here is a list of the Secondary Dominants in C Major:

	Target Chord	Secondary Dominant
V7/ii	Dm	A7
V7/iii	Em	B7
V7/IV	F	C7*
V7/V	G	D7
V7/iv	Am	E7

*Not that this chord requires the 7th to sound like a secondary dominant, otherwise it just sounds like the tonic
Make sure you understand how we came up with each Secondary Dominant before moving on.

What does a Secondary Dominant Sound Like?

We've seen that for basic harmonic functions the Dominant chord is the most tense and the Tonic the most relaxed. What a Secondary Dominant does is create tension that relaxes on a new tonic.
Listen to the following two examples. In the first example the progression from Em to Am is relatively neutral. We expect it to keep sauntering along.

In the second progression, however, the E7 to Am feels like a great build up and release of tension. Not only does the Am feel like a welcome release from the tension of the unexpected E, it also feels like it could function as our new home chord if we continued to stay on it. This feeling of the new chord being like home is called Tonicization, essentially making the Target Chord the tonic. This tonicization can be permanent (i.e.. a modulation) or just passing before returning the the original home key (i.e.. used for color).

As shown in the example above, we'll be using a curved arrow to show where the secondary dominant's Target Chord is.
So why are Secondary Dominants typically Dominant 7th chords? In a dominant 7th chord the 3rd and 7th notes of the chord create an interval of a tritone, which is the interval of greatest unrest. It's the tritone that most wants to resolve into the Target Chord. For example in an E7 chord the 3rd and 7th of the chord make up a tritone (G# and D). The G# wants to resolve up to A and the D wants to resolve down to C# (or in the case of a minor chord, down to C). Listen to this modified progression without the 7th to hear how the E chord still pulls us into the Am but lacks color and is not as strong. We don't get the satisfying resolve down of the D to C.

How Secondary Dominants Are Used

There are a variety of ways you can use Secondary Dominants. They can be passing and primarily used for an interesting color, to build tension, for modulations or even for surprise. Let's look at a few examples to hear how they've been used before.

Mozart's Piano Sonata #12 in F

Listen to the first phrase from Mozart's Piano Sonata #12:

To make it really clear here's a reduction of just what the harmony sounds like:

As you can already see from the curved line, the F7 in the 2nd measure is a Secondary Dominant of the Bb chord in the 3rd measure. Hopefully you can also hear this as well as see it. This Secondary Dominant is being used for color. The Eb from the F7 chord is a beautiful and unexpected tone that lands nicely into the Bb chord. The F7 is clearly not being used to modulate to the key of Bb because by the end of the phrase we still feel like we are very firmly in the key of F.
Although the F7 was merely used for a passing color it made the phrase interesting and unique. Consider how ordinary the phrase would sound if the second measure just stayed on an F major chord:

And again the reduction:

Pretty dull. It's amazing how just one note (the Eb) can add so much. Now let's look at another use from a little further into the piece.
First listen to the section, then we'll discuss what's happening:

At first we are still happily going along in the key of F. Then out of nowhere these C#'s grab us and pull us into an entirely new key (the key of Dm). Although only a single note and not a whole chord, the C# is functioning like an A7 chord. In other words, as the Secondary Dominant to Dm. C# is the 3rd of A7, and the note with the greatest tendency and need to pull up into D.
Not only does this moment act as a modulation into the new key of Dm, it also functions as a surprise. C# is not in the key of F, so it sounds foreign and unexpected but also very exciting. Listen to how it pulls us forward into new and unknown territory and keeps our interest as we are off into Dm.

Hey Jude

We can see that Secondary Dominants can be very useful in classical music for making things more interesting and leading us in new directions, but the concepts can just as easily be applied to contemporary styles as well.
We already took a pretty in depth look at the harmonic functions of the verses from Hey Jude. Now we'll pay attention to the last few bars of the verse leading into the bridge. Here's the end of the verse (the line "Then you begin to make it better" and the first chord of the bridge:

By now you should be able to recognize our secondary dominant as the F7 leading into the bridge. Similar to the Mozart, the Eb stands out as a foreign pitch (even if you don't recognize it as an Eb you can still tell something different is going on). The F7 serves to pull us into the Bb that starts off the bridge. Also like the Mozart we haven't actually modulated to Bb. Although the F7 to Bb resolution is a great release, by the end of the bridge we still feel very much like we're in the key of F. What the F7 has done is increased the tension (remember the unrest that the tritone creates) and pulled our ear forward into the new section.
Here's what it sounds like from the same place if we don't use the Secondary Dominant to lead us into the bridge.

No drama, no excitement. The bridge just kind of shows up as a nice warm Bb chord. Without the Secondary Dominant we lose all sense of the tension and release that creates the excitement of the new section.

In My Life

Another great Beatles example is In My Life, which uses Secondary Dominants in two different ways.
Here are the chords from the first phrase of the verse:

The A7 is the V/IV Secondary Dominant. It leads us into the D chord. This one is yet again like the Mozart example, the D chord feels like a nice place of release from tension but does not actually feel like a new home.
If you're unsure if you're "getting it" yet, consider what it sounds like if the A7 doesn't resolve.

We're left hanging, obviously in need of something more. If the chord were simply an A major triad we wouldn't be feeling that, but the 7 is leading us forward and forcing us to want to hear a release of tension and a D is going to be the most satisfying feeling of release.
Listen to the chords from the next section, and I'll stop on the Secondary Dominant before it resolves:

There are two things happening here. First of all the section has clearly reached a climax. We are at a high point in tension and in great need of release. We also can hear a Secondary Dominant of the V chord; that B7 is really trying to pull is into an E. So let's hear what happens:

Instead of the expected release on an E we get a Dm! The B7 turns out to be a fake-out Secondary Dominant. The Dm completely shatters our expectations but when it finally lands back on our tonic of A we feel like we've come full circle. We have rested at home at last. Compare this resolution to the I V IV I progression we listened to in the previous harmony tutorial and you'll notice it has a similar functional effect. Rather than a build up and release of tension it's more like stepping back or easing down. In this case it creates a dramatic but beautiful moment of nostalgic reflection.
So did John Lennon think "I'll set up a secondary dominant of the V chord but then have a deceptive resolution in a IV minor"? I really doubt it. But just because some geniuses simply feel it in their gut, the rest of us can still benefit from understanding how these devices can be used.

Conclusion

I can't stress enough that the concepts in this tutorial need to be heard to be truly understood. Listen to some of your favorite artists and try to notice moments where the chords seem to come from a different angle and pull you into a new place. If you go back and figure out the chords, do you find that you've got a Secondary Dominant?
Homework assignment: Leave a comment with an example of a song you've found where a Secondary Dominants is being used. The more examples we can point each other to seek out and listen to the more we can all benefit and really drill the sound of Secondary Dominants into our ears.