Dominate Your Local Market!

Browsers

According to the latest figures at the Browser Statistics page at W3Schools, Firefox is continuing to gain share and now accounts for 34.5% of visits to their surveyed websites. Opera is also gaining share although starting at a much smaller percentage. IE 7 is making gains, but mostly at the expense of IE6. Most of the smaller browser's share remain essentially the same.

If I had to make a prediction on the future of browser usage, I'd say that Firefox will continue building share at the expense of Internet Explorer. Firefox's open architecture encourages third parties to create plug-ins and themes that IE will never have as long as it remains proprietary. As with much Open Source software, Firefox is a high quality browser with a huge community of developers building features that users want instead of dictates from Mount Redmond.

Operating Systems

Windows XP still dominates the OS statistics with 74.6% of the OS market, down just slightly from the 76% it enjoyed in January of this year. Vista now accounts for 3.6% of traffic, mostly gained from losses by WinXP and Win2000. Mac OSX continues it's slow but steady progress at 4%, up from 3.8% in January of 2007 and 3.5% in January of 2006. Linux is holding steady at about 3.4%.

Mac OSX will continue to make inroads into Windows share of the OS market, but Windows overwhelming lead is probably insurmountable and Windows will remain the dominant OS for many years to come. Linux flavors have a loyal user base, and my recent experience with Ubuntu Linux has brought me to two conclusions about the future of Linux. One is that Linux is a lightning fast, non-bloated, rock-solid, full-featured operating system. And second is that there are still too many little quirks in Linux installations for the general public. For instance, my installation of Ubuntu 4.0.7 on an HP laptop was very simple, but I have yet to get the built-in WiFi to work with Ubuntu. A posting on the Ubuntu forum produced a "maybe this will work" response, but it was way too complex for the average computer user to attempt – I haven't been able to set aside the time to fool with it in a few weeks. I'll get it going, but with far more effort than the average computer users will be willing to spend. Once these problems are solved, Linux will be a formidable contender along with Windows and Mac OSX. Until then, it will remain a niche OS.

Displays

For the past couple of years, visitors maximum screen resolution of 1024×768 has held pretty steady at 54%, give or take a few percent. Over the past year, larger screens have become more common and now account for 26% of website visitors. This gain in larger screens has come at the expense of 800×600 displays, whose share is now down to 14% and 640×480 which are now virtually extinct.

There is a practical limit to the size of displays and I think we are beginning to reach it. In the not too distant future, the race for bigger will turn into the race for better. The display used on the "one laptop per child" computer that can be viewed in bright daylight will be improved and find it's way into mainstream computers (I'm looking forward to this one). Brighter, sharper, more saturated displays will be coming as the technology moves forward.

That's about it for this look at web browser, platform and display stats. We'll have another look the trends in these metrics next Winter.

You know the feeling. Another day – another 298 spam emails. And if you are using MS Outlook or Entourage, you probably also know just how ineffective Junk mail filtering at the desktop level can be. So what are you supposed to do about it?

We all know the obvious answers. You know, never buy anything from a spammer, never reply to a spammer, never click the "unsubscribe" link in a spammer's email. And we know what we'd like to do like but can't. You know, pot roast the spammer, send the spammer on vacation to the Afghanistan-Pakistan frontier, launch the spammer into deepest outer space.

One morning recently, I was eating some soft-boiled eggs and checking my email when I was spammed upon in a rather unique manner. I received an email from a sender who I never authorized to send me email. Nothing unique about that. I average 298 of those every day. That's over 12 per hour in a 24 hour day.

But this chunk of canned meat was offering to give me a "throwaway" email address so that I could use it on the Internet instead of my regular email address, thus avoiding my regular email address being spammed. I suppose if I clicked on the link, they would ask for my regular email address to verify my honesty. How about that?

Needless to say, I did't click their link – but that email got me thinking. What's the deal with "throwaway" email services? Are they for real? Are they some kind of joke? Is there a better way?

One thing that bothers me about commercially available "throwaway email services" is that they need to verify you in order to serve you. That means giving them your email address – not a very appetizing option in my opinion. If I am trying to protect an email address, why would I want to give it to a complete stranger who requires that they have it in order to protect it. Seems like circular logic and I don't like it.

The alternative that I prefer is to create my own "throwaways" on my own mail server. I have used several of these on all of my email domains and they have been very successful. Just be sure that your incoming mail server isn't set up with a "wild card" to forward any email sent to your domain to you. Using a "wild card" used to be a great idea to keep you from missing emails sent to an inactive address at your domain. But these days, those low-life slugs that send you the endless spam for Cialis, Viagra and others use likely and random addresses at any domain in their sights.

Using "throwaway" email addresses does require a little bit of thought. Let's face – there are some mailing lists you subscribe to that you want to keep getting and when you jettison a throwaway, you might need to re-subscribe to those. This is another reason why RSS subscription is gaining on email for subscribing to information sources you find useful. With RSS (Really Simple Syndication), there is no throwaway email address, no spam and easy subscribe/unsubscribe.

Lately, I have been subscribing using RSS whenever I can. I expect that the future of Internet marketing resides in RSS. But RSS is a media that takes the concept of permission marketing to the limit. If they don't want to see your message they won't. And as yet, there are no tricks that allow the scum of the earth to force their message on you.

So the next time you think about using a throwaway email address to request or subscribe to some information, look for that little RSS icon in your browser's address bar, or click the RSS feed symbol on the web page. Many sites also have "chicklets" (see image at right) that let you click to subscribe directly to the RSS reader you use.

In the past few weeks, I have been forced to face the fact that some Internet marketers who I have previously trusted have either bought or sold my email address without my permission. The evidence is irrefutable. The buyer and seller are guilty beyond a shadow of a doubt. This type of unethical behavior casts a shadow of doubt over every subscription form that requests my email address.

I think that is a shame, but the genie is out of the bottle. I predicted several years ago that spammers were going to kill email marketing. Now I have had to face the fact that unethical marketers will accelerate the demise of commercial email. I'd like to be wrong, but I'm not. If you are in the business of distributing information (and who among us isn't?), now would be a good time to be sure that you are offering an RSS subscription option. Just a short way down the road you'll be glad you did.