The App Center service now allow developers to set a price on their app and those wanting the app will have to pay for it and then run it on their Facebook page. On paid apps, Facebook said, “This is a simple-to-implement payment feature that lets people pay a flat fee to use an app on Facebook.com. If you are interested in the beta program, please sign up to receive more information.”

This time the focus is on monitoring the quality of the apps too. Facebook wants “growth for high-quality apps”. This means developers can benefit from the App Center only if their app meets the quality standards. Facebook will rely on signals, such as user ratings and engagement, to decide whether the app is successful enough to be listed in the App Center. As Facebook says, “To help you monitor user feedback, we are also introducing a new app ratings metric in Insights to report how users rate your app over time. Well-designed apps that people enjoy will be prominently displayed; apps that receive poor user ratings or don’t meet the quality guidelines won’t be listed.”

Another fact worth mentioning is that the App Center is designed to grow mobile apps that use Facebook. Users on iOS, Android or the mobile web can benefit from the apps. Facebook has also directed the developers to create an app detail page. Only after creating this page, will the developer be listed in the App Center. The page will also be the platform for non-users to search for the developer’s app on Facebook.

The App Center is being seen as a way of showing investors that there is a lot of incoming revenue for Facebook. In fact the App Center is considered to contribute as much as 25 percent to the per year growth of Facebook.

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V8 doesn’t optimize the code when it first compiles it to machine code. There is a second compiler that is much faster so V8 has to pick and choose which functions to send through for better optimization. The old V8 would stop every millisecond to look at the current functions to see which ones were worthy of optimization. It was great for longer functions, but the smaller functions would finish before ever being optimized.

So the smaller functions don’t feel left out, Google now has V8 making “earlier and more repeatable optimization decision.” The counters then come into play to keep track of “how often JavaScript functions are called and loops are executed in a program.” This allows V8 to get performance bottleneck information quickly so that the most deserving functions, big or small, receive the most optimization.

As previously said, the new V8 engine is now available in the beta and dev channel releases of Chrome. That means that it’s still under testing, so be sure to download the latest release to test it out before it hits the stable channel release.

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Today’s hangout comes from March 21, but it contains some super important updates regarding Google+. These are the details developers would be keen on learning to get the most out of the platform. As the headline might have tipped you off on, the main focus of this hangout is JavaScript and the REST APIs.

While the above issues take up the majority of the hangout at a whopping 24 minutes, the team still some time out to answer some important viewer questions. The one that may be the most pertinent to Google+ users is if Google has plans on bringing the old +1 button back. I personally like the new sleek look of the +1 button, but I’m sure the old one had its fans as well. Well, Google says that the majority of users seem to like the change to the new +1 button. They do welcome any and all feedback though on the matter.

Speaking of feedback, Google has a handy Google+ platform issue tracker where developers can submit issues they have with the platform. These kind of things usually don’t see a reply so it’s no surprise that some developers may feel that Google isn’t paying attention. That’s not the case according to the Google+ team. They say that they read each and every one of them and discuss them internally.

Check out this latest Google+ hangout and become informed. The platform is constantly changing and it’s good to stay on top of said changes.

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Many webmasters have been left enraged after being issued penalties by Google because their sites acquired artificial links that were used to manipulate their PageRank. Many experienced a sudden drop in the Google SERPs without prior notification.

Google has either partially or completely removed entire blog networks from its index. Consequently when Google removes a website from its index, any outgoing links automatically become null and void leaving thousands of websites affected.

The worst affected by this update are blog networks like BuildMyRank who are reportedly on the verge of shutting down.

So why are blog-networks being penalized this time?

Firstly Blog networks are a form of paid link building and Google’s policy on paid link building is crystal clear that states that “buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.”

The purpose of blog networks is to facilitate link building, by creating genuine back links with quality content via posts opposed to creating paid back links from blogs without genuine content, which many webmasters resort to as it is easy and quick.

Blog networks are a type of “link scheme”. Recently some blog networks have been found to develop a technology to allows users to distribute their articles to hundreds of different blogs in the shortest span of time which is another quick and easy but un ethical way to generate thousands of back links to a site. It was only a matter of time until Google noticed this especially when Google’s opinion on link schemes clearly states that scheme blog networks are not on their list of favorites.

Articles posted to blog networks tend to be of fair to poor quality. The majority of articles posted to the affected blog networks were purely “filler” content that was written to get back links.

Following the first Panda Update in 2011 Google has constantly maintained that it wants genuine and quality content sites to occupy its search index and  it wants webmasters to create and exchange value added content that helps readers visiting the blog site, not content that just creates back links.

Back in March 2012 Google’s head of search spam Matt Cutts had hinted an algorithmic change that will come down hard on sites with over optimization or SEO.
(http://www.seroundtable.com/google-over-seo-update-14887.html)

“We don’t normally pre-announce changes but there is something we are working in the last few months and hope to release it in the next months or few weeks. We are trying to level the playing field a bit. All those people doing, for lack of a better word, over optimization or overly SEO – versus those making great content and great site. We are trying to make GoogleBot smarter, make our relevance better, and we are also looking for those who abuse it, whether they throw too many keywords on a page, or whether they exchange way too many links or go well beyond what you normally expect in a particular area. It is an active area where we have several engineers on my team working on this right now.”

Givena Google penalized one of their own Chrome websites when it was revealed that a marketing company they used had employed paid back links, there is no reason to think Google would spare the other culprits.

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1. Developing for Android – A basic starting point for new developers to the Android ecosystem
2. Foursquare API and developer resources – If you’re mobile app integrates location you may want to add support for foursquare checkin. Here’s a dev resource from foursquare
3. Nokia maps Ovi maps API – you may not think Nokia has huge marketshare in North America, however, on the rest of the planet Nokia is huge! Adding to that, Nokia Maps is a terrific map service and has some awesome opportunities for application developers… don’t discount this at all! And see also location APIs and tools from Nokia
4. The Google Geo Developers Blog – a developer resource and official blog for Google map developers and those using google maps APIs and tool
5. The Yahoo! maps web services Geocoding API – some resources from Yahoo! for working with location in Yahoo! mapping apps
6. Facebook developer APIs and tools – a comprehensive resource for developers from facebook – be sure to keep tabs on facebook Places and movement they make in location aware services, POI and related matters.
7. Twitter developer API https://dev.twitter.com/ and Twitter Geo developer guildelines – A useful resource for those lookig to include Twitter functionality into their mobile apps.
8. Application Platform Overview for Windows Phone and the Windows Phone developer blog
   
   http://windowsteamblog.com/windows_phone/b/wpdev/ with tips and tricks for the developer and those interested in the Windows Phone OS
9. Mapquest developer network and tools – details of their flash maps API, geocoding tools, working with OSM and more – a complete resource for developing for Mapquest. See also OSM tools and guidelines from mapquest – http://developer.mapquest.com/web/products/open/tools
10. Mapnik is a Free Toolkit for developing mapping applications – perhaps not for mobile development, however, Mapnik is a fantastic, open resource for anyone looking to start mashing around with maps and map data!

Image Credit – Alex’s Mobile Geek Support

Resources are a plenty, that’s for sure! For even more I suggest you check out this HUGE directory of developer programs HERE and see also Hackday – Tips, Tricks, OpenData sources, and Developer Resources for Mobile Application Developers

See also – Must Have Developer Resources, App Market Tools and Dev Programs
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Staff.com put out the following infographic looking at average annual salaries for web developers, software developers, graphic designers, and some other positions.

Australia is pretty much ahead in all categories except graphic design, where it’s beaten only by Switzerland. For some reason Switzerland isn’t shown in each category though. Either way, it looks like Australia is not a bad place to have a developer or design career.

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After raising $2.5 Million in its first funding round last fall, and attracting nearly 400,000 pupils to date with its CodeYear initiative (including current New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg), promising E-learning startup Codeacademy has recently jumped on board the crowdsourcing bandwagon with the introduction of its course creator functionality.

Course creator allows users (who were only ever pupils in the past) to author new lessons with relative ease.

Fractus Learning has an interesting take on this development here.

The main point here is that you are in control of what your meta description states and a well crafted statement about the page can increase your clickthrough rate.

Writing a Meta Description

When writing the description it is helpful to think in terms of advertising. What is the user looking for and what will compel him or her to choose your site over the numerous others that will be displayed?  A short and snappy summary of the page with your prominent keywords (they will be in bold text) near the beginning of the description will catch a users eye.

The description should be no longer than 155 characters or you stand the chance of having the message truncated. The meta description allows you to provide the search engine with a meaningful description of your page when they are unable to automatically create one from the page content.

In the SERPs

Meta descriptions are often used when the search engine displays extended site links. It is very important therefore to write a separate and distinct meta description for each and every page on your website. Extended site links are highly keyword dependent, so to benefit most from your meta descriptions your site must have a uniform purpose and your keywords must reflect this purpose. The use of these keywords at the beginning of your meta description will increase the odds that the search engine will use the meta description as a snippet.

Social Media Usage

Meta descriptions are especially important in social media marketing such as Facebook and Google+. If there is no meta description the search engine will usually default to the first sentence used in the article and this will not properly convey what the whole article is about. The majority of marketers on social networks overlook this fact and by creating the meta description you will enjoy a competitive advantage over your competition.

Indexation

A meta description in general is one of several meta elements that provide search engines with information that helps the algorithm index and categorize the page. They are not visible to the user as they are part of the HTML document. In the 1990′s they were essential to search engines in ranking a page but as webmasters learned ways to gain an advantage through keyword stuffing and other black hat SEO techniques search engines gradually started looking to other criterion in search technology.

Today meta elements have a far less effect on determining ranking of any given page as search engine robots have become more refined in sniffing out spamdexing and keyword stuffing.

The search engines of today use a variety of criterion to establish page rank such as:

• Freshness
• Quantity and quality of content
• Number of links from related websites
• Technical precision of source code
• Click-throughs
• Page views
• Relevance
• Uniqueness

The search algorithms of today are constantly changing and evolving but this does not mean you should disregard older aspects of page development. At the very least a well written meta description will be a sign of quality and technical precision in the eyes of search providers. These two criteria do play a part in ranking and will set you apart from those who are looking for the fast track to the top.

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In the last article, I talked about the nifty little fancybox plugin for JQuery, and also explained a little on how to use it. If you were lazy and didn’t read the JQuery tutorial that I linked, you can go ahead and read it here. Trust me, learning JQuery is easy and extremely worthwhile if you are into web design. I will at least get you started on that part and show you how to get the actual JQuery library below:

<script src=”http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.5/jquery.min.js” >
</script >

Now, let’s get down to business and talk about the actual plugins.
1. Spacegallery – This first one that we’ll go over is somewhat similar to something you can do with fancybox. Spacegallery is a Jquery plugin that allows you to create cool, cascading image galleries. The way it works is similar to a filing cabinet, in that you can see the other images stacked up behind the current one. You can’t skip images with the current version of the plugin, but i’m sure any developer ambitions enough could rig something up. Check it out here.

2. Airport – I love this plugin. If you have ever been to really old airport/bus station/train station, you may have seen the old school information board that are updated by mechanically flipping the characters around. When you look at them, it just looks like they’re flickering and then the new message is there. Well, anyways, that is what this plugin emulates. There is a demo on the project page and instructions on how to use it.

3. MopTip – This little plugin allows you to create cool little boxes that will appear when you mouse over an object that you use it on. They are fully customizable, including having the ability to display images within the box. Don’t be afraid when you get to the site and see that it is all in Japanese, there is an option for English at the top.
Well, that’s it for now. I might have a few more of these for you next time, so stay tuned for more cool JQuery tips in the future.

Aside from the many useful things that jQuery offers, such as simplified event handling, there is also a vast array of third party plugins that do just about anything you would want a site to do. Now, before I get into Fancybox awesomeness, if you don’t know much (or anything) about jQuery, you should go and read the tutorial.

Now, as stated on the website, “FancyBox is a tool for displaying images, html content and multi-media in a Mac-style “lightbox” that floats overtop of a web page,” or in other words, its a cool frame that doesn’t require a page reload. There are a lot of cool examples on the site that you can check out to see what it will actually look like, but below is an image of an image displayed using the tool.

As you can see, it is a very sleek interface that would fit in just about any setting where you need to load something without reloading the whole page. Another nifty feature is that you can actually load things other than images, such as other web pages, videos, and long pieces of text if you like.

Now that I’ve hyped this thing enough, it would be a good idea for you to go ahead and download it, read the instructions, and try to implement this thing on your own. Trust me, it will make any website look fresh and new, even if just about everything else is plain.