Google's Marissa Mayer reminded Velocity attendees that pretty rounded corners on HTML images are counterproductive if loading speed is reduced.
(Credit: Tom Krazit/CNET News)SAN JOSE, Calif.--Those who think HTML tags are low-level technology should realize they can have a huge impact on the bottom line.
By finding an HTML tag that allowed Google to offer ads on the right hand side of its search page without delaying page loading times, Google was able to cash in without harming the user experience, said Marissa Mayer, vice president for search products and experience, at the O'Reilly Velocity 2009 conference. There aren't a whole lot of "billion-dollar HTML tags," as Mayer put it, but she spent about 45 minutes Wednesday morning encouraging Web developers to focus on speed.
Google laid the seeds for Mayer's talk Tuesday with the launch of a new Web page that gives Web publishers some help in making their pages load more quickly. Expanding on ideas she presented last year at Google I/O, Mayer told the crowd that "small changes can make a big difference" in how visitors perceive the speed and quality of a Web site.
For example, Google began compressing images in Google Maps, which improved load performance by two to three times for users on slower connections, which still comprise about 12 percent of those who use Google Maps, she said. Likewise, switching from an image version of the Google Checkout shopping cart to an HTML version saved time despite the complicated code needed to properly display the graphic.
As always, Google's goal in sharing these tips with Web developers is to improve the user experience of the Web at large, which Google believes will lead to a greater number of searches on its site, and therefore more money, Mayer said.
Few would disagree that faster is better when it comes to the Web, and Google wants to get Web publishers hooked on speed.
Webmasters looking for ways to speed up page loading times will have a host of tips and tricks to peruse later Tuesday when Google launches a new Web site designed to emphasize the importance of speed on the Web, said Richard Rabbat, a product manager at Google. Google engineering gurus Bill Coughran and Urs Hoelzle plan to unveil the initiative in a blog post unveiling tutorials and position statements on topics near and dear to Google's heart, and company executives will be talking about speed all week at the Velocity conference in San Jose.
Google has already spent a great deal of time over the last year or so evangelizing technologies such as HTML 5 and JavaScript, pointing toward those improvements as a way of making the Web faster and more enjoyable. Speed has long been a primary goal of Google's search engine, with the company often boasting--in contrast to most Internet companies--that Google's goal is to get you onto and off of its domain as fast as possible.
Now the company wants to share some of what it's learned with the outside world. Rabbat noted a recent experiment by a Google engineer in which the Google experience was slowed for a small number of visitors; predictably, they were less likely to come back. Google has already started to help Web publishers test their sites for stragglers with a Firefox plug-in called PageSpeed, something that Yahoo has also done with YSlow.
In addition to the focus on modernizing protocols through its work on HTML 5, Google also plans to devote a section of this new page calling on governments around the world to improve access to broadband Internet connections.
Jonathan Heiliger, Facebook's VP of technical operations
(Credit: CNET / Josh Lowensohn)SAN JOSE, Calif.--At the O'Reilly Velocity conference here, Jonathan Heiliger, Facebook's vice president of technical operations, highlighted some numbers from the social network's latest feature launches.
The site has more than 200 million users, and continues to grow. Heiliger and the rest of his team have had to make sure it can accommodate that growth while managing to keep newly launched features from breaking it. And so far it's worked.
In the last four months, live events like the U.S. presidential inauguration, the NBA finals, and this month's land grab for user names have put increased simultaneous loads on the site. In cases like the presidential inauguration, it was the most live connections the site had ever received--something that has to be planned for both in how the site is engineered and how much hardware is running it.
Heiliger said that the site has since exceeded the inauguration numbers, but out of all the releases, the launch of Facebook's like feature was the most surprising. This lets users favorite items other users have posted to their news wall. "We actually didn't think that many users were going to use it right away. Unfortunately we were wrong," he said. The site had a little more than 7 million likes in the first day, a number that later grew to 46.2 million by the end of the week.
Other than the surprise success of likes, Heiliger said it's been smooth sailing. It wouldn't have been possible without the company's investment in data centers, alongside a change in how the operations and engineering teams work together, he said. Heiliger said that prior to his joining the company in 2007, there was a large disconnect between the operations and engineering teams, and that part of the company's recent successes are due to better communication and planning.
Here are some of those events by the numbers:
Facebook/CNN Obama inauguration live stream
8,500 status updates when Obama's inauguration speech started
4,000 status updates per minute throughout the speech (on average)
2 million status updates total through the CNN Live Facebook feed
Facebook's Like feature
4.1 million users liked 7.1 million times in the first 24 hours of the feature going live
16.3 million users liked 46.2 million items in the first week
39.6 million users liked 226.8 million items in the first month
The Facebook personal URL launch
200,000 user names went in the first three minutes
500,000 user names went in first 15 minutes
1 million user names went within the first hour
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