Topic: The Internet and the World Wide Web

With several mobile device platforms in wide use, the designer's job is more complex than ever. Suzanne Ginsburg sorts it all out, proposing several approaches and giving examples and tradeoffs of each. Should you design a native app only for the iPhone? A web app that works on Android and Windows phones, too? Or should your design fall somewhere between, targeting only a few platforms? Or take a hybrid approach? Suzanne gives guidelines to help you decide and describes tools that can ease the designer's task.

Maps tell stories: track Japan after the tsunami or the Gulf oil spill through time. Jack Dangermond, the president of Esri, talks about and demonstrates ArcGIS.com's new cloud-based GIS computing and intelligent web maps. These two innovations are allowing end users to create their own maps using GIS software online with any device. The Esri cloud will store and share map creations online in real-time, integrating geospatial science and technology into our everyday lives.

With each new social network, it seems social media becomes more important. With a lot of competition for our attention, effective user experience is critical. Erin Malone says we must focus on how people first interact with our designs, then carefully help them flow from one stage of participation to the next. Erin describes clear patterns that help social services ease people on board and encourage them to interact with others.

Building the right marketing strategy can be tricky if you see your customer only through a bubble of research. Peter Merholz strives to construct better models for understanding customers as something more than sheep, highly-rational Vulcans, or Type A personalities. Peter's case studies include connecting consumers to a financial services program and redesigning insulin pumps.

This week, Jeff and Joel are joined by Patrick McKenzie - StackOverflow contributor, internet commentator and SEO expert (especially when it comes to driving traffic for bingo cards). After a few early tech issues we jump right into things, with tons of discussion covering everything from creating bingo cards to optimizing question formats. Also - how much does upvoting someone's first question make them more likely to come back? Tune in to find out.

Last year at F8, a conference for developers in social media, Facebook announced Open Graph, a platform that enabled people to connect to objects and URI's on the Web. This year, Justin Shaffer briefs the Where 2.0 audience about how Facebook plans to enhance user experience by leveraging location and temporal data access in its new product "Facebook Places." Shaffer expounds on the technical differences in the way that "events" and "places" are handled by the new Open Graph API.

"Incumbents, Attackers, and Disruptors" are accelerating mobile Internet development. The ability to gain market share through innovation and motivating shoppers will sort winners from losers in the smartphone market, according to Mary Meeker. Currently, mobile Internet adoption is accelerating because of the demands of modern life, while angles such as flash sales and virtual goods are opportunities still not fully exploited.

Giving a quick history of MySQL, Tomas Ulin and Duleepa Wijayawardhana explain the changes the system has seen in the editions from MySQL 5.1 to the present MySQL 5.6. Tomas Ulin, Vice President of the MySQL Engineering team, also discusses the current state of affairs for MySQL, recently acquired by Oracle. In terms of past development and current changes, Ulin also predicts future uses of new features being created in MySQL.

Tom Preston-Werner presents GitHub as a site that breaks through barriers that slow collaboration and sharing code. Describing it as a mechanism to prevent wasting time, he notes multiple uses of the site, including file sharing, project creation, and code development.

The future is not just in social media's connection to people but in "discovery:" the virtual exploration of physical spaces. This is what Dennis Crowley, founder of Foursquare, believes is the future of location applications. The check-in provides more than just the ability to see "who" is around but to see "what" is around. Dennis believes the combination of rewards, badges, tips and discovery are what make Foursquare successful.