Archive of thenextweb.com
Written on 10th January 2009
28 COMMENTS 
Joop Dorresteijn, East Asia correspondent
In other shocking news, Google changed their favicon again! As you might remember, Google updated their favicon to a rather *fugly* one last June. A few days later Google challenged its audience to come up with a better Favicon. – Chapeau Google, good strategy to get people sending in submissions.
We have a winner!
Google was “impressed by the volume of submissions”, and managed to make a decision – almost one year later, Google launched their new favicon today! 
This colorful icon is based on the design by André Resende, a computer science undergraduate student at the University of Campinas in Brazil. “His placement of a white ‘g’ on a color-blocked background was highly recognizable and attractive, while seeming to capture the essence of Google.”
We would like to congratulate André with his winning submission, and please tell us… You did get something from Google right? Something besides the eternal honor? A trip to the Googleplex, or a bag of money? Tell us!
Edit: André tells us that he didn’t get anything from submitting the winning piece. I’d say, Marissa Mayer, Micheal Lopez do something about that! He deserves some sort of prize! Right?
[poll id="22"]
Written on 22nd December 2008
2 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
Check out this beautiful combination of old and new technology by Jules Tardy:
The favicon was great but maybe they should have used more gradients and rounded corners?
Appropriate for the holiday season?
Written on 15th August 2008
3 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
You better face it: with millions of iPhones flying over counters world-wide, more and more of your visitors will read your blog on the shiny object. On this blog for example, already 2 percent of the visitors does. So it might be time to consider making your blog iPhone compatible. Especially now the crappy plugins are replaced with cool tools which have that “OMG-it’s-so-shiny”-flavor.
You’ll need two plugins: the WPtouch iPhone Theme and Yoast’s Blog Icons. Before we continue, please mind the iPhoney. This nifty tool shows you how your blogs would look on an iPhone.
WPtouch iPhone Theme
Bravenewcode isn’t the first one to develop an iPhone template, but definitely the first one who does a good job. While other versions depicted a rather boring lay-out, WPtouch does have that shiny feeling all over it. Moreover, there’s an option to switch to a normal view, which is something some iPhone users asked us to offer when had an old iPhone theme running. Mostly because they were using a wireless Internet connection.
After uploading the theme, there’s an admin panel available to play around with. For example, there’s the possibility to specify the icons per page or post. It’s also possible to switch off some of the fancy features – mostly Ajax-based – to make your blog for more accessible EDGE and 3G connections. I won’t do it, as I already save these users a lot of time by cutting away the heavy images.
If you don’t feel like installing an iPhone theme, then at least make sure you insert one important line of code that specifies the width of your blog.
Blog icons
So now you’ve taken care of ALL your visitors. But you might want to give your fans something extra, right? Well, Joost de Valk takes care of that with his latest plugin. Based on an idea of my co-editor Boris, he wrote a Wordpress plugin called Blog Icons. It allows you to upload a favicon, rss image, and…, an iPhone icon – the one you see when adding a bookmark to your start screen. So when somebody decides to make your blog available with one click, it will look pretty damn good.
(more resources here)
Written on 9th June 2008
4 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
A few days ago Ernst-Jan wrote about the updated Google Favicon at this blog. It looked kind of lame and I remember thinking ‘I could do better than that’. Maybe I wasn’t the only one who thought that as Google has now challenged its audience to come up with a better Favicon.
You can ‘Submit your Google favicon idea‘ to Google until June 20, 2008. There are also some technical requirements:
resolution: 16 pixel x 16 pixel image
format: .png, .gif, or .ico
size: 5 KB
transparency: 32 bit alpha transparency
And here are a few examples that Google played with before they chose their current boring blue ‘g’:
And a few more tips & requirements from Google:
Make the shape and profile visible. We’ve found that semi-transparent graphics, specifically 32-bit alpha transparency, work best.
Incorporate some or all of the letters in “Google.”
Utilize the primary colors that are used in the Google logo. We’ve found that monochromatic designs tend to work best with blue; yellow is too light and doesn’t provide enough contrast, and red looks like an error.
Avoid being product specific. The favicon should apply well to many different Google products and devices (e.g., mobile, PC).
Be timeless. The favicon shouldn’t date itself or be time-specific. Send us a design that you think will last.
Let us know if you plan to design a Favicon too and post a link to it so we can show it here too.
Written on 31st May 2008
7 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Some things in life seem so unimportant, yet when they change you’ll immediately notice it. An example: have you ever changed the position of your office litter bin? If you have ever did so, you probably remember you threw your garbage on the ground – on the exact place where your litter bin used to stand. Well, same goes for the Google favicon. It’s always there, you’re likely to just ignore it, but now that it has changed, it’s such an incredibly salient little thing.
The big G has changed into a small g. And though I hate to report about minor stuff like this – in Dutch we call it belly-button staring -, I had to share this interesting thought from a Google Blogoscoped forum member with you. Tony Ruscoe is philosophizing about the meaning behind this new favicon:
“Is Google undergoing a rebranding exercise…? Maybe they’re going to be known as ’the little g’ rather than ’The Big G’ from now on…
GB blogger Philipp Lenssen adds:
Google continues to grow and grow, but one of their self-proclaimed core values is “Think and act like an underdog”.
I had never heard of this core value, yet I’m sure to keep it in mind. It puts the whole Google strategy in another perspective. Maybe they have even lost the European Gmail case deliberately to appear like the poor underdog (insert wink smiley here).
One thing if for sure though, the more traction your service has, the more people talk about those minor changes. During The Next Web Conference, Digg founder Kevin Rose expressed the wish to have a small number of users again. So he could make radical changes to his social bookmarking service more easily. I see what he means, as only changing your favicon can be good for 276 blogposts with hundreds of comments.
The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show off, the future of the Web. (More info 
