Many of you already know Flagr.

Flagr is a great mashup on Google maps, many say it is the best application ever built over the popular google service. I tend to agree.

Flagr has a typical web2.0 website. It is simple, uses somebody else’s data and services and gets the users to build up the rest. It gives a way for users build up their own communities, and it even thinks on the bloggers and let them paste the code to include their maps on their own weblogs. Everything is fine, but one thing.

I am currently a registered user at Flagr although I still didn’t build my own map and rarely use the service. They don’t fill my inbox with junk. Before last week, i only received two emails from them, during my registration on March 6th, until last week.

On thursday, July 20th, I received an email form the Flagr team announcing some great new features, bugs solved, and go on. Everything was ok if the email was not sent to hundreds of Flagr Beta users with the email addresses exposed to each other. That’s right. They didn’t send an individual email to each one of their users nor they sent the email with the addresses on the cc field.

And what did Flagr do about this? They apologized. You can read the mail I received here.

But what I was thinking about is how the credibility of Flagr will go out of this? They have behaved in a totally amateur way and I will no trust them anymore. It's true that there is not much I can do now, because they already have my data and they already have exposed my data, but the image I got from them is not the image of the best application over Google maps anymore.

For this I am warning you: Be carefull with your users data. This is a very delicate issue.

Recently I've decided to change the layout for one of my blogs. This is a blog about free stuff including contests, promotions, sweepstakes and lots of freebies and it is in focused on offers available on Portugal. This blog has a few hundred regular visitors and half of the traffic is brought via search engines.

When I update my blog (it's not necessarily evry day) I can update it with 2, 3 or even 10 new offers each one in a separate post. People who visits the blog frequently don't even need to leave the first page of the blog to see the new offers with all the details and click on the links that lead them to the offers page (outside the blog).

What I have done on the change of layout was to don't show the post content on the first page (or archives page). Instead of that I will show only the titles and the number of comments for that post. As many times it has been said here, titles are very important, and as people want to win things, they will often want to see the details for all of the offers, but to do that with my new design, they will need to click on every title and then get back to the main page and proceed to the next entry. This way, I increased my pageviews by 15 times and my clicks by 5 times, although I decreased the CTR by 3 times.

This way, the adsense is much more targeted, because they will show adds relevant only for that post and the visitor will see a lot of different adds, increasing the odds that one of the adds will fit him/her.

You may say I am reducing the usability of the blog, but that's not necessarily true, because now the first page is like a directory of all the offers and it is easier for the visitor to browse them without reading all the text of the non relevant offers and besides that the page loads faster, becaus most of the entries have an image and now, there is no image on the first page.