Micro Ads

In keeping with our lives speeding up and becoming more busy, Ollo has shortened its ad length and compacted the ad results while at the same time providing more information!

Once upon a time 256 characters seemed a good length for an ad description with maybe another 64 characters for the title.  The standard on sites seemed to drop to about 150 character descriptions.  In today’s world of Twitter people only have time for less.  Ollo now supports 30 character titles with 70 character descriptions.  The kind of length you can tweet!  It is also about the length of a Google AdWord or Yahoo Paid Ad.

Ollo puts this ad info on a single line with another line devoted to the web address link.  Finally there is a third line with valuable info like when the site was posted and for classifieds, stuff like car mileage, number of bedrooms in a property, etc.  There is also a link to see additional ad info.  An Ajax page is brought in with details of keywords (to help you decide what you might use in your ad), location and the advertiser’s name with an auto responder form!  This’ in search’ contact makes responding easy.

The additional ad info is a space to watch as we have plans for further development here.  It just seems logical to tuck these details away so as to let people see as much of the results they need to help them find what they want quickly!

Geo Search

Ollo today fulfils its dream to provide global map support for local search.  We selected Google Maps as they now dominate mapping services.  With the release of V3 mapping the Google service is reliable and fast.

Maps are used on Ollo to show where people are searching when they type in a location.  More interestingly you can move the map area or zoom out or zoom in and by selecting to use map area you will search for ads in the area shown on the map.  This is an intuitive alternative to specifying a radius of so many miles around a place to search.

Ollo and its predecessor Apollo have always highlighted the importance of local search.  Apollo was possibly the first site in the world to drill down local searches starting with country grouping in 1994 and over 600 city locales around the world in 1995.

Today local search is common place.  Ollo does however make the task of getting to what you want and WHERE you want it incredibly easy in a neat interface that you can try out at http://www.ollo.com

Bookmark & Share

As a result of not finding a suitable Bookmark & Share widget that would fit the look and feel of the Ollo website, Ollo has built its own. Social bookmarking is very popular now. Lots of people either put lists of links to the best known bookmark sharing websites or insert a widget (most commonly from AddThis).  The advantage of a widget is that the links are pushed from the widget builder’s website so they maintain the links which is one less thing for you to think about.  I’ve seen several well know sites close or change direction already which can leave meaningless links on your page.

So a widget with links to all the popular sites looks like a good solution. Ollo didn’t want the Flash options out there. The usability of overlays covering content is not everyone’s choice. So Ollo built an Ajax solution which means the link icons stay in your page and don’t overlay your content. For the techies the technology is actually Ajast (a form of Ajax). Ajast can work on remote servers which Ajax can’t do (yet!)

You are welcome to use Ollo’s Bookmark & Share widget. The code snippet can be found at http://www.ollo.com/share

New Blog

After reviewing the options Ollo has decided wordpress.com provides the best solution for announcing what is going on at ollo.com.  WordPress has more features, is more interactive and is just more Web 2.0.  Ollo is looking forward to engaging with its users on this platform! – Gordon