Here at the Platformic blog it's a pretty loose forum. While I don't really think that anyone is going to post a blog about their cats (well, maybe Eric might ...) we post about a range of stuff that might be of interest to a client of a CMS or someone looking to work on websites and although Platformic does not provide graphic design services we do work with a host of people who might be interested in graphics and for certain who at some times might use Photoshop so I wanted to share something that I learned today which blew me away (and I have been using Photoshop for 15 years now!)

Google recently announced that it has acquired a social RSS service called Postrank which is a huge indication of their commitment to their social strategy. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that this move is an indicator that social media and services continue to have a very big impact on the web as we know it today. The future will surely continue down the social road.

So what does Postrank do anyway? Here's a quote straight form their web site on the subject:

"Our platform tracks where and how users engage, and what they pay attention to — in real-time. PostRank social engagement data measures actual user activity, the most accurate indicator of the relevance and influence of a site, story, or author."

As sure as the sun will rise in the morning, your site users are going to end up hitting a 404 error page at some point or another. But what you provide them when they hit that pages can actually tell a lot about your site, and can help turn your what is technically a fail for the user into a win, if done properly.

By definition (remember when definition was pulled from encyclopedia rather than wikipedia? I guess I am dating myself somewhat here), a 404 page is:

"The 404 or Not Found error message is a HTTP standard response code indicating that the client was able to communicate with the server, but the server could not find what was requested. 404 errors should not be confused with "server not found" or similar errors, in which a connection to the destination server could not be made at all. A 404 error indicates that the requested resource may be available again in the future."