Ajax Girl

MochiMedia, makers of a popular Flash stats tracking service called MochiBot, are now working on an ad network for Flash games. It’s hard work reviewing anything that has to do with Flash games, but after some time I have concluded that the new project looks like a very good idea. The ad network, called MochiAds, is currently in private Beta but you can go to the demo page to see how the ads work and get terribly distracted by some games.

As has been well demonstrated with online video sharing, Flash files can spread fast. Flash games are a huge online trend right now but most advertising goes on via ads around destination pages that have games embedded in them. If those games leave those destination sites, then it’s easy for the game creator to lose control over ad revenues.

MochiAds are both preroll and mid-game visual ads. It’s a great place to advertise - users fully expect some load time in most Flash games and ads between plays aren’t terribly offensive either. Imagine preroll ads that viewers don’t hate! This may be less true once game designers more widely deploy ways to avoid the extended load times for these games, but for now it looks like compelling ad space. MochiMedia founder Jameson Hsu told me that Flash game players are watching “the game space” closely already and even if they don’t click through ads it’s a great brand advertising opportunity. Ad space is sold on a CPM basis and ads are served by game category. Viewers are invited to rate ads as they display. I think that all sounds quite valid.

I asked Hsu what would prevent any of the ad networks emerging for video to enter into the Flash games arena. He said (charmingly) “nothing.” The primary advantage that MochiAds has is that its analytics software, Mochibot, is already well known amongst developers. Developers receive 50% of ad revenue. The company has a financial foundation from licensing its analytics software to corporate customers seeking to track Flash video campaign success.

The company has already sold ad space to a handful of companies, including BitTorrent, Guba, Slide and HotorNot. I expect we’ll be seeing preroll and midgame ads placed by MochiAds in independent Flash games around the web in almost no time at all.

See previous TechCrunch coverage on this space in reviews of Bunchball blog embedded games and Kongregate, a destination site for user generated games with revenue sharing.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/51919963/

SalaryScout is a just launched salary comparison site that does many of the things that previously profiled site PayScale does but incorporates more of the social features typical of new developments on the web. It has a nice lightweight feel to it. Almost everyone wants to know if they should be making more money or feeling proud about how much they make relative to other people in similar lines of work. There’s definitely a demand for this kind of service, but most sites are too onerous to use and provide little value until users pay a subscription fee. I like SalaryScout because it’s simple.

Users on SalaryScout submit a relatively small number of anonymous details about their jobs, including job description, spot in a workplace hierarchy, benefits and other information. In exchange for contributing information about your job and compensation, you’re able to access detailed information about other peoples’ jobs.

Users are able to rate other peoples’ profiles, flag profiles as bogus, leave comments and subscribe to an RSS feed for searches. The support for RSS is the one thing that saves SalaryScout from being worthless before it gains a large userbase - a common pitfall for social software. Even if there are not a lot of (or any) search results now for jobs that fit my interests, I can subscribe to all future entries in SalaryScout that do fit my criteria. If none ever do, then no harm done, but there is nearly no obstacle at all to easily monitoring the site in the future.

Other salary comparison sites try to offer various forms of added value but end up with poor navigation and a frustrating user experience. SalaryScout is simple and much easier on the eyes than some of the sites we’ve been pitched by who are doing salary comparison.

There are any number of ways that this could be monetized - advertising and aggregate data sales being the most obvious. If site creator Ben Thomas maintains the service as a side project there’s no reason why he couldn’t make a small amount of money while doing his regular job (whatever that it - all the data here is anonymous.) I like the way the site has been developed and though without heavy promotion, full scale business practices and corresponding site bloat - a little site like this is unlikely to ever offer a whole lot of information - it’s nice to use casually. I’ve subscribed to an RSS feed for writing jobs and will be interested to see what if anything other people submit. Who knows? Perhaps SalaryScout could become the Craigslist of salary comparison sites - though the hippies that drove Craigslist in its infancy are unlikely to be interested in comparing salaries, you never know.

These simple parts of what’s called Web 2.0 - user comments, user ratings, flag as inappropriate, RSS feeds - they’ve all evolved for a reason and as is evidenced by SalaryScout you can put them all together with a good visual design and have a solid web site.

On a related note, readers here may also be interested in the newly launched personal finance site Wesabe.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/51870945/

One of the benefits of sharing an office with Coudal Partners is that I get to read trade pubs like Nation’s Restaurant News while I’m having lunch. Coudal has food industry clients so they get food industry news.

I like reading industry trade pubs from industries I know nothing about. It opens your eyes to all sorts of new things. I find articles about trans fats, point of sale displays, digital menus, seasonal high-margin menu items, restaurant designs, premium vs. standard items, romaine salads vs. spinach salads, and fast food kitchen automation fascinating. I really do.

While I was paging through the paper today I spotted an ad for McCain’s Sweet Classics. These tiny “desserts by the bite” help “turn a $1 coffee into a $3 dessert.” The full ad spread makes sure you can tell that these tiny deserts fit neatly near the edge of a saucer with a cup of coffee. I fucking love this idea.

I’ve got a sweet tooth, but I don’t like ordering a 1/2 pound slice of cheesecake or a 6” tall piece of pie for dessert—especially after plowing through the huge portions that are so popular at restaurants these days. Give me a couple of small cookies or a tiny piece of cake or a little brownie and I’m more than satisfied. I suspect I’m not alone.

Ordering dessert also comes with a dose of guilt. McCain Foods knows this too. They know a little dessert is an easy sell when a big piece of pie could turn someone off completely.

McCain cites a survey that says 82% of casual dining customers said they were too full to order desert. That makes sense, but I bet a good chunk of that decision has to do with the perceived desert size. They are too full to order a massive piece of cake, but they’d probably enjoy something 1/8 the size.

That ties nicely into their “turn a $1 cup of coffee into a $3 desert” angle. Give the customer the option to have just a little desert and the restaurant can extract some easy incremental profits. Instead of “just a coffee” the restaurant has the opportunity to value-add the coffee with a bit of desert for only a couple of bucks more. It’s likely an easy sale and a win-win-win for everyone.

While this isn’t brand new thinking (mochi or biscotti comes to mind), McCain is revitalizing it. And it’s a great example of offering less to create more value. More cake, more pie, more desert isn’t an easier sell. Less is. I think they’ll benefit hugely from it. It just makes sense.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/122-less-dessert-incremental-profits

In the crowded space of social bookmarking, Adaptive Blue’s BlueOrganizer is one of the most innovative services online. That innovation is continuing with today’s release of version 3.0 of the product. BlueOrganizer is a Firefox plug-in for social bookmarking/tagging that emphasizes use of standardized and automatically determined terms of categorization instead of only the terms that a user thinks of to categorize a web page. It’s a smart semantic based tool that syncs with Del.icio.us, offers dazzling contextual search and is already bringing in revenue.

The newest version of the product introduces the Blue Menu, a contextual menu of search and tagging options that appears on right-click and is determined on the fly by a semantic analysis of the page you are on.

In other words, if I’m on a web page about a movie I can right click and the Blue Menu will offer to let me search for that movie’s title, for its stars and director and for movies in the same genre in movie related databases. It will let me compare prices for the movie in shopping search engines and with one click I can send that movie to my Netflix queue.

If I’m on a page about a wine and right click, the Blue Menu will offer to let me search for wines by winery, type of wine, geographic location and ingredients in other sites about wine. A music item can be launched in Pandora.

Blue Organizer recognizes items from a list of other verticals too including travel, toys, anime, software, hardware, restaurants, music, images and video. It’s an impressive tool. Each vertical has some default search options, but users can easily select other ones or make requests for still other databases to be included. In future versions of the software there will be a wizard that will let users easily add new search options themselves.

Adaptive Blue has already programmed against hundreds of popular sites in these verticals, but the tool is also quite good at determining context of new sites. With reasonable accuracy, for example, I can highlight the title of a movie in a news story on a news site about that movie and the Blue Menu will recognize it as a movie. It will also let me search for other movies the director has directed or the stars have starred in even if those names are not listed in the news article. Very impressive when it works and it does work fairly often. (See screen shot above, for example.)

In addition to all these exciting search options there’s also bookmarking options. Standard tags are recommended based on semantic analysis of the text but tag choices are ultimately up to users. Pages are automatically bookmarked after you visit them 3 times, but that number can be changed or deselected entirely. In future versions subscription to topics will be offered as well and will be organized in a similar semantic fashion. There’s quite a bit more to the product, but the contextual search menu on right click is the most important new feature.

Today is the new product’s first day in the wild and there are any number of kinks that need to be worked out. Adaptive Blue is a startup with a lot of momentum though. It was recently named one of the Firefox recommended add-ons list when Firefox 2.0 was released and has had more than 130k downloads. Unlike many social bookmarking services - it’s already generating revenue from companies that are paying to have themselves included in the default options of the contextual search and related parts of Blue Organizer. Purchases of bookmarked items through Blue Organizer go through affiliate links as well.

I’ll have to give it some more use to see just how useful and capable this new version of Blue Organizer is, but I’m guessing that many people are going to find if very useful. There is an option to sync your bookmarks in Blue Organizer with your Del.icio.us and Flickr accounts, which is great because you can try it out for awhile without risking the loss of what you bookmark if you decide you want to go back to Del.icio.us.

One of the best things about it is that there is so much than can be done with this tool, and yet using it is remarkably simple. There is a good degree of customization and advanced use that’s possible, but relatively thoughtless use will still provide substantial value to users. Fun for early adopters and mainstream users. That’s one important mark of a good product.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/51782325/

CNet’s photosharing service Webshots is adding video sharing capabilities today, something that has been expected since at least August when the service underwent a drastic redesign. There’s not a lot of information on the site yet about the new feature, but there is one company blog post with links to tutorial videos. You can see examples of Webshots video here and here.

The company claims its video service will have a 50-percent larger viewing area and nearly 3-times the bitrate of other video sites. As we wrote last month, CNet in general is bleeding traffic and Webshots in particular has seen a 69% drop in third quarter traffic. Adding video to Webshots could be a smart move if Webshots can bring something unique to the market. I’m not sure large play and higher quality is going to speak to users as much as the large community of YouTube or the privacy controls and file integrity of Multiply. Webshots may be suffering, but it’s far from dead yet. In June Hitwise identified Webshots as the 3rd leading photo sharing site online, behind only Photobucket and Yahoo! Photos.

Webshots is also announcing today a new program called Project Spotlight, which it calls an artist grant for scripted, documentary and citizen journalism video on the web. Webshots will begin compiling a best-of show combining the best video and photography on its site. This could prove compelling; see for example all the traction online contest site Bix gained by giving out awards up to $50,000 to users before being acquired by Yahoo! last week. Many independent video bloggers are looking for ways to be compensated for their work.

Hosting for free accounts will be free for the first 100 videos up to 5 minutes in length plus 10 extra videos per month of membership. Webshots Premium members will get up to 250 videos up to 10 minutes in length for free, with 25 additional videos per month of membership.

Photobucket has been particularly successful combining photos and video and I think the potential is there for Webshots to succeed with the combination as well. There’s something about the Webshots approach though that has a “destination site” feel to it though and I think it’s widely acknowledged that embedded, viral media is where the market’s enthusiasm is right now. Webshots needs to offer smaller versions of its players if it expects people to embed videos it’s hosting. Combine this with the mass exodus from Webshots and today’s announcement may prove interesting only when we compare features across major media sharing sites.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/51729130/

Yahoo! announced this morning a partnership with a number of large newspaper chains, controlling a total of 176 publications, to share content and functionality. Both Yahoo! and local papers around the US are in a state of crisis, which is amazing if you consider the market and mind shares both still control. Will this partnership make a significant difference for either party? I don’t think it will.

Small, agile, low-overhead local sites that incorporate everything from the authenticity of blogging to the power of video to the immediacy and usefulness of mobile devices are just around the corner. Newspapers will likely retain superior access to other lumbering social institutions for some time, but all parties are going to have to change faster than they will be comfortable with.

The partnership will include the following:

• Local content will appear on Yahoo! presumably similar to the way AP content does now. That’s a logical and smart move; though local newspaper content is hardly thriving perhaps an infusion of traffic will help improve it.
• Local jobs listings will appear on Yahoo! HotJobs. I don’t think anyone cares about this - there’s such a proliferation of online job listings that no jobseeker is likely to rely on one centralized site. Imagine trying to be the all-encompassing housing listing site - that too would be a losing proposition.
• Yahoo will sell ads, provide site search, maps and the Yahoo! toolbar on local news sites. This will mean nothing unless the content on those sites become for more dynamic and compelling.

Comparisions are being drawn in the NYT to Google’s recent partnership with a smaller number of more high profile publications and to similar efforts that have failed in the past decade. Google’s newspaper deal is of course just one of many things they are working on, including selling radio advertising. This Yahoo! deal is too little too late.

It’s a new world and both of these companies face incredible competition. Those competitors, best exemplified by local blogging networks but ultimately just a web of diffused readership, are just beginning to get their game on.

Is there any hope for local papers? The smartest ones are looking to leading examples, like the Lawrence, Kansas Journal World. That local paper has long done incredibly innovative things online - everything from local music blogs to mobile notification of schedule changes for local kids’ sports games. There is hope, but it’s going to require a greater paradigm shift than is represented by today’s announcement of co-operation between staid local sites and a giant portal. The things made possible by new media are just too exciting; this deal will go down in history as a tiny band-aid on top of a massive hemorrhaging in the old media industry.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/51706520/

Ben Nolan has created his take on an ajax’d up wysiwyg wiki called GroupsWiki.

Some of the interesting features are:

• Always editing, users are always editing their wikis, we attach events to the links so that they can open new pages even while contenteditable is enabled.
• Ajax image insert using a micro-version of lightbox. We also do table insertion the same way.
• Autosave - the users data is auto-saved every 30 seconds via ajax callbacks.
• Nice simple design and simple UI.

The application is built using Rails, Prototype, and TinyMCE. Ben didn’t use this great behaviour.js for this application as he says: “I tend to use behaviour only when doing sites that will actually work without JS” (nice and pragmatic).

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/groups-wiki-ajaxd-wysiwyg-wiki

YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim on How YouTube Got Viral.

1) related video recommendations
2) one-click emailing to spam a friend about a video
3) more social networking and user interaction tools like video comments
4) an external video player

Re: #4, the external video player did have an amazing impact. In a matter of months, YouTube seemed to go from nowhere to everywhere due to that slick and easy to embed player.

A big reason why the external player was so effective: Play buttons are seductive. When people see one, they instantly know what it does and want to click it.

Similarly, Coudal’s technique of showing showing video toolbar buttons in its Jewelboxing ads is also a great way to attract clicks.

Some more musings on YouTube’s interface:

YouTube's Interface: If You Build It, They Will Come

So, in a space with plenty of big players, but no real successes, how did start-up YouTube manage to get so big, so fast, and why was it successful where other big players were not? It’s the interface, stupid! While the technological and bandwidth barriers to getting video online easily have only just recently ebbed away, YouTube managed to be the first to take advantage of this new opportunity in a way that, quite simply, works.

Harmonization of the interface

Streamlining and harmonizing the interfaces people need to use to get to you makes good sense. YouTube offers a way for its users to search, navigate and mark favourites that each user knows how to do instinctively after the first few times. As Steven Johnson says in his book Interface Culture: “…knowledge becomes second nature to most users because it has a strong spatial component to it…” And so it becomes easier for people to find my videos on YouTube, because they don’t have to learn the user interface of my own website.

Worth noting: Chad Hurley, YouTube co-founder, comes from a design background (he started his career as a graphic designer and worked on PayPal’s logo and its user interface in his pre-YouTube days).

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/118-play-buttons-and-youtubes-interface

Chris Marshall has a background in writing low-level asynchronous code in C++. When he started to write Ajax code he saw the need to manage concurrency and created a Ajax Queue Class that handles all of this for you.

An example using the library is this file browser where you see the root of the library:

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/ajax-queue-javascript-class

Ryan Breen spoke at The Ajax Experience on Ajax performance, and just released a preview of Actual Experience XF with Actual Experience Lite.

Instrumentation

To instrument a page for collection of metrics, you first include a small .js file in HEAD. Out of the box, the tag will track the DOM Ready and onload times as well as additional metadata (browser type and version number, etc).

The tag also provides 3 JavaScript functions — nameEvent, startInterval, and endInterval — which can be used to add timing instrumentation anywhere within your client side code. The first, nameEvent, defines a point-in-time event, while the latter two are used to measure a span of time. Here’s a simple use case:

 var xhReq = createXMLHttpRequest();
 xhReq.open(\"GET\", \"someGet.aspx?giveMe=stuff&iWant=stuff\", true);
 xhReq.onreadystatechange = onSomeResponse;
 startInterval('some request');
 xhReq.send(null);

 function onSomeResponse() {
   if (xhReq.readyState != 4)  { return; }
   endInterval('some request');
   var serverResponse = xhReq.responseXML;
   // do a bunch of stuff with the xml response
   nameEvent('finished response parsing');
 }

This example would create two events: an interval event called ’some request’ with a start time and a duration, and a point in time event called ‘finished response parsing’ with a start time and no duration. All start times are relative to the load of the aelite.js tag.

Example

Ryan instrumented W3C DOM vs. innerHTML table building and you can see the results.

The graphs are created with Dojo Chart, and Ryan even benchmarked that.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/measuring-the-aggregate-performance-of-ajax-applications