Ajax Girl

Bram Cohen, the creator of the BitTorrent protocol, announced that his company would be finalizing an acquisition of µTorrent today.

“Together, we are pleased to announce that BitTorrent, Inc. and µTorrent AB have decided to join forces,” Cohen wrote in his blog. “BitTorrent has acquired µTorrent as it recognized the merits of µTorrent’s exceptionally well-written codebase and robust user community. Bringing together µTorrent’s efficient implementation and compelling UI with BitTorrent’s expertise in networking protocols will significantly benefit the community with what we envision will be the best BitTorrent client.”

The move will bring quite a few torrent users over to BitTorrent. News site TorrentFreak estimates that buying uTorrent, will bring BitTorrent nearly 50 percent of torrent users.

“What does this mean for the µTorrent community?” wrote Cohen. “Not much, at least not at first. The intention is to maintain the website as it is, and keep the forums and community active. Moving forward behind the scenes, we will continue to develop µTorrent and will be using the codebase in other applications, especially ones where a fast, lightweight implementation is more suitable, such as embedded systems on TVs, cell phones, and other non-PC platforms.”

The acquisition price has not yet been disclosed.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/58352943/

Yahoo CEO Terry Semel blasts some of the rumors out there about Yahoo, including reports (by us) of layoffs, that he was leaving and that Dan Rosensweig and Susan Decker were taking a joint role to lead the company until a replacement was found. Semel also says he welcomed the Garlinghouse memo - something we find hard to believe.

Just to be clear, these rumors are coming directly from multiple senior level Yahoo employees. What’s being said: Until a day or two before the announcements the other day, the plan was for Rosensweig and Decker to jointly run the company, but that Rosensweig ultimately felt that it was a demotion from his current COO role, and that Decker would end up getting all the credit for the inevitable bump in revenue that will come from the upcoming Panama release. We are also hearing that layoffs are coming, but that Yahoo decided to hold off until after the holidays.

This may be accurate or not, but Semel needs to convince his own lieutenants that this is the case, not bloggers. It seems that the only publication that was pre-notified of the announcements was the Wall Street Journal. The rest of the world was left scrambling, and talking to their internal contacts, to try to figure out what was going on.

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/~3/58299797/

Every mission statement says that a company is good to employees but only actual employees really know the truth. That is the premise behind Jobberwiki, a new job site that lets anyone contribute insight on jobs or companies they have worked for.

Jobberwiki launched just a few days ago and has almost no content but we think it has the potential to be useful. It is a lot like Jobster, except you don’t have to login or give any information about yourself to contribute to a posting.

“I’ve always found that searching for jobs online is pretty easy but I’ve made a few career changes and I’ve always found the challenge was to find inside information about what it’s like to work for a certain company,” said founder Michael Zsigmond in a phone conversation on Thursday. “I am hoping people will start to contribute the inside scoop on what it’s like to work on real jobs for real companies. What’s the culture like in the office? What are the people like? Do they really treat you like they value their employees?”

Zsigmond wrote the wiki while he was in between jobs because it was the kind of resource he would like to have. He has no funding, no employees, no office. He’s not making money off of the site right now, although he’s certainly not opposed to the idea. It isn’t a groundbreaking program. It’s written on MediaWiki, with the addition of the ability to filter listings by company or by job.

The problem with this kind of site is that the people who are motivated to contribute may just be disgruntled employees who are looking to vent.

“I think in the initial stages, that will be true,” Zsigmond said. “But people like to be proud of their job so if someone is ragging on their job, they might log in to post something to the contrary.”

Also, there is no way to know that people who contribute to a posting have ever actually worked for the company. And who is to say that owners of a certain company won’t login as if they were employees and sing their own praises?

Zsigmond said that he might consider letting companies sponsor pages on the site so that they can tell their own story about company culture. While sponsored pages might not be taken as seriously as the user-generated content, they may not be a bad way to add actual job listings to the site.

The validity issues are the same that most wikis face. For now, the biggest hurdle for Jobberwiki is its sheer nakedness. It needs content badly if it is to survive.

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/~3/58284125/

Two years ago today, after about $2,000 in development costs, Kevin Rose launched Digg and changed the way millions of people consume online news.

The guy that built the original Digg prototype, Owen Byrne, wrote a post on the Digg blog today to mark the birthday. He also includes some great trivia about the site:

Hard to believe, but two years ago today, Kevin decided my code was bug- free enough to take down the beta sign and unleash Digg upon the world. It’s been a crazy and exciting time since then, and we owe it all to you - the loyal and passionate members of the Digg community.

To those of you who have spent countless hours finding the coolest and timeliest content on the Internet, I and the entire Digg team would like to personally thank you for your contributions and loyalty.

Some trivia –

* First story to hit the home page after officially releasing: http://digg.com/tech_news/Google_Cheat_Sheet

* # of users who registered in the first week: 578
* # of registered users today: 707,593

* First 10 users who registered and are still actively Digging:

http://digg.com/users/Waldoze
http://digg.com/users/drinet
http://digg.com/users/mkirk
http://digg.com/users/jkenzer
http://digg.com/users/nickster
http://digg.com/users/Anthony
http://digg.com/users/dkurfurst
http://digg.com/users/bnitro
http://digg.com/users/CUBApete
http://digg.com/users/martinhuard

* # of servers Digg had at launch: 1 (rented)
* # of servers Digg has today: 103

* # of stories submitted the first week: 923
* # of stories submitted last week: 15,412
* # of stories submitted (all-time): 1,001,865

Congratulations to the Digg team. And to their investors, who are going to make a boatload of money. Our extended coverage of Digg is here, and an interview with the founders is here.

The cool logo is care of Go2Web2.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/58269418/

Via Hemmy.net.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/151-glasswing-butterfly

Sometimes during software development you need to hack something together temporarily just to see it working. You have no intention of leaving it like that.

We recently needed to add an email field to something we’re working on. And to make sure we didn’t forget about it we made it ridiculous.

Now it works, but we can also tell it’s not finished. And we can have a laugh about it.

There are other techniques too. You could set up a CSS class called “temporary” that throws a ugly thick purple border around things you know are temporary.

Or you could just keep a log somewhere, but we think it’s better to show the temporariness on the screen itself instead of on a piece of paper that may or may not be accurate and comprehensive.

What techniques have you used to keep ugly temporarily-necessary hacks from slipping into your final release?

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/148-keeping-the-cruft-out-of-your-release

Metacafe, the video sharing site, is reportedly being sold for between $200-300 million. The buyer is currently unknown but there is speculation that it may be Yahoo.

In July, Metacafe recieved $15 million in funding from Benchmark Capital and Accel Partners. The company was founded in 2004 and has offices in Palo Alto and Tel Aviv.

We are currently calling press reps at Yahoo to inquire about the acquisition, which would be surprising, given their recent commitment to reorganization.

When we covered Metacafe’s funding news, we called it a hybrid between YouTube and Fark. YouTube is definitely the company’s biggest competitor so considering YouTube was sold to Google for $1.65 billion, whoever gets Metacafe for $200 million will get a bargain.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/58226313/

File delivery company YouSendIt told TechCrunch yesterday that it had recently surpassed its three millionth user. While our initial experiences with YouSendIt were not smooth, we have since come to consider it quite a good service. We spoke to CEO Ivan Koon today to see what the company has been up to lately.

“The real reason behind the press release, aside from just wanting to brag a little bit, is that we are a very good case of proving Web 2.0, Office 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, whatever you want to call it,” Koon said. “We started as a free-for-all where anyone could come to our site and use us to send large files and we have very successfully evolved from a Web service for consumers into a Web service for business users.”

Koon said that the majority of YouSendIt customers are business users from small to medium-sized business. The company is also reporting 300 percent growth since September of this year and 200 percent growth in paid subscribers in the same time period.

“Our quarter-to-quarter growth in terms of total revenue is about 50 percent,” Koon said. “Consumers don’t necessarily pay for the service but business users are very willing to pay for services as long as it helps them do their work and it is a service they trust.”

With YouSendIt, the sender chooses either password protection or authentication through login to control who receives their files. Koon said that the company has over 200 highly-secured file servers on both coasts.

Other file sharing sites that we’ve found comparable to YouSendIt are Pando and Zapr.

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/~3/58211901/

There should be an alternative to one-size-fits-all RSS feeds for busy sites. Too many high-volume sites assume everyone wants to read every post. That’s wishful thinking. Some readers may want 5+ posts a day from your site, but what about moderate fans who only want 5 posts a week? Or casual fans who want a mere 5 posts a month? These people just want a glass of water yet sites insist on pointing a firehose at them.

The RSS avalanche
In All Feeded Up, Khoi discusses the challenge of surviving the RSS avalanche:

I’ve collected so damn many RSS feeds that, when I sit down in front of the application, it’s almost as difficult a challenge as having no feed reader whatsoever. With dozens and dozens of subscriptions, each filled with dozens of unread posts, I often don’t even know where to start.

In the past, friends have advised me to just narrow my list down to a manageable number of essential subscriptions — a bare few that I can consume easily, day in and day out. But every time I try to do that, I find that I can’t really bear to get rid of most of these feeds. They all seem essential, and I’m loathe to give any of them up. Of course, I understand the corollary of that reluctance: refusing to part with most of these feeds means I’ll probably continue to benefit from very few of them.

I don’t think he’s alone. A lot of people want to keep up with what’s going on at a specific RSS feed but don’t have the time to read everything there. So people wind up following the advice of Khoi’s friends — ruthless pruning of any feed deemed inessential, even though some of the content there is desired.

If content was filtered better, these on-the-fence sites would at least have a chance to stick around. Here are a few options for filtering RSS feeds so they’re not just an all or nothing proposition for readers:

The author decides
In this approach, authors decide which posts qualify for a “greatest hits” feed. Those top posts are published separately in an abridged, cream-of-the-crop feed.

For example, Gawker blogs, which usually publish double digit posts per day, tag noteworthy posts “top” and then people can subscribe to this tag instead of the entire feed (top stories at Lifehacker and Idolator, for example).The community decides
Similar to the above option, this method lets actions of others determine which posts deserve attention. People like clicking on the Most Viewed link on YouTube or the Top Today link on Digg so why not bring this sort of concept to narrow reading material at selected RSS feeds? Filter posts based on amount of traffic, number of comments, an “interestingness” formula, or whatever.

A while back, Wired discussed RSS aggregators with collaborative-filtering capabilities along the lines of Amazon.com’s automated recommendation system (sample quote: “I want to solve the question of ‘I don’t have any time and I subscribe to 500 feeds. I just got off the plane. What do I need to read?’”).

The reader’s friends decide
The problem with community filters is there’s a lot of groupthink which doesn’t always reflect what you care about. How about a tool that allows trusted friends to suggest individual posts to your RSS feed? For example, your friend Bob, who reads the science blogs and knows you like dinosaurs, could drop you a dinosaur post once in a while.

The reader decides
In this method, software learns your preferences and separates the wheat from the chaff for you (a la spam-filtering technology). For example, you would mark articles “interesting” or “uninteresting” and the software would learn how to deliver just the posts you really want. Feeds 2.0, a personalized RSS aggregator in private beta, claims to rank feeds according to a user’s preferences and then uses that info to bring interesting articles to the top.

What do you think?
Is keeping up with RSS feeds a challenge for you? If so, what solution would you like to see? Are there blogs or software tools out there that are already doing some/all of the above well? Let’s hear about it.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/144-taming-the-rss-beast

Matthew O’neill wrote a tutorial on Super-Easy Blendy Backgrounds:

Recently, while trying to implement a few different navigation ideas that a designer had thrown my way, I became frustrated with my weak image editing skills. The design was gradient-heavy, so a traditional approach to navigation markup and styling would require a dozen or so background-image slices to meet the varying colors and height requirements.

After spending a mortifying amount of time creating the images—I’m a programmer by trade, so anything more complicated than MS Paint gives me the willies—I had to take a step back and figure out a better way. What if, after finishing, I needed to tweak the height? Or, God forbid, the color palette? My head was going to explode if I had to open an image editor again, so the Super Easy Blendy Backgrounds technique was born.

The article follows the typical pattern of “hmm, well in IE 7 we found that you needed to do this” and walks you through all of the fixes (we won’t say hacks).

They end up with:

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/blendy-backgrounds-explained