Ajax Girl

Google has added some new layers to Google Earth. The new layers are part of what is now called the “Geographic Web.”

The Geographic Web is a mashup of content from Wikipedia, the Google Earth Community, and Panoramio, a geographical photo sharing site. As you zoom into a specific location, you can see place marks of points of interest, user-generated photos, and selected Wikipedia articles. Hopefully it will remain uncluttered as content fills in but it appears that Google is only using select information in the Geographic Web from the three user-generated feeds.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/59229008/

YouTube added two new significant features late this week - Quick Capture and Streams.

The more interesting of the two new features is Quick Capture, which lets users record video directly from their computers and record it on YouTube. Previously, users had to record video some other way, then upload the video to YouTube for Flash encoding. With Quick Capture, the number of steps are reduced, making it much easier to create online video. This is particularly useful as a way to leave quick video comments to other videos. There are no editing functions, so this is for the quick and easy recording. I expect this tool to have a measurable impact on the number of new videos on YouTube…just make sure you don’t have any copyrighted music playing in the background when you record.

Streams is a feature still being tested in YouTube’s lab, called TestTube. Users can create and/or join themed “rooms” that have a number of videos lined up at the top. All users in the room participate in a group chat, and users can add their own videos to the queue. It’s an interesting feature, and I wouldn’t mind having a chat box on every YouTube video. But at the end of the day, “time shifted chat”, or the comments left on videos, are a more interesting way to discuss them. I’m not as excited by it as other bloggers, and my guess is Streams doesn’t make it out of the lab, or will have limited appeal to YouTube users.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/59209292/

A European company called Webjam launches this weekend at the LeWeb3 conference in Paris. It is a personal Web aggregation tool with a heavy social networking component.

At first, I thought Webjam was like a fancier Spokeo in that it allows you to customize your profile page with RSS feeds and your personal content from sites like
http://www.techcrunch.com/tag/flickr/”>Flickr. On both sites users can share their pages within their network but Webjam takes that function one step further. With Webjam, users can replicate other pages they find within the Webjam network. They can create a new page with someone else’s content and change it however they like.

For example, imagine you find a Webjam page promoting an upcoming movie. You decide you want to share it with your friends but think some of the content is offensive or lame or for some reason not worthy of sharing. If the page is public, you can duplicate that page and now the page becomes yours to change however you want. You can change the color, the layout, the content. You can add movie reviews from another site. It is a new page under your Webjam account with a new URL.

If you create a site you don’t want anyone to edit or duplicate, you can set it as private but Webjam thinks that most people will keep their pages public. After all, imitation is the best form of flattery.

For private use, Webjam is useful if you want to set your homepage to feed various social components such as your sister’s Flickr album or your friend’s recommended Web pages of the day in addition to the standard home page elements. You can easily duplicate those elements of others’ pages into your own home page. As soon as you push Edit, each component of the page becomes a module, or a widget, editable by drag and drop. The only component that is not movable or deletable is, of course, the advertising module.

The pages within Webjam are organized by tags. The founders said that they anticipate people will start to build communities within each tag.

“It’s very powerful because it’s bringing the power of communicating to the next level,” said Yann Motte, co-founder and managing director of Webjam. “Sharing is fine, but so what? We will make people better by allowing them to build on the communities of what Webjam is doing. If you have no clue on how to run a Web site, you can go to Webjam, pick one you like, and just replicated it.”

I didn’t find Webjam to be the easiest site to learn. There are so many tools and functions, which is not a bad thing but it did take longer than most social networking sites to figure out. But the tutorial is well written.

Webjam unofficially launched a week ago but they wouldn’t tell me how many users they’ve had sign up so far. “We want to keep that information to ourselves but we will say that we did not expect to see this many users from the beginning,” Motte said. The company has already had its first round of funding.

A video tour is below:

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/59117695/

Google quietly added a small feature to Gmail this week called Mail Fetcher. When that feature launched, Gmail became perfect.

Mail Fetcher allows users to access non-Gmail email accounts from within the Gmail interface. If you have a Yahoo email account, and a work email account, etc., you can simply access that email from within Gmail, using POP settings. Gmail will now work in a very similar way as Outlook does on the PC desktop.

This is something I have criticized Gmail for in the past. I went on and on about this issue here when discussing the new Mac web mail product.

Every other webmail service is now inferior to Gmail. Gmail offers more storage than any other free service. They offer free POP access to Gmail from other email applications like Outlook (Yahoo and Microsoft charge for that). They offer access to other email accounts within Gmail (only Yahoo offers that). Gmail’s mobile client is killer (although not yet available for most phones). And only Gmail allows tagging of emails for categorization under multiple topics (I just wish it was a quicker feature).

I am seriously considering switching from using my desktop email client to Gmail. Since I work from multiple computers, using web mail eliminates the syncing problem. If Google implements an offline version of Gmail, in a similar way as Scrybe or via Adobe’s Apollo platform), it will become even more compelling.

Kudos to Google for finally implementing this. It’s just awesome.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/59036669/

At a dinner event earlier this week, Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield casually mentioned a site called Wordie, whose tagline is “Like Flickr, but without the photos.”

Butterfield was amused by the site. Coincidentally, we had just spoken with Wordie founder John McGrath the day before, and we were too. Wordie is like a bag of tricks. It’s a way for users to keep track of words they like and want to remember.

“It’s kind of a combo toy, dictionary, thesaurus, and social networking site…but mostly a toy,” McGrath said.

If you visit Wordie, you’ll see that the site is more about fun than anything else. You won’t necessarily build up your lexicon because there are no definitions there, only links to definitions. But you can keep track of those words that you hear or read and know you’ll want to use again like troglodyte or gouache. When you look up new words, you see links to various definitions, as well as a list of other users who have marked that word to remember. It’s silly but somehow addicting in the way Flickr is addicting.

McGrath had just finished writing Squirl, a social networking site for collectors, when he decided to write Wordie for his friends. It is written with Ruby on Rails.

“I get a lot of email from people saying they thought it was a ridiculous idea and then spent two hours entering words and checking out other people’s words,” McGrath said. “It has a simplistic charm.”

Butterfield brought up Wordie in a conversation about how we define social media and Web 2.0 applications. I’m not sure Wordie is either but it is nifty and a fun way for those of us in the Web 2.0 industry to find/use our sense of humor.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/58892075/