Ajax Girl

Skype isn’t known for playing well with others. It is a wonderful service that I use every day, but it is one hell of a walled garden. It has shunned the open SIP protocol that Gizmo and others have embraced. It’s instant messaging platform doesn’t work with Meebo and other aggregators. It is an island, other than for the (very important) caveat that it works quite nicely with the POTS network, meaning you can use skype to call, and receive calls from, the cell and regular phone networks.

We’re still waiting for a proper Skype hack to come along that gives us access beyond the Skype client software. But today, Charlie Paglee is announcing that they have hacked the Skype interface, and are putting their own “Skype In” and “Skype Out” functionality. The hack adds a button into Skype that adds TalQer VOIP functionality. Highlight a Skype contact, then click the button to call him or her via the TalkQer Voip service.

TalQer has a couple of nice features that Skype doesn’t offer, particularly a free inbound phone number and voicemail. But it’s unclear if that’s going to be enough to convince large numbers of Skype users to add this additional bit of software. My guess is it won’t, but this may irk Skype enough to block them and perhaps file a lawsuit or two.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/72704430/

The CrunchGear guys got a picture of the Windows Home Server, which may be the most exciting thing announced at CES this year. Buy one of these and add additional storage over time, centralize all of your files and access them in the home network or over the web. I’d get one of these, except I’m a Mac user and it isn’t enough to make me switch. It sure would solve a lot of problems though. And the green glow is a killer feature. More discussion on TechMeme.

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/~3/72659784/

I tried to tell LinkedIn back in October that the relationship was over. That I wanted out. I was originally more than a little miffed when that turned out to require writing customer service, but only took a day or so to get a personal response from Michele at Customer Service telling me they got the message and I was gone.

Only I wasn’t. I kept getting those annoying invitations to join networks of people whom I’ve never met. After the third or fourth such invitation, I tried to login again and realized that indeed I hadn’t been deleted, despite the personal note from Michele.

So about a week ago, I tried to write customer service again and request that I be deleted from the system. This time there was no snappy reply and I’m still an active profile on LinkedIn.

Please guys, just lemme out. I’m not even interested in making a new big stink about how bad it is to have leaving the system be a customer service issue. I just really don’t want to get any more emails and I don’t want my profile in your system. Deal?

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/186-linkedin-just-wont-let-me-go

Lonely? Want someone to talk to? Go to ChaCha, a new search engine, and talk to a guide real time about your search. As long as you remain somewhat on topic, I’ve found that the guide will talk to you as long as you like.

There are two ways to search on ChaCha. They have a more traditional search engine that has good but not deep results. But the cool service is guide driven, via an instant message screen on the page. While I found that the results were not nearly as good as Google, it is a lot of fun to talk to the guides.

The company, which is based in Indianapolis, announced a $6 million round of financing today that included an investment by Jeff Bezos through his Bezos Expeditions fund (the same fund that invested in 37 Signals). This is a perfect fit for Amazon’s Mechanical Turk product, and I expect the company will be using that service at some point for the search guides.

While it isn’t clear to me how the company can make money inserting human labor into the search process, they now have at least $6 million to burn while trying. If you’d like to be a ChaCha guide, you can apply here.

As an aside, ChaCha has a linking policy that forbids linking to any page other than the home page. I’m not sure what misguided lawyer told them to do this, but I’ve blatantly violated that policy in this post, including by linking to the policy. Note to ChaCha - links aren’t bad and this policy isn’t enforceable.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/72578880/

Second Life made their client software open source today, sparking near rapture among its hard core users (see comments to their blog post). The first two paragraphs of the announcement talk a lot about about the inevitability of destiny. And they mention Second Life in the same breath as Mosaic and Mozilla.

I’m a Second Life fan, but sometimes the hype gets to be a little too much. At any given time up to 20,000 or so people are logged in to the service. That’s not enough adoption to justify putting Second Life in the same sentence as Mosaic and Mozilla just yet. Today, it’s the playground for just a few hard core users who can live with an annoying server lag and who, apparently, spend at least some of their time gleefully throwing penises at others. Second Life is a really fancy hosting business, since their main revenue source is renting servers for people who buy islands and other real estate.

At current growth trends, though, SL could be a real economic force in a few years. When things really start to hop, SL will look more like it’s own private Internet. Or a privately held virtual nation. At the point that millions of people spend most or all of their waking hours within the SL world, we’ll know this has happened.

I think people (and governments) will start to get a little nervous at that point. It will be impossible for SL to put both its shareholders and users first, and history suggests that users will get the shaft. I can image the most bizarre anti-trust lawsuits in history being fought in courtrooms around the world.

What might make more sense in the long run is more of a Wikipedia-like approach to Second Life. A non profit organization running open source software where people can add their own island just by plugging in a server in their living room or the hosting provider of their choice. Whoever builds that and provides a serious alternative to the SL experience could help the world at least as much as Wikipedia has.

I’m a big fan of private enterprise, but when it comes to creating the next world, perhaps the interests of shareholders should come second to those of its actual residents. And since virtual worlds have many of the attributes of a natural monopoly, running them via a non profit organization may make a lot of sense.

Bloggers are also noting that Second Life has only open sourced the client software portion of their business, not the actual grid. Steve O’Hear speculates on what would happen if they did open source the grid, allowing anyone to add their own server (and therefore real estate) to the system. The result would be a plummet in real estate prices in SL.

Our previous Second Life coverage is here.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/72549584/

A bunch of hub-ub has been created over a presentation at the CCC conference called Subverting Ajax.

The FUD has been interesting to watch. Early in the article they discuss how JavaScript is a prototype-based system which is a ‘flaw’ as people can do things like:

The article does do a good job in explaining some of the dangers, but doesn’t mean that all Ajax is bad. Much as SQL injections are bad, but if you do a few smart things you will make sure that there is no surface for them.

What are your thoughts?

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/subverting-ajax

NovaLet is a new blogging service that aims to be even simpler than Vox.

It isn’t quite open to the public yet, but already features:

• Create, Edit and Delete categories instantly.
• Create, Edit and Delete Links instantly.
• Create, Edit and Delete static Pages.
• Create, Edit and Delete Blog Posts under a certain category.
• Update, Add and Delete images on posts (You can also add YouTube and GoogleVid on Expanded posts, more services will be added of cause).
• Create, Edit and Delete comments on a blog post.
• Categories, Links or Pages on the header can be reordered by clicking on the green icon on the header.
• RSS for the blog and RSS for every category.
• Searcher
• MetaWeblog API
• Url Rewrite
• Pinging
• XSS (Cross Site Scripting) Secure
• Domain mapping (NovaLet accounts can be hooked to any domain)
• Localisation (Right now it only supports English but hoping to support other languages in the future. The entire system is localised, including the JS errors.)
• Good Performance (It performance even better when you are logged off. The current NovaLet beta is running on a weak celeron server with 512MB and MS SQL Express 2005).
• Cross browser, so far it perfectly runs on all these browsers that I have test it on (IE, Firefox, Opera, Safari, Camino).

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/novalet-more-simple-blogging

CheckItOut is an open source Rails based application to manage personal money accounts. It was born out of the desire to have an application like this web based.

You can give it a whirl via the demo.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/checkitout-rails-money-management

InterfaceThis has launched Zirr.us an alternative To Do list that combines Ajax/DHTML, the power of tag clouds, and the simplicity of a whiteboard to provide a fresh approach to task management.

It features:

• View and enter tasks quickly and easily, from anywhere.
• Put everything on your mind in your Braindump list. Put near-term tasks in your Now list.
• Set due dates and priorities. Categorize with tags.
• Overdue tasks move automatically to your Now list.
• Work with your tasks in an informative task cloud, color-coded by tag and sized by priority. Sort alphabetically, by date, or by priority.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/zirrus-tag-clouds-meets-to-do-lists

Later today Sonos will announce that their home music devices will now support Microsoft DRM’d music. That means music from AOL Music Now, MTV Networks’ URGE, Napster, Wal-Mart, Yahoo! Music and the Zune Marketplace will all play on the Sonos devices. Users have been able to play music from Rhapsody since September - meaning that all major music services except iTunes are now supported to some degree.

Sonos users must upgrade to v 2.1 of the software, available here.

Apple still has such a stranglehold on the digital music industry that it’s unclear this will drive much additional usage. And while Sonos will play downloads from the music services, they will only play streaming music from Rhapsody subscribers. So if you are a Sonos user, you’re best bet is to make sure your downloaded music is in the MP3 format, or use the Rhapsody subscription service if that’s your cup of tea.

Things got a little simpler in the DRM world today, but it is our opinion that the days of being forced to buy protected music will soon be over. In the meantime, we do not recommend buying DRM’d downloads from any service. Either buy the CD and rip it, as Bill Gates recommends, or join one of the subscription services. We won’t talk about BitTorrent and AllofMP3 ’cause our lawyer told us to stop.

Our previous coverage of Sonos is here.

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/~3/72331945/