Ajax Girl

The Windows Live team announced today that they’re rebranding their new email beta to Windows Live Hotmail. We haven’t written about the application for some time, and this is as good an excuse as any to compare the current release to Gmail and the new Yahoo mail beta.

The three applications, along with AOL mail, make up the vast majority of the 500 million or so webmail users around the world (see chart included in this post). Most of these users are still using the old, tedious, Ajax-free Yahoo Mail and Hotmail user interfaces, requiring page refreshes for every click. The new applications, along with Gmail, offer a much richer experience, much like Outlook or Mac mail. When these webmail clients are performing well, their speed and ease of use is easily as good as a desktop client.

Overall we prefer Gmail over all other webmail applications because performance (speed) is consistently fast, and emails can be tagged making search much more effective. They also offer more storage and other features, and it’s free. However, Yahoo and Live Hotmail offer more mainstream Outlook-like user interfaces (although Live Hotmail does not allow you to access other email accounts from their application), whereas Gmail takes some time to get used to. If you are looking for speed and tagging is important, Gmail is for you. If you are looking for the closest thing to Outlook online, go with Yahoo Mail.

The following chart compares the services on a feature-by-feature basis. Note that the user numbers for Yahoo and Hotmail include legacy users still on the old platforms.

Gmail

Gmail groups emails in a thread into a single line in the inbox. Some users love this, others hate it. It’s not my favorite feature, but I’ve gotten used to it. The best Gmail feature in my opinion is the ability to tag emails for better organization and search. None of the other services offer this. Gmail also has integrated Gtalk into the GMail interface, and continues to add other functionality as well (such as integration with Docs & Spreadsheets). Gmail is consistently fast, offers the most storage and free POP-in and POP-out, meaning you can use Gmail to access your other email accounts, or access GMail from whatever email client you use. It’s a near-perfect piece of software, and has only occasional hiccups. The fact that Google is paired with Google Calendar, the best online Calendar application, doesn’t hurt, either.

Windows Live Hotmail

The new Windows Live Hotmail will be a welcome change to Microsoft’s 228 million webmail users, but it falls short of the Yahoo and Gmail offerings. They offer 2 GB of storage, better than Yahoo, but there are no POP-in or POP-out features at all. If you want to access your account outside of the web site, you have to do it via Outlook or Outlook Express. It remains the slowest among the three in our tests.

Yahoo Mail

Yahoo Mail is very good, allowing users to access other email accounts (POP-in), but only offering POP-out access for an additional fee. This is probably due to the legacy users who are already paying for this feature - Yahoo may not want to give up this revenue stream. Storage is on the low side - only 1 GB, which is less than half of what Gmail offers. Still, Yahoo Mail has recently been running very fast and offers an intuitive, Outlook-like interface. Instant Messaging and RSS integration is awesome.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/88250387/

We’ve talked about a lot of online presentation applications, both formal (Zoho, Google, Empressr, Thumbstacks, Preezo, Slideshare) and informal (RockYou, Filmloop, Scrapblog, Bubbleshare). Formatpixel is a flash-based crossover between the two, meant to design portfolio or brochure presentations that look more like fashion magazines than PowerPoint presentations. You can see an example I embedded below, a photo portfolio here, and one with an embedded video here. Note the cool page flip animation.

Formatpixel uses a WYSIWYG layout editor to publish presentations in a virtual magazine format. The editor lets you drop in uploaded photos, text, and shapes onto virtual book pages. Each of the items you place on a page can be hyperlinked, scaled, blured, colored, and blended. The page glossiness, color, and background color can also be changed. The feature list for each of these objects is fairly lengthy.

Formatpixel accounts are limited by file size and number of projects. The free account supports only one project of 512K in size, while the most expensive account allows for 20 projects with 20MB of storage for 40 pounds a year. The site is currently the work of a single developer.

The full-size version is available here.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/88161698/

Daylife

Daylife’s Highlights: “Interesting stories from around the world, hand-picked by Daylife.”

Happy Cog

Happy Cog redesigns.

Adium

Eric Giovanola writes, “Here’s a screenshot I thought was great. I use Adium as my IM client, and their mascot/dock icon is a duck. This is the crash report screen.”

Got an interesting screenshot for Signal vs. Noise? Send the image and/or URL to svn [at] 37signals [dot] com.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/260-screens-around-town-daylife-happy-cog-adium

Joe Walker has an idea for CSRF protection. Will it work?

There are several ways to forge a request in a CSRF attack: iframe, script tag, image tag, scripted window.open() etc. As far as I know XHR is not one of these, because cross-domain rules kick in before the request is sent and not when the reply is read.

Both iframe and XHR will allow you to construct POST requests, the other attack mechanisms are restricted to GET only. With the iframe method, you use some DOM scripting to create a form that points to an iframe. This implies that only form-formatted data can be sent over an iframe POST request.

So in the Ajax world, it might be possible to have a CSRF-safe application that works simply by insisting on POST, and denying anything that is application/x-www-form-urlencoded. Clearly this technique won’t work for non Ajax requests because it requires the browser to use XHR.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/csrf-protection-idea

Nivi’s blog has some interesting quote-based posts…

From Mavericks at Work (Part 1):

“Even in the face of massive competition, don’t think about the competition. Literally don’t think about them. Every time you’re in a meeting and you’re tempted to talk about a competitor, replace that thought with one about user feedback or surveys. Just think about the customer.”
–Mike McCue, CEO Tellme Networks, Former VP of Technology Netscape

From The Essential Peter Drucker (Part 1):

“…the aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous. The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits him and sells itself.”

From Part 2 on Drucker:

“Knowledge work is not defined by quantity. Neither is knowledge work defined by its costs. Knowledge work is defined by its results.”

“Of all the decisions an executive makes, none is as important as the decisions about people because they determine the performance capacity of the organization.”

“[The relationship between knowledge workers and their superiors] is far more like that between the conductor of an orchestra and the instrumentalist than it is like the traditional superior/subordinate relationship. The superior in an organization employing knowledge workers cannot, as a rule, do the work of the supposed subordinate any more than the conductor of an orchestra can play the tuba. In turn, the knowledge work is dependent on the superior to give direction and, above all, to define what the “score” is for the entire organization, that is, what are its standards and values, performance and results. And just as an orchestra can sabotage even the ablest conductor — and certainly even the most autocratic one — a knowledge organization can easily sabotage even the ablest, let alone the most autocratic superior.”

He’s also got a Twitter blog with rapid-fire snippets.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/255-quotes-on-business-marketing-writing-etc

Raphael Bauduin has been playing with the Javascript prototype member in order to get an Understanding of Javascript’s prototype member.

After he saw Doug Crockfords Advanced JavaScript presentation he cracked open Rhino and started playing.

Take a peak at the ride:

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/delving-into-javascripts-prototype-member

Jim Yagmin has created a fun app that uses Ajax called the Shakespeare Sonnet Shake-up.

The site allows users to rearrange the lines of Shakespeare’s sonnets to create a “sonnet remix” - an entirely new poem written using lines across any of Shakespeare’s sonnets. The program understands the rhyme scheme of a sonnet, and will only show matching rhymes where appropriate. A fun tool for would-be poets, students of the sonnet form, and any fan of Shakespeare!

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/shakespeare-sonnet-shake-up

NBC’s new CEO Jeff Zucker didn’t waste any time before stirring things up a little. The Financial Times is reporting that he trashed YouTube, using words very similar to those chosen by Viacom a week ago when they demanded YouTube remove over 100,000 video clips. The words, in fact, are so close that the two events almost seen orchestrated:

“YouTube needs to prove that it will implement its filtering technology across its online platform. It’s proven it can do it when it wants to,” Mr Zucker said, referring to the site’s controls to block pornography and hate speech. He added: “They have the capability. The question is whether they have the will.”

It’s clear that YouTube has the ability (like their competitors) to filter out copyrighted materials right now, and they are choosing not to do so. That would gut YouTube’s core content and that isn’t going to happen without a judge getting involved. It’s also clear from all the posturing by the television networks that they want their content to appear on YouTube. It helps television ratings, and they want the online revenue.

So the question is, if both sides want it, why hasn’t it happened yet? The infamous television network joint venture to compete with YouTube hasn’t, and probably won’t, materialize. YouTube has no competitor with enough market share to argue that they are a viable alternative. These companies need each other.

The answer may lie in the amount of revenue that can realistically be generated from these clips. If users can be convinced to watch a video advertisement or two before a clip, the money may be there. But simple display ads around a video just won’t generate enough money to make the networks happy. A $1 CPM generates only a tenth of a cent per view in revenue. Multiply that by ten and you still have only a cent. Television networks are used to getting $0.30 and more in commercial advertising per viewer for a hit show.

Google obviously made promises early on that it couldn’t keep. We’re hearing off record that the TV companies’ biggest frustration with the negotiations is that Google has repeatedly made and then pulled offers. It’s clear that Google is still trying to figure out a model they can live with. That may not happen.

Back to NBC, keep an eye out for their new social networking products. It was mentioned in a different FT article on Zucker, who “noted that NBC was planning to roll out social networking applications across its internet properties in the next few weeks.” This is consistent with earlier reports on this as well - see here and here.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/88054550/

It takes effort to explain the significance of a new product when the immediate benefit to consumers may not be so obvious, and the awkwardly named “pipes” from Yahoo! is no exception. The product name is taken from the world of UNIX where a pipe is a conduit for the transfer of data between applications, while with the Yahoo product it is a conduit for data between web services. In a basic form Yahoo! Pipes allows you to take data from one or more sources and to bring it together, for example - to aggregate a group of feeds.

But Yahoo! Pipes goes beyond what just pipes are and what pipes do though as the application provides functions (or as they are called in the app - modules) that will perform a variety of different actions. There are modules available to prompt the user for input (a variety of input types), different operators to count, loop, cut, count, sort and merge data along with a variety of string and date functions. Because of this already broad base of available functions, Yahoo! Pipes is more akin to a shell scripting environment for the web rather than just a simple conduit between applications. It works like a visual procedural programming language with the output of the process dropping out at the bottom, in the form of text output, RSS, SMS alerts of even JSON. You can use feeds, user input or other pipes as input.

The beauty of the application is with its simplicity - a user can take any sources, user input requests or the above mentioned module and drag+drop them into place and then connect the pipes. Within minutes I had built an application (also known as a pipe, they should probably change the name as not everything can be a pipe) that would search for ‘Techcrunch’ in a variety of feeds, bring that data together, sort it and filter it for unique results. I saved the application and published it, from where I can now execute it at any time and receive the output in a variety of formats. I can take a copy of an existing pipe (application, argggh) and use it as a base template for my own pipe and I can browse an existing library of pipes.

Pipes can take any feed as input, and combined with the already available list of functions proves to be very powerful - my mind is still buzzing thinking about all that can be done with Pipes. I think some of the terminology needs to be cleared up, there needs to be a better introduction on the main page - but besides that this product is fantastic. It was inevitable that such a product would be released, and it is very good for Yahoo! that they managed to be the first of the big web companies to release such a product. The fact that they include Google Base as a default source in Pipes shows that the web is much more about interoperability than the desktop ever was or ever will be.

See Anil Dash, Tim O’Reilly and Jeremey Zawodny for more.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/87991940/

Facebook released an API last year and new startup Mosoto is putting it to good use. Mosoto is a Flex 2.0 application that sits on top of your Facebook account via the API and allows you to share files, chat with friends, and discover new ones. The app has a desktop layout, where you control different mini applications for sharing files, chatting, discovering friends, and sharing music.

The chat client controls most of the action, listing which of your Facebook friends, friends of friends, and Facebook networks you’ve joined. By hovering over the names, Mosoto alerts you to the similarities between your profiles. If you find someone that looks interesting, you can befriend and poke them right through the chat window. Chatting is one on one, with groups of friends, or even all of your friends within a network.

From within the chat roster, you can share files with your friends using a free 1GB Box.net account. You can share and open files like pictures, songs, and videos using their in-browser file list and file viewers. The most interesting type of file sharing Mosoto does is with music. Mosoto lets you upload songs into your Box account and string them together in play lists your friends can play through and remix. The music player lists all the music and lists your friends have, and lets you mix songs from your friends accounts into your own play lists.

Mosoto is looking to release in the middle of March, but is still taking beta testers through their Facebook group. The project is self funded and was created by a of a team of five recent University of Arizona graduates: Girard Kelly, Seth Lesky, Louis Tran, Srinivasan Chandrasekharan, and Paul Chung.

See the video below for a great overview of the product, with the cheesiest background music ever.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/87988386/