Ajax Girl

A new open source cross-site social networking service called Explode launched today and looks to me a like a very appealing alternative to the now Yahoo! owned MyBlogLog.  Built by UK open-source social network provider Curverider (whose primary product, Elgg, is similar to PeopleAggregator), Explode offers an embeddable widget that links out to users’ respective profile pages on any social network but allows commenting and befriending in one aggregated location.  I found Explode via Steve O’Hear’s The Social Web, one of my new favorite blogs.

Explode users can search for other users by interest tag, they can view each others’ Facebook style “comment walls,” and users can access their site’s traffic stats for free using the javascript widget that Explode provides.  Users of MySpace, Vox and other javascript hostile networking sites can post an image widget that simply links out to their page on Explode.  The javascript widget will display the most recent of a person’s friends to have done “something online” according to the least clear part of the service’s FAQ.  

MyBlogLog has been a fascinating success story - it’s very appealing to see the faces of people who have been reading your blog.  People are willing to expose a lot of personal information in exchange for the experience.  The service’s explosive growth, if you will, combined with its underlying data capture capabilities lead to a Yahoo! acquisition just months after launch.

Unfortunately MyBlogLog has been plagued by problems.  Spammers (nothing personal Mr. Online-Pharmacy, thanks for reading my blog) are relatively easy to block from your widget but identity problems have been a bigger challenge.  From my face appearing in comments left by my friend after I borrow his computer to my boss’s face appearing in comments I leave because we co-author the same blog to Michael Arrington’s dog’s face appearing next to comments I leave around the web for who knows what reason - MyBlogLog cookies have a tendency to get mixed up.  This months spate of random invitations to be added as co-author other users’ blogs was just the most recent issue.  On top of it all, I now find myself unable to gracefully deny having read a post on someone’s blog once my face has appeared in their sidebar.

Even if these problems were all solved, there’s a level of data capture by Yahoo! via the service, and subsequent lack of access on the part of users, that’s disconcerting.  You can opt out of a lot in MyBlogLog and still use the service, but it’s not at all obvious how to do so. An open source, community based alternative could prove very welcome.

Explode requires that users click a link on a site they visit in order to befriend that site’s author, unlike MyBlogLog’s default addition of users to a site’s community after a given number of visits to that site.  It would be nice if Explode allowed users to add each other as friends while on the Explode site and unless there’s good reason to prohibit it I expect this functionality will be added soon.

The idea of adding a cross-network friendship and commenting community isn’t a shocking innovation, but if Explode can implement it well then it could find strong support among users.  The creators of Explode report that they will soon implement widget skinning, OpenID and an API.  Explode is a simple system, but it solves a very clear problem of siloed social networks without asking people to abandon the services they are already invested in.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/93660356/

YUI 2.2.0 has been released one year after YUI was released into open source.

The major changes are:

• Versioning: 0.12.2 to 2.2.0: The new version syncs up the internal and external release numbers
• Browser History Manager: The YUI Browser History Manager supports all A-grade browsers in managing the back/forward button navigation and bookmarking
• DataTable Control: The DataTable control allows you to present tabular data and allow your user to engage that presentation by modifying/enhancing the data, sorting and searching through it, and adjusting the presentation itself.
• Button Control: Buttons are essential parts of most graphical interfaces, but the visual constraints of buttons in their various form-control implementations (submit buttons, radio buttons, check boxes, etc.) diminish their effectiveness in some applications. The Button Control provides a platform for implementing visually impactful buttons that range from standard click-to-navigate buttons to radio buttons and checkboxes to advanced split-buttons that can operate as both a button and a menu.
• New YAHOO.* properties: such as YAHOO.lang, YAHOO.env, and a YAHOO_config global

Congrats on the new release.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/yui-version-220-released

David Lindquist has created a new component for YUI called ColumnNav.

ColumNav is a hierarchical menu implementation utilizing Bill Scott’s Yahoo UI Carousel component. Content is loaded from an unordered list (in the form of a DOM object) and displayed in a scrollable viewport, similar to Column View in the Mac OS X Finder. Features include:

• infinite extensibility using Ajax to build sub-menus
• a highly customizable look and feel using CSS
• support for keyboard-only navigation (CTRL + arrow keys)
• cross-browser compatibility

It looks good and simple to use.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/columnnav-think-apple-heirarchical-menus

We’re seeing some smart people create very targeted web applications and flipping them just a couple of months after launching. First was MyBlogLog, which launched in October 2006 and was acquired by Yahoo just three months later for a reported $10 million.

Confabb may on an almost identical path. The company, which has created a social network around conferences, launched just three months ago. And from what we’re hearing, they are very close to being acquired in the next week, for $5 million or so. Look for founder and Chairman Salim Ismail to make an announcement about this at the Stirr event in Palo Alto tomorrow evening.

This is good news for Confabb’s angel investors, including Dave Winer and Andrew Rasiel, who put a total of $75,000 into the startup. And it’s even better news for Ismail, who needed a win after his last startup, PubSub, imploded due to founder conflicts.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/93548148/

IReader 2.0 is a semantic analysis and link preview tool that launched today. Syntactica, the company behind iReader, hopes the browser plug-in will bring its technology back to life after a previous incarnation as a search engine was allegedly shut down by Google. If you’ve seen CoolIris, Browster or Snap then you’re familiar with the idea of a browser plug-in that provides a preview of the page behind a link. What makes the iReader unique is that the software analyses the text behind the link and gives readers a handful of bullet points intended to summarize the most important parts of that text.

Compatible with IE or Firefox on Windows or Mac, the iReader installs very easily. It can be turned off at any time with a right click or control click. The program’s performance varies at launch; some summaries are good and some aren’t. The two second delay between hovering over a link and seeing the small pop-up window is probably unavoidable but is sometimes longer than I care to wait. Of course seeing a pop-up as soon as any link is passed over is annoying as well, so perhaps what’s at issue is that this whole class of tools is unappealing to me.

A quick test of the semantic analysis provides some interesting examples. The iReader does a great job of summarizing OpenID.net - perhaps that’s its true calling, who else do you know that can summarize OpenID clearly? Hovering over the company’s own link results in text with bad enough grammar that it’s distracting. A Google News link for “Brittany Spears Checks Into Rehab” gets no summary at all - perhaps that headline speaks for itself.

I’ll give the iReader an extended trial and perhaps it can surprise me. I can’t help but wonder what else its semantic analysis could better put to use for. (See the previous post on Adaptive Blue for an example of semantic analysis put arguably to better use.) In most cases, the title, context and URL that appears for a link when I hover over it provides sufficient preview for me.

It will be interesting to see what kinds of business models beyond obtrusive advertising emerge for services like this. Analytics could offer interesting opportunities, but pop-up previews could lead to an unhelpful reputation for intrusion that would leave users hesitant to willingly expose their traffic and attention data. Give me a readable summary of the text of all the links I’ve hovered and clicked in a day and I might be interested.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/93567649/

Semantic web Firefox plug-in provider Adaptive Blue announced today that the company has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Union Square Ventures.  The company’s product, called Blue Organizer, is a tagging and search tool with an incredible array of features and a focus on parsing the semantic meaning of web pages it interacts with.  Union Square Ventures is most well known for its funding of Del.icio.us prior to the Yahoo! acquisition.  The firm also invested in Feedburner.

Blue Organizer rolled out a series of upgrades this week as well; I reviewed the previous version of the product  here in November.

Adaptive Blue is a four person company that was founded one year ago and had been self funded by founder Alex Iskold.  The company’s big break came when the Blue Organizer was selected as an official recommendation on the Firefox 2.0 add-ons page.  User downloads grew from 20k prior to that listing to 130k in November to 340k today.  It’s interesting to see that growth rate has continued since the release of the latest Firefox version.

To get a good idea of Blue Organizer’s power, I recommend either trying the browser plug-in out or reading my previous review of it.  Below is a screenshot to give you a taste of what it looks like when I was on a web page containing a movie review and used Blue Organizer.  The product automatically determined that I was reading about a movie, who the stars of that movie were and what search options would be most relevant.   It’s very impressive, but my personal use of the web is focused enough on one topic that it’s topic discerning powers and vertical search are less relevant to me than they might be for more casual web users who read online about things like wine and books.

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/~3/93440064/

Kevin Rose, speaking here at the Future of Web Apps conference in London, just announced that Digg will adopt the OpenID decentralized digital identity platform. Don’t expect this right away though - adoption will begin “later this year” according to Rose.

It’s definitely time to declare OpenID a winner and the hope for a single-sign on world a reality. This Digg news comes just after Microsoft and AOL announced their support as well. Yahoo, LiveJournal, and Wikipedia are among the other services that have previously announced adoption.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/93408904/

Real estate search company Trulia announced the availability of its new API this morning as well as two interesting mashup examples made possible by that API.  Outside developers will now have access to the company’s real estate data and aggregate user search data.

To demonstrate the types of things made possible by the API, the Trulia team made available two interesting mashups they built themselves.  Plotornot (a play on HotorNot) correlates a variety of demographic information like gender, marital and income data for any state in the US.  TruliaHolic (presumably a play on Alexaholic given the similarities) provides visualization of the differences in average list prices and search popularity for any city or county in the US.  Real estate use of new web services is hot so I expect we’ll see any number of interesting uses of the new API on other sites.  

One of the most notable things about today’s announcement is that Trulia created its API with the assistance of Mashery, the API management service we profiled here in November.  Last week Mashery helped launch an API for traffic analytics service Compete and the company is working with three other companies on APIs that will be released soon.

One potentially mitigating factor is that the Trulia API is for noncommercial use only according to its terms of use.  Though terms like this are often considered open for interpretation, I was disappointed to see it.  Presumably though this is just a first step for the program; the company will likely increase its call limits (now only 1000 per day) and open itself to select commercial users in the future.  

Trulia’s major competitors in the real estate search space include Zillow, who released APIs of their own in October, the crowd sourced My-Currency (our coverage) and a host of others.  See our previous coverage of Trulia here.

Marshall Kirkpatrick is the Director of Content at SplashCast and will be assisting with TechCrunch while Michael Arrington travels.

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/~3/93395858/

VideoEgg and its content delivery network Akamai Technologies have announced this morning that the two companies have passed 3 million video uploads together.  Akami provides the webcam capture and video uploading service for users of some AOL sites, Bebo, hi5, Piczo, myYearbook, Dogster, Tagged and others.  

VideoEgg says it’s now serving 15 to 20 million video streams each day. US users consume about 230 million video streams per day, according to ComScore. You might remember that YouTube announced that it hit 100 million streams a day back in July. It’s bandwidth costs were already believed to be well more than $1 million per month by that time.

VideoEgg’s ad network, rolled out late last year and dubbed The Eggnetwork, claims to be the largest ad network for social media sites and it is undoubtedly substantial.  The company’s elegant and unobtrusive banner ads are a model that the rest of the industry is likely to follow.

The combination of white labeling video services for users and offering an ad network for B2B customers is a strategy that appears to be paying off uniquely well for VideoEgg.  It’s frequently discussed as a shining light in the video startup space that’s grown blurry post GooTube.

VideoEgg has received funding from August Capital, First Round Capital and Maveron.  The company was launched about 18 months ago by a team of Yale classmates whose decision to move to Silicon Valley was widely discussed as an example of the area’s continuing importance in the industry.

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/~3/93376096/

What Should I Say? is a new question and answers site that uses YUI, JSON, and other libraries to subtly use Ajax throughout.

An example check out the very visual sorting:

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/what-should-i-say