Ajax Girl

A Goldman Sachs trader in the UK named “Charlie” was warned by his employer that his visits to Facebook on company time were to stop. He spent, apparently, over 500 hours on Facebook in a six month period. That works out to about 4 hours per day.

Unwisely, perhaps, Charlie posted the warning email on his Facebook account, saying “It’s a measure of how warped I’ve become that, not only am I surprisingly proud of this, but in addition, the first thing I did was to post it here, and that losing my job worries me far less than losing facebook ever could.”

Indeed.

I really wish I was a Facebook stockholder.

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/~3/100623730/

AT&T turned the Wall Street Journal (behind paywall) into a marketing tool today, planting a story that it’s long and successful DSL partnership with Yahoo is in jeopardy. Yahoo needed this like they needed a hole in their head, as CEO Terry Semel is still reeling from a recent stockholder action calling for his immediate dismissal.

At stake is $250 million/year in high margin revenue for Yahoo, which receives a monthly fee for every AT&T SBC DSL subscriber from the joint venture. AT&T wants all, or at least more, of that revenue to stay with them, and today’s threats are the first public volley in renegotiations around the deal. The current deal terminates in 2008.

From the article:

AT&T now wants to overhaul its Yahoo deal, according to a person familiar with the issue. Instead of paying Yahoo a percent of the revenue from its broadband business, AT&T wants to offer Yahoo only a cut of revenue from the sale of products Yahoo provides, such as from its music and photo services, this person says.

One reason AT&T now believes it shouldn’t have to share broadband subscription revenue is that the phone company has been approached by other Internet companies offering to pay to reach its broadband customers, says the person. Google over the past year has played a high-profile role in paying companies that help expand its online services and advertising. Those offers, bankrolled by Google’s Internet ad success, have roiled the market for deals structured like Yahoo and AT&T’s — as Google pays partners rather than charges them.

And while this article was clearly planted by AT&T execs, the companies official position remains that the deal is “the most successful partnership in the industry.”

Why, then, has AT&T “quietly painted over its colorful vans, expunging the Yahoo logo; the vans now sport AT&T’s new blue insignia alone”?

$2.2 billion in Yahoo market cap vaporized today, as the stock fell over 5%. What’s at stake here is more than Semel’s job. For Yahoo to stay an independent company, some good news needs to break. The barely suppressed whispers around silicon valley suggest that if the stock falls further and stays there, Yahoo will become acquisition fodder for Microsoft or others.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/100601093/

AT&T turned the Wall Street Journal (behind paywall) into a marketing tool today, planting a story that it’s long and successful DSL partnership with Yahoo is in jeopardy. Yahoo needed this like they needed a hole in their head, as CEO Terry Semel is still reeling from a recent stockholder action calling for his immediate dismissal.

At stake is $250 million/year in high margin revenue for Yahoo, which receives a monthly fee for every AT&T SBC DSL subscriber from the joint venture. AT&T wants all, or at least more, of that revenue to stay with them, and today’s threats are the first public volley in renegotiations around the deal. The current deal terminates in 2008.

From the article:

AT&T now wants to overhaul its Yahoo deal, according to a person familiar with the issue. Instead of paying Yahoo a percent of the revenue from its broadband business, AT&T wants to offer Yahoo only a cut of revenue from the sale of products Yahoo provides, such as from its music and photo services, this person says.

One reason AT&T now believes it shouldn’t have to share broadband subscription revenue is that the phone company has been approached by other Internet companies offering to pay to reach its broadband customers, says the person. Google over the past year has played a high-profile role in paying companies that help expand its online services and advertising. Those offers, bankrolled by Google’s Internet ad success, have roiled the market for deals structured like Yahoo and AT&T’s — as Google pays partners rather than charges them.

And while this article was clearly planted by AT&T execs, the companies official position remains that the deal is “the most successful partnership in the industry.”

Why, then, has AT&T “quietly painted over its colorful vans, expunging the Yahoo logo; the vans now sport AT&T’s new blue insignia alone”?

$2.2 billion in Yahoo market cap vaporized today, as the stock fell over 5%. What’s at stake here is more than Semel’s job. For Yahoo to stay an independent company, some good news needs to break. The barely suppressed whispers around silicon valley suggest that if the stock falls further and stays there, Yahoo will become acquisition fodder for Microsoft or others.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/100601093/

Waxxi, an interactive podcast where people can call in and join the discussion, has just announced that they’ll be talking with Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales on April 5. If you want to be a part of it, register now. Only the first hundred or so people can participate.

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/~3/100584726/

For demo purposes, we’ve had to populate Highrise with a bunch of fake people. Here are some of the sites we used to save time and increase randomness while creating these make-believe contacts:

The Random Name Generator pulls first and last names from a couple of genealogy sites. Some fun ones that turned up: Garfield Morland, Juniper Pinney, Keaton Dimsdale, and Seymour Zeal.

A search for “John Smith” at whitepages.com provides addresses and phone numbers (we change the street and phone numbers by a couple of digits).

Plambeck.org has a company name generator that serves up choices like Sems Research, Cadridium, Nated Design, etc. 2robots.com also offers a Random Business Name Generator.

For job titles, The Economic Research institute has a huge list. And there’s also GigantaMegaCorp’s Job Title Generator which spits out random ones like Inter Purchasing Planner, Senior Engineering Associate, and Foreign Information Processor.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/311-making-random-contacts

There’s a new version of the CrunchBoard job board - we’ve ripped out our custom code and replaced it with the new Edgeio marketplaces product.

Edgeio is a company that I co-founded, and I spent a lot of time with them working on the product features to make sure it was perfect for us and other sites that want to have their own classifieds site. They’ll customize the page to have the same look and feel as your main site, and handle all of the logistics, customer service and payment issues. They charge a flat 20% of gross fees generated if you choose to charge for listings, otherwise the product is free.

One feature edgeio has that we’ve already implemented - the ability to cross promote other job boards on your own. So in the process of listing a job, I can ask the lister if they would like to also list their job on another edgeio-powered board, optionally for an additional fee. If the lister chooses to do that, the fee is split between me and the other job board any way we want to split it.

Another feature, not yet launched, is an affiliate program. When that is launched other sites can become affiliates of edgeio powered sites, and receive a commission for selling listings. There will be both a widget and simple link option for affiliates. I’ll be adding this as well as soon as it’s available, and giving away a third or so of the fees to affiliates.

We’ll also now be expanding Crunchboard to other types of relevant listings as well. More on that later.

The important thing for us is to provide relevant job listings for new startups, and get employers and employees together as easily as possible. edgeio is letting us do that, without the hassle of managing all of the bugs and hassles inherent in maintaining your own code.

Note: There are lots of excellent other job board providers to choose from (I wrote about many of them here), and I am clearly conflicted in choosing edgeio. Still, I think the pricing and flexibility to expand beyond job listings into a customized craigslist-type site for any kind of listings makes it a good choice.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/100548460/

John-David Dalton has spent some time compressing Prototype in a couple of ways to keep your download time to a minimum.

His package is a collection of Prototype versions 1.4, 1.5rc0, 1.5rc1, 1.5 final, and it includes original, formatted (proper semicolons, helpful for others who want to compress it), compressed, and ultraCompressed files. There is also a gzipped version of each library.

He managed to get it down to 14.4kb.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/compressed-versions-of-prototype

I have recently had quite a few people talking about how they like GWT but with they could get out of the Java box to delve into JavaScript for some low level work.

The assumption was that you cannot do this with GWT and that if you run against the abstraction barrier you are hosed.

There is actually a way to embed your own JavaScript directly.

JSNI has a similar name to JNI but isn’t as hairy, although it does have a creative hack.

To implement JSNI the GWT team overloaded the term native and used it for their own good:

Take a close look. Sneaky huh? The $wnd variable is your link to the window object, and if you need the DOM you simply use $doc.

The piece of JSNI that looks a little like JNI is how you access Java methods and fields directly from JavaScript.

Before you run off and start writing reams of JavaScript code, remember why you are using GWT in the first place, and use this as a last resort.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/javascript-native-interface-jsni-in-gwt

The less people are aware of you, the better idea it is to give your product away

“A lot has to do with the ratio of possible consumers of the free product who might be converted to paying customers to the total market size. If I have awareness with .01% of the target market, giving copies away to raise awareness to 10% of the market, where 10% of those might convert (1% total) is a good deal. But if I have awareness with 60% of the target market, and give my product away, with a 10% conversion rate, I’ve lost a great deal.”

Incomprehensible intersections

Photos of traffic-routing gems.

Software development “inventory”

“In software development, inventory is anything that you’ve started and you haven’t gotten done. It’s ‘partially done’ work. In manufacturing if you start making something and it is in-process, it’s not sold, it is inventory. In development it’s the same thing. If you started developing something and it’s not done, it is inventory. What you’re trying to do Lean software development is the least amount of ‘partially done’ work as possible. You want to go from understanding what you’re supposed to do to having it done and deployed and in somebody’s hands as rapidly as possible.” [tx PA]

Marko Karppinen’s CSS column exercise

Click the icons on the upper right to change the number of columns and justification.

The meaning of “The Medium is the Message”

“It is only too typical that the ‘content’ of any medium blinds us to the character of the medium.’ And it is the character of the medium that is its potency or effect – its message.”

Soigné = make it perfect

“When you have a really important diner – an influential food critic, a chef you admire, anyone the higher ups deem to be important – the soigné level rises to something absurd like “super soigné.” Anything short of culinary perfection means certain death for a cook…Poor orders were not considered – no sauce on the side people, no special requests, no well-done meats. If they didn’t know how to eat, they weren’t going to appreciate what we were putting on their plates.” [via JK]

The command line comeback

“Standard GUIs, with their drop down menus, check buttons, and tree-lists just cannot compare to the range of options that a text interface gives effortlessly. In just five alphanumeric characters, you can choose one out of 100,000,000 possible sequences. And choosing any one sequence is just as fast as any other sequence (typing five characters takes roughly 1 second). I challenge you to come up with a non text-based interface that can do as well.”

The value of solving hard problems on your own

“A lot of investors and advisors will tell entrepreneurs to do the least amount of work possible, so that they can get going quickly. You can get going more quickly this way, but then you’re stuck trying to build a real business, instead of just a thin UI on top of someone else’s business. If you’re making all your money off of AdSense (and you’re not Google!), who really owns the relationship with your customers? Most people don’t think this way, and they should.”

Honda and speed

“When we do anything, even though it may appear on the surface to be an advantage, we think about how it’s going to affect customers upstream and downstream. If what I do saves me five minutes but causes the customer downstream 15 to 20 minutes of extra work, then it’s not a good idea.”

Where's Digg for photos?

“Digg users have begun calling with increased volume for the creation of a special section of the site designated for photographs and pictures. Two requests to this effect have received more than 6 and 8 thousand diggs in the past 2 weeks. It’s hard to imagine that some sort of photo section of the wildly popular news site won’t be introduced soon.”

Videocracy

“Each weekday, The A.V. Club’s Videocracy chart combs the Internet to track the most-talked-about online video content. Drawing from YouTube, Google Video, ifilm, Super Deluxe, and other popular video sources, we figure out what the Internet is watching and bring it to you unfiltered.”

A.S.S. (Attention Surplus Syndrome)

“A disorder that allows people to reach goals and complete tasks. Also known as the opposite of A.D.D. Michelangelo probably had A.S.S.”

Bill Simmons on sports broadcasters: "Chemistry is 90% of the battle"

“It just boggles my mind that networks don’t value chemistry more. Every No. 1 announcing ‘team’ is more like a corporate merger: Al Michaels is a big name, John Madden is a big name, so of course they’re combined into MaddenMichaels. Meanwhile, the best 2006 NFL broadcast was the one ESPN threw together for a Raiders-Chargers game with a one-time crew that included Ron Jaworski and Dick Vermeil, two old friends. We felt like we were sitting on the sofa with them for three hours. I loved it. Why not hire more friends to announce together? Then we wouldn’t have so many teams sounding like they’re on an awkward blind date.”

Top 10 in-game dunks

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/306-sunspots-the-upstream-edition

Instacomment allows you to embed a link to a PHP script and some JavaScript to embed a comment system anywhere on your site.

The comment widget starts as a chicklet:

and when clicked on opens up into a comment view:

If you are looking to add a comment system to something that doesn’t bundle comments already, this is a simple solution.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/instacomment-add-comments-to-your-site