Ajax Girl

Vivek, over at Startup Squad, recently discovered a new social network and social networking meta search engine, Streakr. The main URL still says the site is coming soon. The new engine lets you search the profiles on the major networks (MySpace, Hi5, Bebo, and Facebook) as well at it’s own social network. It appears to be a hook to draw people into their main service, like Wink did when they launched their own profile search and Rapleaf had with UpScoop. Profile management tool ProfileLinker also has a search engine.

Streakr’s social network is like Delicious for cool kids and is a less flashy take on Trig. It includes a profiles, a toolbar, and a stumble upon feature that lets you flip through links in a given category. Here’s the one for video.

The profiles look a lot like MySpace, consisting of the usual details, about me, photos, and seizure inducing layouts. Xenia is Streakrs’ Tom. However, where MySpace puts a blog and comments, Streakr puts in favorite links and your “thumbs up” rating for each. You can input the links into your profile manually, or use the Streakr toolbar to add links to your profile and vote on them. The toolbar also provides an interface to all the other functionality on the main site, and is currently only for IE, requires the .NET framework, and takes forever and a day to download and install.

There are a couple other sites with social networking meta search. Here’s the lowdown on a few:

Wink
Wink is fast and simple. It searches Friendster, MySpace, Bebo, LinkedIn, and Live Spaces. It also has advanced search features, like location, sex, status, age, and interests. It also lets you narrow your search by those fields after your first search.

ProfileLinker
ProfileLinker is the most comprehensive search engine, with 84 social networking sites including general, blog, cultural, dating, professional, student, and special interest networks. Unfortunately you have to log in to use it.

UpScoop
UpScoop comes ahead in ease of use. Unlike the others, UpScoop searches by email based on all the contacts in your address book. It searches Bebo, Classmates, Ecademy, Flickr, Friendster, Hi5, Livejournal, Multiply, MySpace, Ringo, Tickle, Tribe, Yelp, Mog, and LinkedIn. While it finds the vast majority of your friends off the bat, some drawbacks are that it can take UpScoop up to a couple hours to search for the last few and the need to hand over your email credentials.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/102052939/

Not for the first time, alternative models to page views are in the news.

This time, comScore has announced a new “visits” metric. “AJAX” is cited as one of the motivations.

comScore Media Metrix today released its monthly analysis of U.S. consumer activity at top online properties and categories for February 2007 and introduced a new suite of metrics based on site visits. The visits metric, defined as the number of times a unique person accesses content within a Web entity with breaks between access of at least 30 minutes, is a way of measuring the frequency with which a person views content, thereby illustrating a key component of user engagement. Included among the new suite of metrics are: total visits, average minutes per visit, average visits per visitor, and average visits per usage day.

As technologies like AJAX change the Internet landscape, certain measures of engagement, such as page views, are diminishing in significance for many Web properties, said Jack Flanagan, executive vice president of comScore Media Metrix. The introduction of these new metrics based on visits provides an alternative for measuring user engagement that tells us how frequently visitors are actually returning to the site to view more content.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/visits-not-page-views

This morning Grouper sent social search engine Searchles a C&D letter and, of course, it was published to the web. Here’s Searchles’ response. Grouper doesn’t like Grouper videos being streamed on the site’s new Searchles TV product. Grouper’s main complaint deals with the re-skinning of the the videos in the Searchles player, which removes their branding and feedback features.

If complaints like this have any teeth, it bodes badly for media remixers such as the video multimedia player Splashcast and Cuts‘ video editor.

The C&D letter is posted below:

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/102015180/

Back in September we reported that MySpace had begun allowing artists to sell music directly using SNOCAP MyStores. The service utilizes MP3s without DRM of any kind. Due to the DRM-free format, was unclear at the time whether or not MySpace and SNOCAP would strike a deal with any major labels, as they typically prefer to keep their tracks closer to the chest.

All of that changed today, however, with a major announcement from SNOCAP out of SXSW. The company revealed today that it would now be offering tracks from major indie labels like Sub Pop, New Line and Dangerbird. While this seems innocuous enough at first glance, I should point out that all of these labels operate under the Warner umbrella, making the announcement far more savory.

Perhaps I’m being overeager in my assessment, but I envision this as a key break in the DRM-dam. A vast army of listeners get their music from MySpace and I’m certain that, with it offering DRM-free copies of popular musicians, this number will grow exponentially. I’m confident that we’ll begin seeing far more announcements from major labels in the very near future.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/101959699/

This is the final preview before we launch Highrise. In this preview we’ll talk about Cases.

What are cases
Cases help you keep related notes, files, images, and people together on one screen. You can add notes directly on a case or attach a note you’ve entered on a person page to a case.

Attaching a note to a case
When you enter a note on a person page you are given the option to also attach it to a case. The note will then appear on the person’s page and also on the case page.

That note is now added to the case:

The Case
Here’s what a case might look like:

If a note is attached to a person and a case the person is also listed in the sidebar of the case. This allows you to see who’s part of the case.When would you use a case?
Cases are really helpful when you have to keep related communications together from multiple people. For example, if you are working on setting up health insurance for your company you may keep healthcare-related communications from your insurance salesperson, payroll company, and accountant together in a case called “Health Care Communications.” The flexibility is fit for almost anything when multiple people or companies are involved in/about something together.

Fun with cases
Imagine if Hillary Clinton and John McCain were using Highrise. Now imagine they each made a case to keep ideas and communications about the candidates from the opposite party. Here’s what it might look like.

Hillary’s case on the Republican candidates…

John’s case on the Democratic candidates…

Launch around the corner
Assuming everything is on track, launch is right around the corner. Stay tuned. Hundreds of golden tickets will be going out this weekend as well. If you want to sign up for a change to get one, get your email address on the announcement list.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/324-preview-8-highrise-cases

We have been talking about how the desktop and web experiences are converging, and Jeff Atwood is asking Are Web Interfaces “Good Enough”?

His example is µTorrent, and how the new web UI is so similar to the downloadable version:

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/are-web-interfaces-good-enough

Jingle Networks, operator of the 1-800-Free-411 service, just announced that they now control 6% of the U.S. market in 411 calls. This is up from 1.5% a year ago.

About 2.6 billion 411 calls are made in the U.S. each year, and is a $7 billion/year market. Jingle reports that they received 17 million calls in February, and have had 170 million calls total (they just recently announced their 100 millionth call last November).

The company has raised a boatload of cash - over $60 million to date - and AT&T recently started competing with them.

Jingle makes money from short advertisements played to the caller before the requested phone number is delivered. Given their stellar growth, many consumers are obviously willing to give up 12 seconds of their life to avoid 411 fees that range up to $3 per call.

Last October I interviewed Jingle CEO George Garrick and investor Josh Kopelman. Listen to the podcast over at TalkCrunch.

On a related note, Tellme’s new mobile voice activated 411 product is also free and absolutely stunning.

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/~3/101946447/

Auto-pilot often comes at a cost: It puts a layer between you and what you’re building.

In “Creating Short Films for the Web,” Hillman Curtis writes about shooting in manual:

Another goal I set for myself was to become comfortable enough with the camera to shoot in manual. This meant switching everything “auto” on the camera off: auto focus, auto zoom, auto iris and shutter speed, an auto white balance. This can be risky when you are new to using a camera: you might misfocus or forget to check your white balance as the light changes. But with manual you can dial in a much richer shot, and it forces you to stay connected with your camera throughout the shoot.

For similar reasons, we often choose to pull out the machete and chop our own path in software development. Programmers write code in text editors, instead of integrated development environments, so they can better feel the pulse of the code. Designers code HTML/CSS by hand too. Also, we answer every support email ourselves because farming support out would put us that much further away from our customers.

Every time you outsource something, put something on automatic, or get software to do it for you, you put up another layer. After a while, these layers add up. They blur your vision. You lose touch with the core of what you’re doing. Like Hillman says, shooting in manual lets you dial in a much richer shot.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/321-auto-mode-vs-shooting-manual

News is just breaking that Cisco has agreed to aquire WebEx for $3.2 billion in cash. In 2006, WebEx generated nearly $50 million in profit on $380 million in revenue. They have $300 million or so in cash on hand, so the net deal value is $2.9 billion.

Webex is still ubiquitous (I am asked to view a WebEx presentation almost daily), but it’s expensive and bulky. And if you aren’t on a newish Windows PC, there’s a good chance it isn’t going to work properly. WebEx is exactly the kind of a company that is being disrupted by new web startups, who are creating cheaper and better alternatives to older web applications.

A bunch of startups have launched over the last year to provide cheaper and more flexible alternatives, including open source “clones” of WebEx functionality. Teamslide, DimDim (open source), 1videoconference (open source), Vyew, Live Meeting and SlideShare are all competitive with WebEx in one way or another, and all are better at cross platform collaboration.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/101920078/

A development pow wow in the conference room. Note how Sam doesn’t need his computer. He programs in his brain.

Headphone time for Jason and Ryan.

The view from outside. (This photo by DjD.)

You can see the entire office in the Coudal film Copy Goes Here.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/313-photos-of-37signals-hq