Ajax Girl

Kaneva is a new social network that extends the concept of MySpace into a virtual world. Although you’ve been able to sign up for a 2D profile on Kaneva they recently opened the doors to their 3D world. The idea is that users can create personal profile pages in the 2D space, like MySpace, but also carry out the same personalization to their virtual world apartments.

The social networking site is chock full of all of MySpace’s main features: friends, photos, videos, messages, groups, and personal blogs. Kaneva also gives you control over what your home site and profile look like, using an AJAX editor to drop modules into the page. If you really feel like replicating your MySpace’s horrid layout, you can also dress your profile in straight CSS. Here’s and example profile. Unlike MySpace, Kaneva also includes a voting system, called “raves”, to mark the best profiles, groups, photos, and videos.

The virtual world has a kind of Sims or There.com look to it. The architecture of the world is based on warping to different public locations (mall, club…) and your personal apartment. Goods are purchased with a virtual currency. The site gives you some basic hair, color, body, and shape customizations for you avatar, but still has a way to go in order to catch up with the more established SecondLife and There. Your personal apartment serves as your “3D profile”, which you can decorate and use to host parties. However, the really interesting part is how Kaneva ties together their 2D and 3D worlds. Users can not only decorate their apartment with TVs and photo frames, but also fill those items with content from the site so that you could have your virtual friends over to watch your favorite viral video (click on the screen shot to the left and note the music video playing in the background). Groups created on Kaneva’s site can carry their meetings out in the virtual world. Kaneva is also working on a quest engine to incorporate games into the world, which will be essential to its success. Currently you can only chat, dress up, and do some basic animations, which is not enough to contend with the alternatives of just chatting online or the more complex game of dress-up SecondLife suppots.

Kaneva gives a good twist on social networking, drawing in the younger, non-gamer MySpace crowd into virtual worlds. However, they still have a lot of room to catch up with the established virtual worlds.

var so = new; SWFObject(”http://www.kaneva.com/flash/omm/OMM.swf?v=3&startMe=http://www.kaneva.com/services/omm/request.aspx%3ftype%3d1%26assetId%3d-388921&autoStart=false&detailMode=false”, “MediaPlayer”, “275 “, “242″, “8″, “#ffffff”); so.addVariable(”quality”, “high”); so.addParam(”loop”, “true”); so.write(”o99″);

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/102320958/

Digg revolutionized social bookmarking when it launched in 2004. Since then, it has become the undisputed champ of link ranking sites. They just recently crossed the million mark. And their influence goes far beyond those user registration numbers.

Tangible evidence of Digg’s importance: the raw number of clones and Digg gaming schemes out there. We’ve seen rigging, vote buying, profile sales, and accusations of thug rule. The dozens of clones include a not-bad SourceForge project called Pligg, which lets users “build their own Digg”.

But Digg’s ubiquity and influence doesn’t mean it’s perfect. A number of startups are tackling the same problem as Digg - sharing of good content via link submission and some form of voting. One of them, stumbleupon, actually has more registered users than Digg. For the most part, though, these sites won’t be able to do much damage to Digg’s steady growth. But many of them are worth looking at, and they all have individual features that could, if incorporated into Digg, make it a better overall service.

BlinkList
BlinkList takes a distributed approach to the Digg model. It lets anyone get their own link blog where they can add their favorites. BlinkList then looks across the whole network and ranks the site based on how many other users added the link.

ClipMarks
Instead of full URLs, Clipmarks lets users share just the best parts of webpages. Using their plugin, you can bundle together your favorite selections of content from a webpage. This includes text as well as pictures and video. Submissions are then “popped” by other members of the community, with the most popular at the top. Using the plugin, you can also submit your clips to your blog. Currently, the site’s two pane page layout gives me the feeling of looking at the net through a steamship porthole.

CoRank
CoRank confronts the mob mentality on Digg. Digg promotes stories to the front page based on the votes of the whole community, resulting in a lot of noise for users with interests different from the crowd. CoRank lets you look at all submitted links or filter out the noise by subscribing links from just the users you choose. Only the highest rated stories from your subscribed sources make your front page.

Netscape
Netscape has also taken on Digg’s mob mentality, mixing in their own team of anchors to submit stories and cut out spam. The anchor’s stories are featured on the front page along with the current top 25 stories. They also got into a little hot water with their recruitment practices. Netscape has managed a greater variety of content in it’s front page, pulling 2 stories from each of the top 10 most popular channels and 1 story from each of the next 5 most popular channels.

Newsvine
Instead of a submission free-for-all, Newsvine implemented it’s own form of quality control by only allowing users to vote on content from the Associated Press. Users are given a live feed of all the latest AP stories, voting on an writing about them on their personal column page. Newsvine shares 90% of all revenue generated by advertisements on your column page with the user.

OpenServing
OpenServing is a product of Wikia, and the opensource version of BlinkList works for fun or profit. The concept is the same, a personal page of links, democratically ranked by your friends, but it also lets you post your own ads on the site.

Reddit
Reddit made headlines when Conde Nast acquired them. The site is a favorite of mine and is still up and running, with some key differences from Digg. Reddit rankings are based on an absolute vote (+1 for hot, -1 for cold), meaning a story can dance up and down Reddit’s top page instead of being buried out of existence by a few power users. To see what’s on top now, there’s also a “hot” list. This type of voting system also means the front page can be stagnant, to the chagrin of some users, but it has also avoided Digg’s payola scandals. Another bigger differentiator for Reddit is their recommended article page, which suggests links based on your voting pattern.

Spotback
Spotback is an automated alternative to Digg, that aims to use personalization to improve the signal to noise ratio of the stories you see. You train Spotback by clicking and voting on the stories it digs up. Voting positively on a story causes Spotback to reveal the next most relevant story. One of the best parts about Spotback is that it doesn’t even require a registration to get up and running.

Spotplex
Spotplex is another automated link site that automatically submits stories from blogs carrying its badge. Stories are then ranked on the Spotplex homepage based in part on how many views the article generates (the algorithm is still being tweaked). The site’s automation and closely controlled blogroll seems has avoided the types of rigging Digg was subjected to, but it lacks the community of commentors that make these social media sites addictive.

StumbleUpon
StumbleUpon provides a different user experience while discovering and digging up links. You use a tooblar (FF & IE) to tag, submit, and vote for links. While the site does rank links the main experience is by taking a random walk around the internet. It keys in on Diggs greatest strength, an easily accessible constant stream of interesting links. StumbleUpon is definitely catching on, they recently surpassed 2 million users.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/102291930/

Despite the sarcasm of the title, I’m pretty excited to hear that, in celebration of the 50th anniversary of Gumby, all 200+ Gumby episodes will soon be available in full length on YouTube, AOL and other video sites. Each episode includes the original soundtrack and has been digitally remasterd by Art Clokcey, the son of Gumby creator Joe Clokey. The first Gumby episode, Gumby on the Moon, is here.

I grew up on this stuff.

Sharing of Gumby videos has been turned off on YouTube, so no embedding on other sites. I embedded the classic Saturday Night Live skit instead.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/102276454/

Get-organized-now hysteria

“In the electronic, gadgetized age of e-mail, BlackBerrys and ever-more-sophisticated desktop software—all designed theoretically to manage digital information efficiently—we’ve become overwhelmed. That’s where the productivity industry comes in. The question is, however, whether this newfound emphasis on productivity is helping—or just making us crazier.”

Detect available fonts using JavaScript and CSS

“I wrote a JavaScript code which can be used to guess if a particular font is present in a machine. This may be help of desktop-like web application developers when they want to provide different skins or fonts preferences to their users.”

Tim Cook on Apple, iPhone, Apple TV

“I can’t stress this enough, the thing separates Apple from others is that we have this very simple culture. Our company revolves around product and we focus on making the very best…We believe in giving people great value. Many companies put a computer out and its not what the customer really wants, so they have to add this and that (wireless, video camera). The customer winds up having to jump through many hoops before they finally get something that they think they want and it, unfortunately, doesn’t really work that well, then. We don’t do that.”

The graphic design of Idiocracy

“The movie spares no detail in the satire of branding and graphic design, turning every logo, sign and poster into a dumbed-down, Web 2.0-ish, futuristic-looking style that may come sooner than 500 years from now…Idiocracy displays some of the best graphic humor to appear in a feature film. Here are some of my favorite screen-captured moments.”

A "bedouin" is someone who transforms a laptop, cell phone and coffeehouse into an office

“A new breed of worker, fueled by caffeine and using the tools of modern technology, is flourishing in the coffeehouses of San Francisco. Roaming from cafe to cafe and borrowing a name from the nomadic Arabs who wandered freely in the desert, they’ve come to be known as “bedouins.” San Francisco’s modern-day bedouins are typically armed with laptops and cell phones, paying for their office space and Internet access by buying coffee and muffins.”

The Web 2.0 Bubble

“There are some similarities between the current ‘bubble’ and the last one that burst in 2000. Lots of incomplete and underexperienced teams, business models based more on eyeballs than cash flow, and a rash of incremental and ‘me too’ deals.”

Eyetracking shows decorative images are wasted space

“Users treat pages with superfluous images like obstacle courses: The images create barriers to content…If an article is about a signature meal at a restaurant, say a tuna dish, display a scrumptious-looking picture of the plate of food. Don’t show a generic picture of a spoon and fork, as many sites do.” [via JK]

Do page views still matter?

“Ajax is enabling flashier, more convenient sites. It’s also contributing to Yahoo’s decline in page views, a yardstick long used for bragging rights and advertising sales. ‘These technologies have outgrown the metrics.’” [tx CSJ]

Larry Page and Eric Schmidt offer tips for entrepreneurs

Tip 1: Just don’t settle. Especially with employees, it is very important to find great people you are compatible with. Tip 2: There is a benefit from being real experts. Experience pays off. Tip 3: Have a healthy disregard for the impossible. Stretch your goals. Tip 4: It is OK to solve a hard problem. Solving hard problems is where you will get the big leverage. Tip 5: Don’t pay attention to the VC Bandwagon. Don’t start a company just because you can, have a really good idea that is good regardless of the funding situation.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/325-sunspots-the-bedouin-edition

It must be Friday. Web-O-Random is a new website I created to spend hours exploring random websites the Ajax way ;). A list of URLs is fetched from the server, placed into an animated carousel/slider component, and you can then navigate through the carousel to preview the websites.

Technologies:

• Server is Rails-based, accessing URLs from the Open Directory Project (as Active Records). Uses the Prototype Carousel component by Sebastien Gruhier, in turn based on Yahoo!’s carousel Scriptaculous is used for some effects.
• URLs are fetched via JSON calls.
• As with WebWait, site is loaded into an IFrame with event handler to determine when it’s been loaded (in Firefox).

More info in this blog post and the FAQ.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/web-o-random-random-website-viewer

Nich Tyrrell of InTime Games created a new Ajax site with a strange name indeed… Eat Poop U Cat.

The site uses a combination of Google Web Toolkit, Amazon S3, and Amazon EC2, along with an in browser drawing utility that uses the Canvas element to get it all working. Its an online version of a party game similar to the game of telephone only using pictures and sentences.

So, you can go online, put in a random sentence, and people will start drawing a cartoon off of it.

TGIF.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/ajax-version-of-telephone-game

In my recent post on current concerns with Ajax, there was a comment about lack of documentation for Dojo and Prototype. In the comments (of the Ajaxian post and my blog post), project members asked what would you like to see wrt documentation?

Here’s my wishlist for Ajax framework docs, in particular Dojo and Prototype:

• Project/documentation portal A single page linking to all relevant documentation, with simple categories.
• Task-based. Documentation based on typical tasks users (developers) need to perform, not just a walkthrough of the API. The Yahoo! UI docs is a good example of this. Dojo has a few tutorial-style articles that approach what I’m talking about, but not enough components are covered.
• API reference Less important to me, but in an ideal world, there would be accessible documentation on every class/function.
• User-commentable PHP leads the way here, with the official API docs allowing user comments at the bottom (example). No-one can anticipate all the issues that will arise, so why not open up docs to the developer community? Allowing user comments is also an easy way to help keep the docs up to date (if something of a compromise.) It could also be done as a wiki, if the wiki is managed well. (The Rails wiki is a good example of a well-maintained wiki that receives frequent contributions from people in the know.)
• Up to date This one is more difficult for open-source projects, so realistically it has to be considered a nice-to-have at best.
• SEO’d So I can google for a component name and easily find the official docs for it.

I believe we have some good examples of docs in the Yahoo! UI library, Scriptaculous (which includes Prototype sort of), and Mochikit, and probably many others too. Prototype also has the benefit of being included in many Rails books. Dojo is an excellent library, and would probably be used a lot more if some work was done on the documentation side.

What’s on your Ajax doc wishlist?

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/docs-for-dojo-prototype-others

Adam Burmister sent us what he calls “The Worst Application of JavaScript Ever”. Perfect for a Friday

He has built something “nobody will ever need a JavaScript based ray-tracer. The point of the exercise was actually to learn more about the Canvas HTML element, and ray tracing techniques, not JavaScript.”

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/javascript-ray-tracing

Have you ever wanted to do something with ajax but didnt want to code it yourself or pay to have it coded for you? Check out MiniAjax.com Here is a list of a few things they have for download:

- Prototype Windows
- Ajax Star Rating Bar
- Site Heatmapping Script
- GrayBox Popup Script
- Bubble Tool Tips
- Ajax Tabs Script
- Ajax Poller Script
- Ajax Pie and Donut Chart Script
- Ajax Form Validation Script

And much, much more. Check it out now.

Ryan Johnson has created unobtrusive JavaScript tabs called Control Tabs.

The project uses Prototype / Scriptaculous. You create the tabs using standard
anchors and named elements, so it’s completely accessible to non JS
browsers.

Example

Full Usage

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/unobtrusive-control-tabs