Ajax Girl

All web analytics track your activity somewhere along pipeline connecting your computer to a website’s server. Comscore tracks traffic trends on computers of 2 million users. Hitwise catches traffic at the ISP level and matches it up with demographic data they collected. Compete, Quantcast, and Alexa differ from these other web metrics companies by tracking traffic on the computers of users who installed their tool bars. Each of these services gauge critical marketing metrics such as unique visitors and page views.

However, some people argue that the page view is no longer a proper measure of a website’s heft. New web page design principles such as Flash and AJAX are making constant page requests obsolete. One of the most extreme examples of this phenomenon is Justin.TV where you can log on and never refresh the page. This is great news for web users, but it’s sowing confusion among advertisers over how to peg a site’s true advertising appeal.

Comscore has been evolving their metrics to keep up with the changes. They recently announced their “visit” metric after facing some heat by BusinessWeek over ranking MySpace above Yahoo’s in monthly page views last November. The visit metric was meant to gauge user engagement by counting the number of unique requests for a site at least a half hour from the last request. All those pesky MySpace page requests would be lumped into one visit, giving a fairer idea of how often each unique user was engaging with a website each month. It had the result they wanted, bumping Yahoo back on top.

Compete also has a visit metric. But today they also launched a new metric called “attention,” which argue see as a better measure of user engagement. Attention is the total amount of time U.S. users spend on a website as a percentage of total time spent on the Internet by all U.S. users. It’s analogous to Alexa’s reach metric, which tracks the number of visitors to a site as a percentage of total internet users. Compete’s attention metric is like airtime, whereas Alexa’s reach is more like audience size.

According to Compete, we spend about 1% of our internet time on YouTube. Compete also tracks the change in attention over time, called velocity, unique visitors per month, site visits, page views per visit, and average stay.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/106179775/

Subvert and Profit is the newest service to try to sell home page placement on Digg. Like User/Submitter and Spike the Vote before it (both now offline), the idea is to charge people for a digg vote (in this case, $1 per vote).

Digg users can sign up and will receive $.50 every time they digg a story (note: this is in clear violation of the Digg terms and conditions and many users who have joined similar gaming sites have been banned from the Digg).

The difference with Subvert and Profit is their positioning. People who want to get stories on the Digg home page are called “advertisers.” The site describes itself as “We allow advertisers to purchase actions on social networks” and says that they are “50 to 100 times more cost effective than conventional Internet advertising.”

The service also has an affiliate program of sorts. For every user you refer to the site, they will pay you 10% of that user’s earnings going forward.

No one has been able to set up a successful service to game digg so far. Users who signed up for User/Submitter were banned. SpiketheVote, which described itself as “bulletproof” was sold on ebay for $1,275 and the buyer then donated the domain name to Digg.

We’ll see how this one does.

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/~3/106142451/

If you’ve ever wanted to have your own mobile phone company, now you can. Sonopia launched today, and it allows anyone to create their own virtual mobile phone network in a couple of minutes (which I promptly did).

Sonopia uses Verizon to handle actual calls and data, and is effectively a reseller of their service. Users who set up a network for their affinity group (sports team, church, school, etc.) will receive 3-8% of the revenues generated from their customers (the % grows as the number of customers grows).

Users can choose from a few different phones and calling plans and can co-brand their own website to get people to sign up.

Almost as an afterthought, it seems, Sonopia tacked on social networking features to their site as well. Subscribers can add friends, create a profile, upload pictures and video from their phone, etc.

I came away disappointed in my testing of the site. Design and flow of the signup process isn’t thought through properly, and there is very little information available on the site for people who are thinking of creating a network. It took me only a couple of minutes to create my own mobile company, but when I was done I had a lot of questions left unanswered.

Small groups will be able to guilt/bully some of their members into switching from their existing carrier, but the site needs an overhaul before large number of subscribers will feel comfortable with the service.

The company was founded by Juha Christensen, a Symbian founder and the former head of Microsoft’s mobile division. The company has raised $9 million from venture firms ComVentures and Sevin Rosen.

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/~3/106135223/

ViddYou just launched their video blogging network today. According to Mefeedia, the majority of vlogging is taking place on people’s personal sites, which tend to be web shows like the late-great Ze Frank. The other, more personal, half is captured by social video sites. ViddYou is focusing on the latter category, enhancing and promoting the “Personal and Blog” section normally buried in social video sites like YouTube.

The site is based on a simple social network design, consisting of vlogs and communities. Vlogs keep track that users latest videos, friends, interests, and personal profile video. Communities bundle vloggers of similar interests together. Currently communities can only be created by the company, and are limited to the general, travel, music, and confessions.

The overall user experience is streamlined and straightforward. You can post videos to your vlog by recording them within the site’s widget on your webcam, or uploading them from a hand-held or mobile phone camera (via emailed MMS). You can even watch videos on your mobile phone if you have a 3GP video player installed. They’re currently limiting the videos to five minutes to discourage posting content illegally. Each video you upload can be rated, replied to (video or text), embedded, and accompanied by a set of Flickr photos placed below the recording.

We’ve seen a variety of other personal video services before: Vlip, Ustream, Stickam, Blip.tv, and the plethora of other social video sites. ViddYou focuses solely on vlogging instead of web shows; this helps differentiate it from these other services. Vlip consists of video comment threads (a bulletin board for video comments). Ustream and Stickam support live show streams. Blip.tv catalogs web shows, and other social video site tend to bury vlogs in a mountain of other videos.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/106127029/

Riding on the buzz behind its stellar tumblelogging network Tumblr and its web-based file distribution utility Senduit, the New York based web design company Davidville, Inc. is positioned to make an audible splash. Its solutions are designed with accessibility in mind, making them appealing to even the most basic of users.

Tumblr is a re-envisioning of tumblelogging, a subset of blogging that uses quick, mixed-media posts. The service hopes to do for the tumblelog what services like LiveJournal and Blogger did for the blog. The difference is that its extreme simplicity will make luring users a far easier task than acquiring users for traditional weblogging. Anytime a user sees something interesting online, they can click a quick “Share on Tumblr” bookmarklet that then tumbles the snippet directly. The result is varied string of media ranging links and text to pictures and videos that takes very little time and effort to maintain.

Having just celebrated its one month anniversary (it launched on March 1), Tumblr is already used by a growing legion that of over 50,000 users — and the numbers get more interesting from there. For every five users on Tumblr there is one post per hour. Although a Tumblr is conducive to mixed-media posts the creators were initially fearful that Tumblr would be heavily weighted toward only one or two of the available mediums. What they’re finding, however, is a healthy spread of all of the flavors currently available to tumblrs, with photos currently owning 34-percent of the posts and other formats tagging along in close succession.

Tumblr utilizes intuitive proprietary web publishing software that offers unparalleled simplicity. In fact, in all of my years online, I’ve never encountered a more transparent publishing utility. There is absolutely no learning curve, just sign-up and start posting. I’ve been running one at Wasteoid.net for about a week now and I’ve tumbled a considerable collection of entries due entirely to its instant gratification posting dynamic.

Because of its simplicity, Tumblr finds itself in a doubly strong position. It is poised to gain the attention of the less web savvy masses who have been wondering for some time “what that blogging stuff is all about.” There is no small value in clinching that demographic — the success of MySpace is a resounding testament to that.

Perhaps more interestingly though, is its ability to fill the wide gap between social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace and community sites like Flickr, Delicious, etc. Beyond simply posting directly to Tumblr, users can have Tumblr aggregate feeds from many of the other sites on which they propagate. On Wasteoid, for instance, I’ve set my Tumblr to draw my RSS output from Twitter, Digg, Pipes and other sites. The result is something akin to my digital stream of consciousness, consisting of a homogeneous flow of status updates, links of interest, pictures, text, quotes, conversations and practically anything else that crosses my path during the day.

And there is still a lot more in the works for Tumblr. In April, it will roll out a collection of Tumblr features designed to fuel its expanding community, including additions to connect tumblrs around content and friends, and transparently interact with users outside the Tumblr network. Continuing down the calendar, their goal for May is to begin offering premium account subscriptions for a nominal fee. While Davidville founder Dave Karp assures me that, “[They’re] committed to continuing to offer free accounts that are more robust and powerful than any of the other web publishing services,” premium accounts will fulfill a fundamental place for the fledgling network.

In addition to receiving a suite of premium services, pro tumblrs will serve as the primary testbed beta testers for new Tumblr features. This is a keen route as it adds incentive for users to purchase premium accounts and because it provides Tumblr with an expansive testbed of users that not only are familiar with the service, but also have a personal interest in its outcome. Furthermore, there is the boon of adding money to the company coffers for continued expansion — but Karp and crew aren’t banking on just one invention

Back in Feb. they launched Senduit, a web-based utility designed to assist in the sharing of large files over the Internet. Since its launch two months ago, site usage has expanded to 250,000 unique monthly visitors. Over 65,000 files are uploaded each month and downloads are in the ballpark of 500,000. The service manages its bandwidth usage through smart throttling measures used to ensure that its not abused or used for spam and warez.

All of that said, Davidville, Inc. is a company to pay attention to in the coming months. It has in Tumblr a product that any company would froth wildly at the mouth for, a trendy service that is capable of vast mainstream appeal across the demographic lines. Its products have entered my current stable of web tools and aren’t likely to leave anytime soon.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/106088570/

Last week we launched a new feature in Highrise called Public Contact Cards.

The idea
Public contact cards make it easy to share someone’s contact information with anyone who needs it. For example, if a friend asks if you can recommend a plumber, and you have one you’d recommend in your Highrise account, you can share that plumber’s public card with your friend — even if they don’t have their own Highrise account. Now your friend has all the information they need to get in touch with the plumber.

The feature that could have been
As we thought about how to implement public contact cards we started thinking about all the possible options we could offer.

• One-click to import the data into your own Highrise account
• hCard support
• Email this contact info to someone
• Subscribing to the data so you’ll get updates if it changes
• And the list goes on…

The feature that is
When you face a long list of possible add-on features you need to step back and ask yourself: “What’s the core value? Why are we building this core feature?” In the case of public contact cards, the core value was being able to quickly share someone’s contact information over the web with anyone you want. It wasn’t hCard support, it wasn’t subscriptions to contact information, it wasn’t one-click import into your own Highrise account, etc. Those things might be nice, but they aren’t part of the core value. The core value is the simple display of the contact information. That’s 90% of the value.48 hours
Because we said no to all the stuff public cards could be, we were able to go from an idea over dinner, to design, to coding, to testing, to implementation, to launch in about 48 hours. Had we said yes to some or all of the other stuff we could have done, we likely wouldn’t have launched the feature yet. And we’d probably never get to it because there are more important things to spend 2 weeks on. For 48 hours worth of work it was worth it. For 2 weeks of work it wasn’t.

So keep core value in mind. Execute on the basics beautifully and leave the “it would be nice” and “wouldn’t it be cool if” extra features for another time. Get 90% of the value out the door as quickly as you can. The remaining 10% often sucks up far more development time than it’s worth.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/348-highrise-public-contact-cards-from-idea-to-feature-to-launch-in-48-hours

Orvis

Gregory Maher writes:

I was just checking out some gear on the Orvis Web site and found this interesting feature. When checking out, you can round up your purchase for charity. Orvis will quadruple your offering making a donation to the McCloud River Redband Trout. Pretty neat.

30 second portfolio

Tim Van Damme writes:

When you arrive at The Consult’s homepage, you’ll see a link in the top right corner saying “Short on time? View our 30 second portfolio”. My first reaction was: “I’m always short on time, and I am indeed interested in getting a quick overview of your work!”.

Vista

Des Traynor writes:

Found a screenshot that is the antithesis of Simplicity…

Is there ever, EVER an excuse for a dialog like this (taken from Windows Vista).

You’d think after the joke that was the XP Puppy Search, they might put more effort into these dialogs. (Note: I’m pretty sure this isn’t default search prompt, but thats still no excuse.)

Quizlet

Andrew Sutherland writes:

From Quizlet, a site for learning vocabulary…The cool part of this page (click image for full screen) is the Accents bar – you click on the input box you want the accent in, then click on an accent button, and it gets inserted. It’s very handy for people who are studying foreign languages but don’t know the keyboard combinations required for accented characters. Also, the accent bar slides to each input box you click on, so it is always close at hand.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/338-screens-around-town-orvis-the-consult-vista-and-quizlet

Pingdom just published a report measuring total 2007 downtime to date for the top 20 sites on the web as ranked by Alexa. Leading the list is Yahoo with zero downtime. Google’s YouTube and Blogger.com are the worst performers, with over 4 hours of downtime each (although Google.com is very reliable).

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/106047377/

Dean Edwards has released Packer v3.0, one of the top utilities to squeeze your JavaScript like a lemon.

• respects Microsoft conditional comments
• new option to shrink variable and argument identifiers
• removed the special chars feature
  (except the ;;; feature which people seem to like)
• some bug fixes:
  • packer no longer closes spaces between the +/- operators so code like this is safe: c = a++ +b;
  • the throw"error"} bug that affected Safari (this is a Safari bug really but packer gets around it)
  • the __proto__ bug for Mozilla browsers (this only affected the online version of packer)
  • a minor parsing bug affecting the detection of regular expressions
• simplified the user interface

Dean also had some fun sniffing browsers and came up with the short test:

but then Sil came up with:

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/packer-30-and-ismsie-hacks

twoBirds Lib 2.0, a library that handles on-demand loading problems, has been released by Frank Thuerigen.

It works asynchronous and allows out-of-order execution of JS code. JS objects can recursively load other JS objects.

Take a look at the prototype to see it in action:

In the “user” field top right enter a character combination and hit return to enter… in the menu click on “communication” and then “chat”… enjoy your chat. A closer look using firebug etc. will reveal that all element parts are loaded separately, simultaneously and out-of-order, on-demand when you click on a link.
The system itself ensures that elements are being displayed once all the necessary files have loaded. Note: IE users may have to add this site to the list of trusted sites, since login requires a cookie. All demo windows are accessible without login.
There is no more loading after the first display of an element, all data and code was cached and on re-selection displayed right away causing no server traffic. The chat will periodically retrieve new lines, of course…

Example Code

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/twobirds-lib-20-released