Ajax Girl

Yahoo Australia launched a new personalized search engine called Alpha today. Yahoo has another personalized search product called Yahoo Search Builder meant for customizing a Yahoo search engine for your site. A lot of people are calling Alpha a competitor to Google Coop, but it’s not. Yahoo Alpha is a meta search engine with a Netvibes look and feel, letting you type a search in one box and see results amongst several search engines. Google Coop and Rollyo interleave the results from several sources ranked by relevance.

The search results page is a two column layout of search result widgets, with the left column holding the main search results and right column a list of smaller result feeds. The default setup is Yahoo’s website search on the left and smaller Flickr, YouTube, Yahoo news, Wikipedia, and Yahoo Search Marketing widgets on the right. When you enter a search into the main box, results for each of the sources show up in the widgets.

You can customize the results page by reordering widgets on the page and adding new search feed widgets. The process for adding a feed is confusing and required entering an abstruse Opensearch url (e.g http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch_feeds?hl=en&q= {searchTerms}&ie=utf-8&num=10&output=rss) and captcha answer. Opensearch is an Amazon A9 technology that lets third parties access your search results via RSS. Each of the widgets can be public or private, although we don’t see a marketplace for these widgets yet.

It’s surprising to see Yahoo come out with a product like this - Rollyo does a much better job with Yahoo’s own API.

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/~3/106716038/

Lifelock

Jason F.	Great marketing concept from http://www.lifelock.com/
Jason F.	It’s an identity theft prevention company.
Jason F.	Their CEO publishes his social security number
Jason F.
Jason F.	Clever
Jamis B.	wow
David H.	Brave
Jason F.	Great marketing idea though. Really smart. Really makes you trust their service.
Jason F.	Convinced me!
David H.	Totally
David H.	And it ensures that he’ll never be identity thefted
David H.	he’s way, way, way too high profile
David H.	very clever
Jamis B.	JF, totally convincing. I’m considering enrolling just based on that
Jason F.	JB totally
Jason F.	I think I’m going to enroll too
Jason F.	nuts!
Jason F.	Enrolled!
Matt L.	my plot to assume JF’s identity has been foiled!
Jason F.	haha
Matt L.	<-puts away teapot and curling iron
Mark I.	If anyone wants to assume my identity, and in particular my mortagage payments, let me know…
Jamis B.	haha
Jason F.	curling iron!

Motionbox

Ryan S.	check out the video player UI at Motionbox
Ryan S.	it has a scrolling series of thumbnails on the bottom, so you can jump to different parts of the video by sight
Ryan S.
Matt L.	yeah, neat idea. needs to be hideable tho.
Ryan S.	it’s a little feature bloated, but great concept

Print stylesheets

Shoe repair

Sam S.
Jason F.	Love that.

Don’t make a post a project

Dordoni table

Jason F.	Dordoni Worktop Table. Those desks I was talking about
Jason F.
Sam S.	really nice
Jason F.	They are fantastic
Jason F.	I LOVE LOVE LOVE mine
Ryan S.	wow those look nice
Jason F.	Fantastic open space, 8 possible drawers
Jason F.	spaces on the side for other stuff
Jason F.	they are just great.
Jason F.	Best desk I’ve ever owned

Daring Fireball ad

Ryan S.	lol at this ad for membership on daring fireball:
Ryan S.
Jamis B.	haha

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/353-fly-on-the-wall-lifelock-motionbox-print-stylesheets-shoe-repair-posts-dordoni-table-and-daring-fireball-ad

The FBI has visited Linden Lab and their Second Life casinos in order to figure out just what that giant teddy bear — really a Japanese exchange student — and the fat man in Spokane who looks like a Suicide Girl and calls himself Wendy Wild are doing over at the roulette table.

Yes. friends, some FBI agents want to know how online gambling in Second Life works and they won’t give up until they figure out how to get off the damn orientation island and customize their avatar.

“We have invited the FBI several times to take a look around in Second Life and raise any concerns they would like, and we know of at least one instance that federal agents did look around in a virtual casino,” said Ginsu Yoon, until recently Linden Lab’s general counsel and currently vice president for business affairs.
…
Yoon said the company was seeking guidance on virtual gaming activity in Second Life but had not yet received clear rules from U.S. authorities.

Dear FBI: There are more compelling places to look for criminal behavior than LuLu’s Kasino next to Wally’s House of Furry Fun.

FBI checks out gambling in ‘Second Life’ via CrunchGear

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/106668662/

The legendary Homaro Cantu of Moto restaurant in Chicago talks about his plans for edible advertising and “multitools” like pans that can change shape. He covers sustainability, how we need to think differently about food as the population balloons, the difference between organic and local, and more.

He also discusses patents (he patents a lot of his food inventions) and later open-sourcing these patents:

Yes. I’m very big on open-source and that’s a contradiction for me, because I patent everything. But why do I patent everything? Because I want to be first to market. Most importantly, I want to take those patents one day and make them open-source.

He also talks about the benefits of their paperless kitchen:

Right now, downstairs my cooks are looking at a giant 60-inch screen projection and they follow their prep lists on this. We don’t use paper. And when they’re done, it knocks those things off the prep list. It can also speak with dishwashers who might not speak English.

Next time you’re in Chicago get a reservation at Moto. It’s fascinating, educational, experimental, multi-dimensional, mind-expanding, and most of all, really fucking tasty.

Moto is the best dining experience I’ve ever had by a factor of 10x. If you can swing it go for the 20 course Grand Tasting Menu and you might even get to don a pair of laser-proof safety goggles for a trip into the kitchen. And don’t forget to ask the bartender for a Bacon Martini.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/354-moto-cantu-can-do

For a limited time: If you upgrade or sign up for a Highrise Premium or Max plan, or a Basecamp Max plan, you’ll get a Campfire Premium account at no charge (it’s normally $49/month).

We don’t know how long we’ll be running this promotion, so if you’re interested you should act soon. Once the promotion ends you’ll still be able to keep your free Campfire account, of course.

Details on how to claim your free Campfire Premium account will be included with your Basecamp/Highrise welcome or upgrade email.

Thanks for your business.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/352-promotion-get-campfire-for-free-when-you-upgrade-or-sign-up-for-certain-highrise-or-basecamp-accounts

We have been holding our breath a little on this one. Ext JS hasn’t been a secret, but the site wasn’t complete and live until now, and we didn’t want to hammer poor Jack Slocum with an Ajaxian post until he said he was ready!

The new site launch comes with more than just the Ext code that we have already talked about.

It also features:

• Fresh Feed Reader is a sample Apollo application uses Ext JS for the HTML/Ajax side of things
• Indycar “has an updated “Live Timing & Scoring” feature for 2007, implemented using Ext DomHelper and UpdateManager components. The application updates race statistics and positions live while races are underway. The Indycar.com website also features a powerful administration interface featuring Ext grids, views and forms”
• Tutorial: Beginning Using the Grid Component

Congrats to Jack and the Ext JS team. We are excited to see what is to come.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/ext-js-goes-live

The arguments around offline have been brewing for some time. DHH came out with typical flare on why offline doesn’t matter as you are either online all the time, or if you aren’t, you don’t mind it.

I hope that offline matters less and less over time, but for me connectivity can be very spotty indeed. It isn’t just when you are on a plane. EVDO and friends often suck. Wireless often sucks. Hell, if they can’t fix it so my calls don’t drop all the time then how can I expect decent net access from anywhere? And all of this is from someone living in the bay area, let alone Lonely, Wyoming, or somewhere in the third world (yes they have internet too!)

The folks at Cerulean Studios (makers of Trillian IM) have blogged about their offline IM client that is Flash based, but can jump offline.

The current focus of the technology is to rip application-quality web software *out* of the browser and *on* to the desktop. It is (currently) technically impossible (for security reasons, at the very least) to magically invoke a real application on your desktop without a download of any sorts; the current demo you’re watching is using a small Firefox plugin to do its dirty work. The actual IM product is still the same web-based Flash that you’re invoking from your web browser. In a way, you can just think of this as a mini web browser (very mini ).

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/the-offline-battle-you-arent-on-a-plane

YouTube is clearly the most popular video sharing site on the web. But limits on video length, DMCA takedown notices and billion dollar lawsuits have damaged YouTube’s ability to facilitate serious copyright infringement. The smaller guys are now stepping in to fill the void.

Full length copies of well known TV shows and/or movies are readily available on a number of YouTube competitors. Watch, for example, The Office on DailyMotion, Scrubs on GoFish, or SouthPark on Veoh.

And if searching for the shows on these sites is just too much work, there are other sites that aggregate and organize this content, and embed it on their own sites. Watch any episode from any of the 11 seasons of SouthPark on Allsp.com. And new site VideoHybrid is in a class of its own, with dozens of full length movies and virtually every popular TV show. VideoHybrid even give statistics showing exactly how many times copyrights have been violated.

Its not clear if the MPAA and networks just aren’t focusing on these smaller video sharing sites yet, or if DMCA notices are simply being ignored. These sites aren’t hiding out and trying to evade the law - they’re funded by well known venture capitalists and, in Veoh’s case, copyright holders. And GoFish is actually a public company.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/106512615/

Mozilla has released details on The Coop, a new product that will incorporate social networking features directly into the Firefox browser. This is not good news for the privately-backed social browser Flock (also built on Mozilla), which is yet to release a 1.0 version of its browser. Many of the proposed features and some of the mockups created by Mike Beltzner (see above) suggest a significant overlap in the two products.

In fact, Coop even has an example screen shot of Flock on the wiki page describing the product, along with the description “The design will likely resemble [formerly of Flock] Chris Messina’s mockup for “People in the Browser”, with a horizontal bar containing avatars for a user’s friends, and icons overlaid on those avatars to indicate the presence of new content.”

The Coop product will allow Firefox users to “subscribe” to friends in the browser, bringing those friends into a sidebar. Those friends can share content and web pages with you (receive content from you, and send content to you).

Adding a friend will mean getting access to a broad array of their published web content. Content will be pulled from that person’s Flickr photo feed, del.icio.us tag feed, MySpace status , YouTube favorites, etc. When you want to share content with that user, you simply drag it into their avatar (see mockups below).

As Larry Dignan notes, The Coop could also have an impact on social networks that depend on constant user page refreshes to maintain pageview growth. Having status information on your friends directly in the browser could significantly lessen the need to visit those sites directly.

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/~3/106493451/

Pasha Sadril, Jonathan Trevor, and others on the Yahoo! Pipes team showed up at Google to discuss Yahoo! Pipes. The presentation was recorded for all as part of the Google Tech Talk series.

The presentation started with Pasha discussing how Pipes came into being, and showing it in action. Then, Jonathan took over to discuss some of the high level architecture choices and decisions.

It was interesting to hear how Pipes is aimed at the top 10% of the market (from developers to remixers), how it is built to enable you to do that one thing you need (I need a sofa near me), and how it mimics the data flow programming that we are used to in AV. I think that the top 1% would maybe enjoy a simple DSL.

Learning about the pains of canvas, and how they got those connectors working is fun too.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/pipes-a-tech-talk