Ajax Girl

Firefox’s exploration of bringing social networking features into the browser has moved forward a step. There is now a very rough prototype of “Coop” available as a Firefox Add-on that tries out some of the ideas discussed on the Firefox Labs wiki.

The Add-on can be downloaded here. Only early adopters who want to see what Firefox is up to will be interested in trying this out - for now it simply pulls some basic Facebook functionality into the browser.

But it does show what the product might eventually look like. The Add-on prompts you to log into Facebook. It then pulls all of your facebook friends into the sidebar. You can share any link, photo or video with a friend by simply dragging it into their picture.

I’m looking forward to watching this develop. Screenshots of the Add-on are below.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/106989180/

Verisign, the domain name registry that controls the .com domain (as well as .net and others), just notified its registrars (the companies that actually sell domain names to end users) that the wholesale price of .com domains will be raised 7%, from $6/year to $6.42/year. Expect registrars, particularly discount registrars with little margin to play with, to raise their prices by roughly the same amount.

This doesn’t sound like much of an increase, but Verisign now has the right, pursuant to a renegotiated contract with ICANN, to continue to raise wholesale prices 7%/year pretty much indefinitely. And with roughly 65 million .com domain names registered worldwide, Verisign just added $27 million dollars per year to their bottom line.

It’s good to be a monopoly.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/106965519/

Over the years the “people don’t scroll on the web!” mantra has been both supported and denied. Today I think it’s pretty fair to say the majority of people have figured out how and when to scroll a web page. This has pretty much become a non-issue.

But there’s another scrolling issue worth thinking about: Email scrolling. Standardized emails are too long. These usually take the form of “Welcome to our product” emails or verbose auto-responders that have one line of steak and 150 lines of sizzle.

People don’t read these things. They’re too long, they’re too wordy, they’re too fluffy.

Welcome emails seem to be the biggest offenders. Welcome emails have become the place where copywriters and web designers shoehorn all the stuff that didn’t make it onto the web site. “Ugh, just put it in the welcome email.” They’re the bastard child of the signup process.

Long emails get ignored and filed away. Short emails get read. People see the value without having to get out the reading glasses. A welcome email shouldn’t be a novel.

We used to have a really information packed welcome email for Basecamp. It had everything you’d ever need to know about your Basecamp account. And guess what? We got lots of support emails asking about the things people should have spotted in the welcome email. But they couldn’t see through all the fog we put in their way.

Ever since we cut the welcome email way back we’ve seen significant reductions in basic support questions such as “What is our URL?” and “How can I upgrade” and “What’s my username?” Small change, noticeable results.

Here’s an example of the current Highrise welcome email:

Short, sweet, to the point. That’s everything someone really needs to know right now. And it’s everything they can find later on if they need to. No wading, no translating, no digging through piles of words to find the quick answer.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/357-people-dont-scrollemails

We’d like to take a post to thank our readers and sponsors for supporting TechCrunch.

We currently have six great sponsors. Here’s a bit on what’s happening with each:

Plazes - Plazes tracks your physical location and shows you other Plazes users and places nearby. Plazes also integrates with Skype, has a widget to place on websites that shows your current location and other information, and a SMS service to find out the current location of your Plazes friends.

MIX 07 - Microsoft is hitting up Sin City at the end of April for a conference covering the latest technologies, business methods, and development strategies. The conference will also feature keynote speeches from the likes of Microsoft’s Ray Ozzie, Robert Bach, and Scott Guthrie.

Conduit - Conduit lets people build browser toolbars tailored to your community. The TechCrunch toolbar, available here, consists of a search box, full RSS feeds, latest podcast, email notifier, peer to peer messenger, and gadgets. 130,000+ publishers have used toolbars to double their traffic.

Auction Ads - Auction Ads allows you to monetize your website by displaying live eBay auctions next to your related content. The ads come in different sizes and feature a picture of the item and a link to its auction.

Edgeio - Classified listings are hidden all over the web, Edgeio brings them all together. They’re also just launched Edgeio Marketplaces, a killer way to monetize listings on your site. They have 100+ million items, from 16,258 cities, in 162 countries you can search by category and geography. Check out these “Web 2.0″ jobs from all over the world.

Zoho - Zoho has been turning out a long list of quality web apps over the past year. Use Zoho for your own document editing, spreadsheets, planning, and presentations, or for their collaborative wikis, notebooks, and project management. They recently released a new meeting application.

We also recommend that you consider attending the Future of Online Advertisingconference happening out in New York June 7th and 8th. The conference features speakers such as Digg’s Jay Adelson, Brightcove’s Jeremy Allaire, Federated Media’s Chas Edwards, Feedburner’s Steve Olechowski, Micropersuasion’s Steve Rubel, RightMedia’s Michael Walrath. The full list is here. The schedule also includes a ton of case studies about advertising, covering salient topics for advertisers such as ad networks, search ads, video ads, and click fraud prevention.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/106962070/

GetThemLaid is a new site where you can post a description and pictures of your friends who really need to, well, have some real world social interaction. What really caught my eye is that one of the first few profiles on the site is Aaron Levie, the co-founder of Box.net. He’s described as “a sensitive soul” who “spends too much time with other dudes, sitting in front of a computer, trying to figure out how to monetize users.” I wonder what good friend of his decided to help him out…

If you find yourself on the site and want to be removed, email remove@getthemlaid.com.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/106944448/

Social bookmarking service Del.icio.us has one of the more popular Firefox Add-ons, but until recently it didn’t sync with your account and bring bookmarks and tags to the browser. A few months ago they quietly released a new version that basically takes over the Firefox bookmarking function, but it wasn’t syncing fast enough for power users.

Today they’ve updated the Add-On, and they’ve solved the speed issue. If you are a del.icio.us user, this will become your most-used Firefox Add-ons. If you aren’t one of the 2 million people using Del.icio.us yet, this may be the reason you start. Download the Add-on here.

My biggest complaint about Del.icio.us over the last couple of years has been that it is often too slow. That led me to switch to Bluedot.us, a worthy competitor. But Del.icio.us has made significant speed improvements recently, and this new Add-on is incredibly useful. I’m back at Del.icio.us.

Currently Del.icio.us only allows bookmarks to be public or private. I’m hoping they’ll soon allow users to share bookmarks with friends only, which is sort of in between.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/106932513/

Update — go get 1.04 — its a more robust fix for the security issue - read Joe’s comment here.

Joe Hewitt has posted an update to Firebug that you should grab right away as it fixes a couple of issues and covers a 0-day security hole.

The update has been published to addons.mozilla.org, so you can get it by updating Firebug from the Firefox Add-ons window. Alternatively, you can install the update using the big orange button on the getfirebug.com home page.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/update-firebug-to-103

Joe Hewitt has posted an update to Firebug that you should grab right away as it fixes a couple of issues and covers a 0-day security hole.

The update has been published to addons.mozilla.org, so you can get it by updating Firebug from the Firefox Add-ons window. Alternatively, you can install the update using the big orange button on the getfirebug.com home page.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/update-firebug-to-103

Kare.com is the site of famed iconographer Susan Kare.

My work has continued to be motivated by respect for, and empathy with, users of software. I believe that good icons are more akin to road signs rather than illustrations, and ideally should present an idea in a clear, concise, and memorable way. I try to optimize for clarity and simplicity even as palette and resolution options have increased.

Some of her work from the 80’s:

Icon designer strives for simplicity is a 1995 profile of Kare.

When Kare worked on the original Macintosh, which was shipped in 1984, her work was denounced by computer geeks as too cute and “a crib toy” for its whimsical graphics…

“Some icons are easy because they’re nouns — a calender, for example,’’ Kare said. “But verbs are hard to do. Undo is especially hard. I struggle year in and year out about undo.’‘

Execute, she said, is another difficult one. “Some people have guns for execute, which doesn’t seem good. I had dominoes falling over and have tried running shoes.’’…

“I feel much happier that people are looking at my icons every day than having my sculptures in five living rooms across the country,” Kare said.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/355-susan-kare-user-interface-graphic-designer

There is increasing buzz over security with JavaScript, and people are stepping up to the plate.

In How to Protect a JSON or Javascript Service, Joe Walker looks at a few solutions such as:

1. Use a Secret in the Request
2. Force pre-eval() Processing
3. Force POST requests

Joe implements some of these in DWR, including:

Prefix the script with throw new Error("message");. This is a neat solution in that it allows you to explain what is wrong to users that get the message by mistake.

Andrea Giammarchi wonders if 130 bytes are enough to solve JavaScript JSON Hijacking problems? in which he discusses tactics for detecting the hijacking of your objects and comes up with solutions such as this:

Finally, the GWT team has published an article on Security for GWT Applications that delves into how GWT handles JavaScript vulnerabilities such as leaking data, cross-site scripting, forging requests, JSON and XSRF.

A lot of good stuff.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/protecting-a-javascript-service