Ajax Girl

Facebook is to offer a free classified ad listings service as an add-on to its popular social networking destination, according to the NY Times.

The report states that the new service, Facebook Marketplace, is aimed at giving users another reason to visit the site as opposed to being a new income stream.

Facebook Marketplace combines the privacy features of Facebook to allow private listings. Users can choose to show listings only to their designated friends or to their broader networks based on high school, college, company or geographic region.

It’s a logical add-on for Facebook. MySpace has offered classified services since inception and Friendster recently announced their intention to launch a similar service. The closed network structure of Facebook creates a higher level of trust amongst users than MySpace, with its more wild west approach of open friend lists. Giving Facebook users the ability to sell only to their closed networks also provides a security layer that you don’t get with services such as Craiglist.

The new service goes live Friday. Classified listings will be grouped in four categories: housing; jobs; for sale and other.

Previous TechCrunch coverage of Facebook here.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/115782253/

If the world wasn’t already worried enough about electromagnetic radiation from cell phones, Apple now provides us with another source from which to fuel our anxieties, particularly if we’re old.

According to a study presented by a 17-year-old high school student to a meeting of heart specialists on Thursday, iPods can cause pacemakers to malfunction and even fail by interfering with the electromagnetic equipment monitoring the heart.

If you believe that animal testing is cruel, try waving iPods in front of 100 old folk with a mean age of 77, all fitted with Pacemakers.

The study tested the effect of the iPod on each pacemaker patient. Electrical interference was detected half of the time when the iPod was held just 2 inches from the patient’s chest for 5 to 10 seconds. In some cases, the iPods caused interference when held 18 inches from the chest.

Interfering with the telemetry equipment caused the pacemakers to misread the heart’s pacing and in one case caused the pacemaker to stop functioning altogether.

Yes, iPods could kill you if you have a Pacemaker!

The study was held at the Thoracic and Cardiovascular Institute at Michigan State University. The results were presented at the Heart Rhythm Society annual meeting in Denver.

Fake Steve Jobs, always quick to put the flame out on any negative press for Apple, writes that Apple has known about the issue for quite some time. “And we’re happy about it. We even cranked up the voltage on our new models. Thing is, we really don’t want old people using iPods”. Given this study it’s probably wise that they didn’t.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/115766739/

LinkedIn added a new feature this week called “Who’s Viewed My Profile” that shows the last twenty people who’ve looked at your profile and the company or industry they are in.

In the last week, visitors to my profile included a student at the University of Waterloo, a product manager at Microsoft, and someone at Kyocera, among others.

Users choose what information they’d like to disclose when viewing a profile (name and headline, anonymous profile characteristiscs, or don’t show any info). The default choice is the anonymous profile information.

The feature is linked from each user’s profile page in the right sidebar.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/115761635/

Motorola CEO Ed Zander has given notice that Motorola is set to announce a direct competitor to Apple’s iPhone.

Speaking at the Software 2007 conference, Zander gave the audience a brief overview of the phone. Due to be formally announced next Tuesday, he described it as a “media monster”.

The new phone will support 30 frames-a-second, full-motion video and will incorporate incorporate support for SD cards.

“We are working with another company to deliver movies on SD cards. You can start watching unbelievable quality movies,” Zander reportedly said.

Unlike the iPhone, the new Motorola device will initially be targeted at the European market: the phone will work on the 3G platform that despite having a broad global presence, still lacks coverage in the United States.

He was surprisingly upbeat though on Apples iPhone, saying that the iPhone will stimulate the overall market for feature-rich mobile devices, including Motorola’s. “I think it’s [the iPohne is] going to, in some cases, reinforce what we have been trying to do and are doing with the mobile internet. Applications such as multimedia and video and photos and music are going to be done on these devices”.

Previous TechCrunch coverage of Apple’s iPhone here.

in part via smh.com.au

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/115751805/

Last.fm launched an embeddable radio widget today that lets you add a personalized Last.fm radio station wherever Flash widgets are accepted.

The widget can play in three modes: a stream of what songs your recently listened to on Last.fm, hand-picked tracks, or full songs of related artists based on your personal preferences. If you want to play specific tracks, you must seed the widget with 15 or more songs by different artists and play it in shuffle mode.

Personalizing a full radio stream is dead simple. You just feed their widget generator artist names, tags, or MySpace page URL. The widget we have below is based off of Tom’s MySpace page. If you’re a Last.fm member, you can create a widget based on your existing personalized Last.fm station.

The new widget certainly lowers the barriers to getting your personalized music station, now easily available to non-members and providing a better experience than MySpace’s own highly restricted player. However, it also adds another point of Amazon affiliate sales for Last.fm.

There are several other music widgets online. Finetune has an artist radio widget. Pandora has an API for distributing music. MyStrand’s “Flash Chart” lets users stream their recently played songs to visitors. iLike’s widget similarly lets users display their recent activity. In a somewhat legal gray area, HypeMachine and RadioBlogClub let listeners craft play lists of songs pulled from servers all over the internet. Other embeddable widgets let user’s pull music from their online music library (TuneFeed, MediaMaster) or single songs (MOG, iJigg).

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/115740659/

The Samwer Brothers are up to the same game they started with their investment in the German version of Facebook, StudiVZ. They recently invested in a French and German Twitter clone called Frazr.

As Matt Marshall reports, the site is cloned right down to the welcome message: “Everyone wants to know: What are you doing? Tell them. On the Web, in a message, or phone”. The German version recently changed the message, but the French version has the old message. Check the screen caps below.

Foreign companies have been mirroring English based site concepts for some time now. Japan’s largest social network, Mixi, with 5 million members at the time, went to IPO last year at around a $1.5 billion market cap. Outright cloning has also been good business for foreign developers who are nimble enough to copy successful product and expose it to a new market. StudiVZ sold for $100 million. Xiaonei, a Chinese version, sold for an undisclosed amount.

There are countless other clones of successful sites being developed to capitalize on these language barriers, and some have established themselves as brands in their own right. Successful concepts will be developed in other languages, the only question is by whom.

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/~3/115739730/

“Home” takes you to the top of the page. “End” takes you to the bottom. They’re easier and faster than scrolling all the way up or down a page. I see people scrolling to the top or the bottom an awful lot.

The more I watch people use computers the more I start to think that “Home” and “End” should be bigger, given new positions on the keyboard, or renamed “Top” and “Bottom”.

These keys are usually stacked in the middle of a six key cluster. They’re small and their function isn’t all that clear. You can just press one to see what happens, but I’ve also noticed people don’t experiment with their keyboards. They use the keys they know and avoid the rest.

None of this is a big deal of course, I just wanted to share it. I’ve been observing it a lot lately so I figured I’d toss it out there for comment.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/414-home-and-end-two-of-the-most-useful-yet-underrated-keys-on-the-keyboard

The Interweb is all a’flutter about an odd iPod patent filed by Apple that describes a device with screens on both the front and the back of the player. An amalgam of Sprint’s UpStage and the iPhone, this patent describes an interface in which a rear touchscreen accepts input and reflects that input on the front screen. Confused yet?

It works like this. Because a Nano-sized device would be too small to allow for a real front touch interface, the rear touchscreen would sense your finger position and show a cursor where your finger or thumb would be on the front screen. This frees up front real estate and could potentially allow for an onscreen keyboard and other goodies. Possible? Yes. Will it happen soon? Probably not.

This is all pie-in-the-sky conjecture, but it does show a potential design for a future Nano-sized iPhone and makes for great Apple rumor-mongering.

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/~3/115687626/

Do nothing fast
From: Des Traynor

Thought you might like this quote from one of Microsofts very talented programmers, Raymond Chen…Speaking during Q & A at the PDC developers conference recently…

One of the questions I always get asked is, “My app is soo slow to startup! What are the super secret evil tricks you guys at Microsoft are using to get your apps to startup faster?” And the answer is … the super evil trick … is to do less stuff. Because the stuff you don’t do doesn’t slow anything down…It turns out I can do nothing really really fast!

Pinkberry yogurt = “frozen heroin juice”
From: Scott Heiferman

The taste that launched 1,000 parking tickets [“This is a story about yogurt, but it is also about entrepreneurship, financial and cultural expectations, beating the heat, beating the caloric system and parking.”]

Hwang and Lee agreed that the store should be streamlined, so there are only two flavors of yogurt—plain and green tea. You cannot buy anything else. Not even water. There is little waste and the staff can be trained in a few hours (it’s not hard to yank down on the handle of a soft-serve yogurt machine).

Vignelli explains his 1972 NYC Subway Map
From: Tyler Rooney

Massimo Vignelli explains his 1972 NYC Subway Map (Quicktime, 4 minutes).

I thought you guys might appreciate this. It’s outtake footage from the documentary ‘Helvetica’. Vignelli even mentions what he did wrong with his iconic subway map.

MTV’s The Real World
From: Eric Prugh

In what is potentially the last season of The Real World on MTV (Season 20), they have created a social networking type site to let the public vote on the finalists for the show. From what I can tell it seems to be in Rails and includes all the Ajaxy goodness and slick interface that Web 2.0 demands. The interface might leave something to be desired, but it’s cool to see how TV is jumping on the bandwagon of interactive web content and driving people to their websites.

Coincidentally, I came across the site because I am a finalist. Wouldn’t it be cool to have an RoR programmer on the show? I thought so.

Frank Gehry on models
From: Nate Rosenberg

Thought you’d appreciate this: In the documentary Sketches of Frank Gehry, the architect explains that he creates multiple scales of a model to remember that the model is not the project. He explains that its often too easy to become infatuated with the model itself instead of remembering it is a representation of a building. Kinda like software teams working on the specs instead of the software.

Kiwi laundry products
From: Harry Llewelyn

Great advertising for laundry detergent!

Got an interesting link, story, or screenshot for Signal vs. Noise? Contact svn [at] 37signals [dot] com.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/411-mailbag-raymond-chen-pinkberry-massimo-vignelli-frank-gehry-etc

Dougal MacPherson sent in a photo of a menu from a recent Qantas flight he took from Melbourne to New Zealand. At the bottom of the menu, there is a “journey planner” timeline that shows passengers when they will be served meals, receive immigration documents, etc. It’s a creative way to set in-flight expectations.

Click for full version

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/410-qantas-journey-planner-sets-in-flight-expectations