Ajax Girl

Facebook’s new Developer Platform has been live for nearly a day, and data is coming in on which third party applications are the most appealing to Facebook users. The top application, by far, is music service iLike. They currently have just under 40,000 Facebook users, more than the rest of the top ten applications combined.

The application was added by 10,000 users within the first ten hours of the service being live, and 10,000 more in the following three hours. It seems to be increasing by about 100/minute at this point. Once installed, users can search for and add their favorite music and concert information to their profile.

Competitor MOG is also popular, coming in currently as the fifth most popular Facebook application and just over 3,000 users.

Causes On Facebook, the application that we covered yesterday, is in the top twenty apps and has just over 1,000 users.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/119757402/

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery Digg would be at the top of the heap. The site that popularized social news has been copied, cloned and even spawned Pligg, an open source Digg style script.

If Pligg opened up Digg style clones to site hosts and developers, coRank takes the concept to the mass market; users who either can’t or don’t want to host Pligg on their own domain. coRank is to Digg clones what Blogger once was for blogging.

coRank has evolved from its earlier incarnation as a stand alone Digg clone. The new coRank is now a fully customizable hosted social voting platform. Users can set up social news sites through easy to use menu options without the need to edit code. Like Blogger there is a range of templates available, including one that looks just like Digg. The options are surprisingly broad. Users can customize everything from the name of voting members through to the names given to the actual voting system. Everything from user banning through to privacy options and user statistics has been included.

Although the entire morality of an army of Digg clones may be a passionate topic for debate, there’s little doubt that social news continues to grow. Ethics aside coRank is a notable point in the progression of social news development. In time coRank is an idea that is sure to be cloned itself.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/119749499/

A study from Strategy Analytics has found that 90 percent of handset owners rate Apple’s iPhone as being superior to existing mobile phones. This despite the rather pertinent facts that the iPhone has not yet gone on sale and none of those questioned would have used an iPhone.

The “Consumer Reactions to the Apple iPhone” study explored the appeal of iPhone features, developed comparisons with current products and investigated the nature of the iPhone experience. 90 percent of respondents gave the iPhone higher marks than their own handset and over 40 percent of respondents rated the iPhone as being much better across key functional categories, including music player, web browsing, voice mail, and phone call management.

The study found that whilst consumers are definitely buying the iPhone hype, price may be the iPhone’s undoing. “While the iPhone “Wow” factor is impressive, our user panel indicated that challenges in pricing and positioning may act as a barrier to mass-market success,” said Kevin Nolan, Director of User Experience Research at Strategy Analytics.

Previous TechCrunch iPhone coverage here.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/119744910/

Marijn Haverbeke has not only been able to create a syntax-highlighting JavaScript editor in JavaScript, but he has written up the story of the brutal odyssey to the dark side of the DOM tree.

The story is a great romp through the never-never-land of JavaScript, DOM, and browser “quirks”. It is well worth a read to find out about fun with selection, designMode, parsing, and much much more.

A huge kudos to Marijn.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/implementing-a-syntax-higlighting-javascript-editor-in-javascript

The Digg API Visualization Contest held to celebrate the launch of the Digg API is now in its final stages with 10 shortlisted candidates.

Four of the ten finalists are Abode Apollo based applications, remarkable for a platform launched just over 2 months ago.

The four Apollo based finalists:

D’Lite is an Apollo application that utilizes Digg’s API to retrieve data, information, and processes. Features include pagination, favorites, network detection, and smart auto refresh.

Digg Watch is a tool that lets users browse Digg and grab information from stories, like who Dugg what stories and how many Diggs a story gets over time. A nifty tool in looking up user activity.

Mini Digg allows users to view stories and see the story activity. A story tracking feature allows users to save favorite stories for future tracking.

DiggGraphr is a desktop application that lets users browse Digg stories in treemaps. The application allows customization as well as choice of Digg Channel.

All four have individual appeal and are generally clever implementations of data pulled from Digg and generated under Apollo. Voting closes May 30.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/119620451/

Christos Constandinou has created Event.observeMethod, a library that gives you a way of adding event listeners to methods in an object and running other methods before, around and/ or after the method you are listening to.

The code itself is small, based on Prototype, and only 49 lines (1.8kb), uncompressed.

Dojo has allowed you to do this kind of thing in its connect() model. You tend to wonder how often people need this granularity versus just being able to attach normal events.

It makes a lot of sense in large scale applications, but maybe not your JS hacking?

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/eventobservemethod-more-aop-for-javascript

Kevin Hoyt has posted a very detailed entry on a file upload component that he created with Apollo and JavaScript:

Let’s say that you take a lot of pictures. You take pictures, but you don’t want to think about how to upload them. You’d really like an application to monitor a directory for new images, and then upload them to a server. That kind of rules out the browser - it’s not going to be watching a directory on your desktop for image files, and then automatically uploading them. What about Apollo though? Couldn’t an Apollo application monitor a directory for me? Sure! Let’s make it happen…

The article walks you through the example, using jQuery, and gives details on the Apollo APIs:

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/file-upload-with-apollo-and-javascript

Don Schmitt and his team has built a site using Microsoft’s Ajax extensions and
Ajax control toolkit called Profilemine.

Profilemine has a unique MySpace profile editor that enables you to edit
your actual profile without typing HTML code (not just the CSS).

The site includes a number of advanced Ajax-based features such as:

• Load your existing profile and edit it directly (and not just the styles).
• Automatic layout change submissions directly to your MySpace profile
  without requiring copy / paste.
• Ability to drag & drop elements on your profile.
• Ability to upload layouts and the site will automatically take a snapshot
  of the layout and create the thumbnail and the layout will be available for
  download immediately.
• Upload images directly to the front page of your profile without writing
  any code.
• Save your favorite layouts and easily swap between them.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/profile-mine-rich-ajax-myspace-editor

Social surfing recommendation site Yoono has released a new plugin “Buzz It” that takes services such as Google Notebook to a new level.

Most people would be familiar with notebook and scrapbook style sites and plugins. You can add notes, reminders and links. Buzz It takes those basics and incorporates a rich Web 2.0 experience.

The plugin is available for Internet Explorer and Firefox and installs a new toolbar. It’s an initial negative that can be fixed. Relevant buttons on the toolbar (in Firefox) can be dragged onto existing place holders at the top of the browser.

Recording sites or notes with Buzz It is as simple as highlighting text or a page, then pressing a button or using the right click menu. An Ajax overlay appears with the relevant information. The plugin pulls images and videos from any site being viewed and then displays those results in the Buzz It sidebar, empowering drag and drop functionality into an entry. Amazon book links and even Google Maps can be generated inline and added to any post.

Buzz It also doubles as a blog posting tool. Most major platforms are supported and it’s one of the better blog posting tools I’ve used. It needs some work, the markup generated is below average and images posted are served from the original site and are not reposted locally; however for a MySpace user or casual blogger these are not going to be major issues. It’s simple, clean and easy to use.

The plugin integrates with Yoono’s social surfing recommendation platform and comes with the usual site recommendation style tools typical of this sort of service. If you’re in to this sort of thing then it’s one of the better services out there and currently boasts of having over 700,000 members.

Yes, Buzz It another plugin with (OMG!) another toolbar but looking past this I can honestly say that it is impressive. It’s smart, cool looking and is bound to have a broad range of appeal.

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/~3/119504018/

MyBlogLog, a distributed social network which was acquired by Yahoo earlier this year, will launch a tagging feature later this evening that will allow users to add descriptive tags to the people and blogs (called “communities”) on the service.

The new feature serves a number of purposes, founder Eric Marcoullier told me this evening. The main use will be to categorize topics and people to let users find new content they might be interested in. If you read a certain blog, view it’s MyBlogLog page (ours is here) and click on a tag to see other blogs that are tagged with the same word.

The company is also asking users to help fight spam by tagging spammy sites with the word “Schmoe,” which they say stands for “Social Media Optimizer” (SchMOe). The team will review those tags and associated sites and take appropriate action.

Tags can be added by any user to any other user or blog community. Once a tag is added, others can vote it up or down which increases or decreases its size in the cloud. The owner of a profile can permanently remove any tag. The company is importing tags for blogs from Del.icio.us and Technorati to get initial content; they say they will add other sources as well over time.

The new feature is based on a Yahoo internal tool developed by Cameron Marlow at their Berkeley research center, called Tagsona. Yahoo employees use Tagsona to tag co-workers internally (sounds like loads of fun).

MyBlogLog continues to expand. Marcoullier says they are tracking 100 million monthly visitors to sites that have the MyBlogLog widget, and have 140,000 registered users. Just recently, he said, more people without blogs (readers only) started registering than users with blogs.

The service will be redesigned, and possibly renamed, later this year.

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/~3/119490880/