Ajax Girl

In an interesting move, Google has come out against controversial documentary film maker Michael Moore’s latest documentary “Sicko” in a post titled “Does negative press make you Sicko?“.

Lauren Turner of the Google Health Advertising Team writes:

“While legislators, litigators, and patient groups are growing excited, others among us are growing anxious. And why wouldn’t they? Moore attacks health insurers, health providers, and pharmaceutical companies by connecting them to isolated and emotional stories of the system at its worst. Moore’s film portrays the industry as money and marketing driven, and fails to show healthcare’s interest in patient well-being and care.”

Apparently there is a cure to the Sicko ailment, and it involves spending money with Google:

“We can place text ads, video ads, and rich media ads in paid search results or in relevant websites within our ever-expanding content network. Whatever the problem, Google can act as a platform for educating the public and promoting your message.”

Google targeting Michael Moore is probably not a wise move. Whilst there may well be reasonable grounds to attack anything Michael Moore puts together, antagonizing Moore may well see Google become a larger target at a time the search giant is in the spotlight over its Double Click acquisition.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/129398412/

I’ve written some notes on the Google Gadget API and how to write a gadget, targeted at developers who already know Ajax.

What’s a Gadget?

• The gadget is an XML file sitting on your server. In my case, http://ajaxify.com/run/widgets/google/diggroundup.xml. It will get cached, so effectively it must be a static file.
• The user adds your gadget to their igoogle portal, or codes it into their own website, by specifying this URL (it may be done indirectly - via the gadget registry. You’ll appear in the registry if you’ve submitted your gadget to igoogle.)
• The gadget is rendered as an iframe, so you have all the usual security constraints which stop you borking the portal and other gadgets. This also means you can’t communicate with other Gadgets other than via than remote calls to a common third-party server (or has anyone tried hooking them together using the iframe-fragment identifier hack? ).

It’s based on a Digg Roundup tool, where the gadget show Digg stories according to user preferences such as topic and whether to go for popular or upcoming stories.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/129240596/how-to-write-a-google-gadget

The focus and experimentation on IPTV is switching away from watching short clips on YouTube to watching full length shows on downloadable TV applications like Joost, Babelgum, Veoh TV , Netflix (which now has a Silverlight application) and others. YouTube continues to grow, but people are not looking to find full length TV shows there.

That isn’t stopping the competitors from trying to get a piece of the action, though.

YouTube has a slew of direct competitors, but the network effect kicked in long ago for YouTube and its unlikely that loose copyright policies or higher quality videos are going to make any kind of dent in their market share. But the networks are still goggling that $1.65 billion price tag for YouTube, and they want their pound of flesh.

Competitors Running In Circles

Hitwise published some statistics earlier this week showing that YouTube has 60% market share of the U.S. video sharing sites - they have more visitors than all of their competitors combined. They continue to grow at a fast clip even after the networks started massive litigation against them.

Comscore worldwide data is nearly identical, showing YouTube with a 66% market share. See the chart to the left for the side-by-side numbers.

It’s clear that the market is probably big enough for a few competitors to be successful, but no one is knocking YouTube off the thrown any time soon.

Clown Co Still Clowning Around

In March we saw the dramatic introduction of a new service, backed by News Corp. (owner of MySpace) and NBC. They dubbed it “NBC Universal and News Corporation’s Online Video Joint Venture,” which isn’t exactly catchy. When rumors started that Google execs were referring to it as “Clown Co.” the name stuck. Until they name this thing, there’s really nothing else to refer to it as.

Lack of a name hasn’t stopped them from making some bold steps, though. This week they named Jason Kilar, a Harvard MBA and former Amazon executive, to lead the unit. And now there are reports saying they’ve been out trying to raise $100 million in venture capital on a billion dollar valuation. YouTube raised just a fraction of that.

To be fair, Clown Co. isn’t supposed to be a direct competitor to YouTube, and has promised a more distributed approach. And they’ll have (legally obtained) content from both NBC and News Corp. properties, a big advantage over competitors. We’ll have to wait and see once it launches. But the naming problem, as well as the fact that the parent companies described it as “the largest advertising platform on earth” in a media call, suggest it is off to a very bad start.

News Corp. Places Another Bet

News Corp. which owns MySpace, is placing a second bet beyond Clown Co. This week they announced the launch of MySpace TV, a direct competitor to YouTube. MySpace has been collecting video clips from users for well over a year, and their recent $300 million acquisition of Photobucket adds more to the library.

Having the MySpace property behind MySpace TV is a great competitive advantage, although Google’s search engine is behind YouTube, which more than evens the playing field. And since MySpace has shown a willingness to block third party videos if there is even a hint of advertising, YouTube may, over time, find it can’t do much there.

For that reason, MySpace TV is the biggest direct threat to YouTube. But in my opinion it won’t be enough to knock them from the top spot even in the long run. YouTube is now firmly entrenched in the mainstream user’s head as the site to go to see user generated videos and copyrighted video clips, and they are backed by Google. No one is taking that from them any time soon.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/129223564/

An interesting thing happened during yesterdays iPhone launch and it wasn’t just observing Robert Scoble’s mastery of self promotion (in a good way of course). Thousands of people* who were not lining up for an iPhone, be that because they simply weren’t interested in doing so or as in my case were unable to due to geography, experienced the highs and lows of iPhone day vicariously through live streams.

The day wasn’t without issues, Kristopher Tate’s Zooomr/ Ustream feed had technical issues at times, but on the whole the experience was something special. From the interviews on the street, through to the screams of those entering the Apple store to applause, through to the first addition to America’s Funniest Live Video Streams 2020 when Tate had his credit card declined.

The difference on iPhone Day was that instead of turning to blogs or waiting for the mainstream media to report the facts hours later, we were all able to watch it all in first person. The promise of user generated live media was delivered. The seed of a revolution was planted.

Lifestreaming has been covered before on TechCrunch; I remain unconvinced about the likelihood of Lifestreams such as Justin.tv (the man, not the service) being anything more than a niche pursuit, yet what we saw on iPhone Day was different: this was Eventstreaming.

Eventstreaming is the missing link in Web 2.0’s challenge to network television.
(more…)

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/~3/129194690/

Now we can get our hands on an iPhone, developers are testing out Safari to see what is actually available. How is the DOM? What events get fired? How does the keyboard send onkey* events? How is scrolling handled? How is the JavaScript support?

Abe Fettig has been jotting down his notes, which include:

• Poking around the DOM, I don’t see any special objects, with the possible exception of window.offscreenBuffering (set to true).
• Bookmarklets work, although you have to go through the bookmarks menu to get to them.
• Safari crashes are handled gracefully - the main screen fades back in, and you can jump right back into Safari. It will then load page you were visiting when it crashed.
• Drag and drop, and other behaviors based on picking up mousemove events, don’t work. CSS-based element drag and drop doesn’t work either. Dragging one finger around the iPhone’s version of Safari causes the window to scroll, and that’s it. I assume that scroll events do work. I’m sure somebody is already working on a version of drag and drop based on window scrolling.
• For documents with no width set, the iPhone uses a default width of 980px.

Joe Hewitt isn’t too happy with his experiments:

My first task has been exploring the DOM events that you can handle. You do not get “mousedown” when you touch the screen. You get “mousedown” and “mouseup” at the same time when you release your finger. The “mousemove” event does not seem to fire at all. There is no way to handle double-clicking because that is the action for zooming, and calling event.preventDefault() doesn’t seem to override that.

If Safari is the current SDK, we need help as developers to build, and debug, applications.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/129175427/iphone-safari-notes-and-quirks