Ajax Girl

The news is just coming out that Technorati have lost two more employees. Tantek Celik has left after serving as 3 years as head of technology at Technorati and Adam Hertz has also left, after also serving for 3 years as the VP of Engineering. Both Tantek and Adam have played important roles in developing the technology at Technorati, with Tantek additionally being a spokesperson and evangelist of Microformats and other open standards.

From the blog post it appears that they have both left the company to pursuit other opporunities. It is unkown if they are working on the same opportunity together, as they have left at the same time and worked closely together at Technorati. This is yet another blow to Technorati, as they have again lost high profile members of the team. Tantek bought a lot of technical credibility to Technorati, which was especially needed as Technorati constantly stuggled with downtime and performance issues. Tantek was also responsible for a large part of the developer community that formed around Technorati, specifically around tags and microformats. You see Technorati built into almost every blogging tool and their API being used in many different places, and this is mostly because of the great level of developer evangelism and support that Tantek (along with Kevin Marks - who left for Google earlier this year) bought to the company.

Update: It turns out that Technorati product manager Liz Dunn has also left the company, although there was no mention of it in Dave Sifry’s post. Liz has left Technorati to join Will Farrell’s Sequoia-back comedy video site FunnyOrDie as the Director of Product. Liz had been at Technorai for 18 months and was responsible for the new site they launched.

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/~3/130309408/

eBay has opened a US version of its classifieds site Kijiji.

Kijiji has previously been available in Canada as well as parts of Europe and Asia, and is a direct competitor to Craigslist.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Kijiji is immediately available in 220 cities in all 50 US states. Like Craigslist, advertising is free with eBay looking at ways of charging sellers for display ads or premium services at a later date.

eBay bought 25% of Craigslist in 2004 and retains that shareholding today.

Despite, or perhaps because of its ugly interface, Craigslist has been an enormous success in the United States, although notably not nearly as much elsewhere. eBay is trying to tackle a 500 ton gorilla with a product that would appear to be nothing more that a pretty looking Craigslist clone, so it will be a hard ask. Then again eBay certainly has the strength, marketing skills and capital to call game on.

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/~3/130296143/

Dojo 0.9 has been released in beta. This is a brand new Dojo, and a very exciting time for the project:

SPEED: Stripped of all ‘excessive’, redundant, and backwards-compatible code, the new Dojo core is a speed-demon. It consists of a streamlined, compact Base (aka: dojo.js) which provides a plethora of reliable features for you and your application to expand upon. Our goal was to keep the new Base under 50K on disk and we’re happy to say that even with the many improvements to it since M2, Dojo Base still clocks in under the wire and gzipped it’s even smaller: 24K. The base of the new widget system (dijit.js) is even lighter, weighing in at 21K on disk and 11K on the wire.

Accessibility: one of the main goals of Dojo’s 1.0 release is accessibility. We want to put the power to build great web applications in everyone’s hands, and that means applications that are also great for everyone. Dijit (the dojo widget system) is striving to make all aspects of the Dojo Toolkit accessible via keyboard navigation, accommodate screen readers, and work in high-contrast mode for visually impared users, while still maintaining its elegant and customizable structure. Much of that work is already done as of Beta and it shows. Try tabbing around the examples on IE or FF and you’ll see how a focus on a11y makes the components we provide better. Again, our heartfelt thanks to Mozilla and IBM as well as David, Simon and Becka11y (the a11y team) for their continued efforts on everyone’s behalf.

Theming: Dijit is entirely customizable. Shipping with a default theme named ‘Tundra’, a structure has been established with which to create your own personalized sytle of Dojo, on a per-page or per-node or per-widget basis. All dijit look and feel is CSS-based, and easily extendable. Look at any of the Dijit examples and you’ll see that there’s no magic about how the CSS gets loaded or applied. Want to provide your own theme? Just create an allegory to tundra.css and you’re off to the races!

Documentation: a new version of our venerable web-based/html API tool is is in the works. Following a strict style guide, and documentation standards, we’re working hard to make Toolkit code nearly self-explanitory. Where it’s not, the new API system supports in-place updates of the documentation via the web interface and comments on any node so that you can share your experiences, common usage patterns, and frustrations about any API with yourself and your fellow Dojo developers. We expect this new tool to be integrated with the main Dojotoolkit.org

I am excited to see what comes out of this. Great jobs guys, and kudos for being ballsy enough to make this change.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/130168950/dojo-09-the-next-generation-is-here

Amie Street, one of our favorite new music distribution services (SellABand is up there, too), turns one year old today - we first wrote about them last year a couple of weeks after launching.

Amie Street’s business model is dead simple - Artists upload their music for download on the site. Users download songs, with the starting price at free. When downloads pick up for popular songs, the price starts to rise, all the way up to $0.99. If a song gets to $0.30 or so, you know its popular. The artist keeps 70% of revenues after the first $5 in sales. Songs are sold DRM-free in MP3 format. Users can also generate credit in Amie Street by recommending songs. Only a few recommendations are allowed, but if the song you promote does well, you get credit in your account that you can use to buy other songs.

Well known artists are starting to use the service. Barenaked Ladies, Master P, Romeo and the Meat Puppets are all distributing music on the site, which has now sold over half a million tracks to users.

To celebrate their birthday, Amie Street is giving the first 5,000 signups on the site $2.50 in free credit and five free song recommendations. Just use the promo code “TechCrunch.” Note that we are not receiving any compensation from this. Try it out if you like.

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/~3/130110686/

FeedBurner has ceased charging for two premium features following their acquisition by Google in May.

FeedBurner Stats PRO, a service that provides detailed statistics including subscriber numbers, item clickthrough tracking, podcast downloads and aggregate item uses amongst other features, becomes free.

FeedBurner MyBrand, a service that allows users to control the URL of feeds is now free as well; a move that will be strongly welcomed. For many, the biggest argument against using Feedburner was the need to give up control of your feed URL (for example, http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch). Being able to keep ownership of a feed complete with site branding will drive new many new users to Feedburner, including yours truly.

FeedBurner PRO and MyBrand accounts will not be billed effective from June. Although the services are now free, Feedburner users are required to “upgrade” to them from within the Feedburner control panel.

(via SEL)

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/130109297/

Richard MacManus writes about one of his frustrations with Digg - poorly created links that don’t give do a story justice. Once a particular link is added to Digg, there is no way for the submitter or anyone else to edit and improve it.

Sometimes this is done negligently or in a desire to post first; sometimes it is done maliciously to effectively block a story on Digg. Either way, it is an increasingly annoying problem for Digg users, and one that should be addressed. Too often, Digg’s data is crap.

Richard suggests giving some or all users the ability to edit links. He says he’s calling for editors, but not to pick stories. Rather, just to clean up existing stories to make them more accurate.

I like the idea a lot, and it’s something I’ve seen with a few other startups. Thoof, for example, which we wrote about last month, allows users to change any story in a wiki-like fashion. Changes are then voted on by the community to see if they stick or not.

Whether its power users, hired editors or the community at large, something should be done to fix the incentives for people to submit bad data to Digg. Good idea. Richard.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/130097211/

Mobile gaming portal Cellufun has launched its newest game, “MobilePet myPhone”, a virtual pet game for the iPhone and other mobile phone users.

MobilePet myPhone allows users to care for, play with and feed a virtual pet. Users must keep the virtual pet from getting sick, from feeling neglected and must “avoid visits to the virtual computer store for repair”. MobilePet myPhone users are able to download music from Cellufun’s catalog of artists to entertain their pet. Additionally, users can earn points when their friends visit their pet on their own phones, as well as by successfully caring for their pet; scores are compared with other members in the same gaming community for a place on a scoreboard.

The game is WAP based and ad-supported, delivering a free service that requires no download.

The success of Tamagotchi’s and Nintendo’s Nintendogs would indicate that virtual pet games are wildly popular. Bringing the craze to the iPhone would seem like a logical step.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/130062516/

Korean electronics giant LG has signed an agreement with Google to develop a YouTube focused mobile phone.

LG said the model would allow users to upload, view and share video clips without the need to use a computer. The 3G phone will be offered first in Europe in the second half of this year.

Apple received a lot of attention earlier this year when they announced a deal with Google to deliver YouTube video natively onto the iPhone; in comparison the LG deal is far more interesting. Essentially users will be able to record videos on their mobile phones then upload them immediately to YouTube through a streamlined interface. Whilst many may argue that nothing can compare overall to the iPhone, Apple’s failure to launch a 3G version of the phone, or release it outside of the United States gives Apple’s competitors time to improve their offerings prior to the inevitable future worldwide release of the iPhone.

(via AFP)

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/~3/130047641/

Nick Stakenburg has written a nice simple tooltip built on Script.aculo.us called Effect.Tooltip.

It is as simple to setup as:

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/130046191/scriptaculous-effecttooltip

Christopher Lukic has created an iPhone application that has been optimized with the network issues in mind.

It’s a bar and subway finder for New York City, and I implement a number of techniques to overcome some of the short coming of AT&T’s edge network. Virtually the entire site is composed from a single javascript file of just under 25k. By reusing components and keeping server refreshes to an absolute minimum while pulling data in via ajax, I was able to create a pretty responsive component that feels like it belongs on the iPhone (i hope!).

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/130030043/new-york-on-tap-iphone-app