Ajax Girl

One of the bigger letdowns of the iPhone is a lack of instant messaging support. Last month we took a look at FlickIM one of the first iPhone-specific chat applications (but only for AIM). Older web chat startups Meebo and eBuddy also have their own applications. eBuddy’s is iPhone customized. Meebo doesn’t hide the fact that they will launch one soon.

Today, Mundu, an Indian web chat provider threw their hat into the ring with Mundu for the iPhone. Like other web chat clients, it connects the big guys: ICQ, AIM, MSN, Yahoo, and Google.

The application consists of three different pages: log in, contacts, and chat. Clicking on a contact opens up a new conversation tab in your chat pane. It worked well enough, with a reasonable response time and legible text. It’s better than eBuddy (load time issues) and FlickIM (AIM only).

So why in the world will they eventually charge $11 for it?

There are way better ways to monetize software. Offer a free version and drop an advertisement into the conversation every once in a while, for example. But if Mundu wants to get a lot of users fast before Apple adds their own apps, they can’t be screwing around with charging customers. The marginal production cost of software is zero. That’s what the price should be.

Here’s a look at the other guys:

• Meebo - They don’t have a optimized application, however, Meebo’s web application works. Unfortunately chatting on it is like using the site through a key hole. You have to constantly zoom in and out to pick your contacts or chat in a specific window. It also crashed my browser from time to time.
• FlickIM - If you just want to get on AIM, I strongly suggest FlickIM. It’s a no frills chat app that lets you get online and easily start chatting. It also maintains your user session even if you exit the browser. The only drawback is that they use a drop down menu to select a chat contacts instead of an easy to scan list that takes advantage of the iPhone’s scrolling.
• eBuddy - They have the fanciest iPhone chat application with a lot of the full application functions. On eBuddy you can chat with your contacts, send smilies, change and change your text color. Unfortunately it only connects to MSN, Yahoo, and AIM.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/140491615/

As predicted, Amazon launched a new payments web service today called Amazon Flexible Payments Service, or FPS. It will compete with Paypal and Google Checkout.

FPS, Amazon says, “is the first payments service designed from the ground up specifically for developers” and “unmatched flexibility in how they can structure payment instructions.” Payments can be made by credit cards, bank account debits, and Amazon Payments balance transfers.

The most important feature: people can pay using the same login credentials and payment information they already have on file with Amazon. That means people don’t need to have their credit card and other personal information stored at yet more ecommerce sites. For payments over $10, Amazon will charge 2.9% + $0.30. This matches PayPal but is higher than Google, which is eating fees to gain market share (Google charges 2% + $0.20).

This may quickly become Amazon’s most popular, and most profitable, web service. Anyone can now leverage their tens of millions of customers and provide a very simple payment option.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/140484417/

There is a bit of buzz around the presentation Bear Stearns Internet analyst Robert Peck gave a couple of days ago. It recommends a broad strategy for Yahoo to get their act together in the social networking space, and recommends a near term acquisition of one of the big players.

I’ve embedded the full presentation below. It is a broad overview of social networking in general, which Peck breaks down into four distinct types:

Peck also notes that social network users are not all teenagers - the largest user group is 35-54 years old:

Peck also notes that social networks have incredible reach, page view growth and boast very high engagement (lots of time spent on the sites. He estimates that by 2011 social networks will control 12% of online advertising.

He then goes on to build an argument that Yahoo should acquire Facebook, something they tried and failed to accomplish last year. Compare his valuation model below ($4.5 - $7 billion) to the model Yahoo put together last year ($1.6 billion):

There is a lot more information in the presentation to digest. See below for the entire thing. Also, while it’s easy to tell Yahoo they need to go buy Facebook, it’s not clear that the company is for sale at any price. The public markets would likely value Facebook beyond even $7 billion at this point. Somewhere down the road it might be Facebook buying Yahoo, not the other way around.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/140444990/

In May Flickr cofounder Stewart Butterfield casually mentioned to me that they would be allowing users to upload video “soon” (see last sentence in this post). Yesterday Yahoo Video GM Mike Folgner reconfirmed this: “Yahoo’s Flickr photo-sharing site will also be adding video,” he said.

If was another throw away statement that was part of a larger article on Yahoo revamping its video site to be more competitive with YouTube. But frankly it was the only interesting thing he said. Playing catch up sucks, and that’s the position that Yahoo Video is in right now. They’ll have to work twice as hard as YouTube and are unlikely to get the return they are looking for.

But Flickr needs video. Too often I return from a trip, upload pictures to Flickr and then just store the videos on my hard drive. I want those videos right next to the photos, with the same tags and in the same sets (albums). They should have added this two years ago…and I’ll be glad to see it later this year.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/140426451/

The first batch of Techstars (a Y Combinator like incubator) startups are launching. MadKast is the first out the door. They’ve made a dead simple way to increase distribution for your blog with one line of javascript or one click for Blogger and TypePad.

With the widget, you can easily let visitors share your entire blog posts via email, mobile MMS, or through any of the social bookmarking services. The widget widget also maintains a list of emails and phone numbers you’ve contacted in the past to make sending new links to friends really easy. AddThis (which we use) has a similar widget, but focuses on an exhaustive list of social bookmarking services.

MadKast’s widget also offers and analytics package that tracks which posts are shared most often and what other blogs your readers are visit.

They plan on monetizing through splitting revenue with bloggers from contextual advertising sent along with the shared post or links. Charging for more complex analytics tools is another option.

MadKast was started by Doug Ludlow, Johann Moonsinghe, Tony Restuccia, and Josh Larson, the team originally behind Zemble.com, a mass text messaging service. They brainstormed the idea for MadKast while in Colorado applying for TechStars. TechStars is an early stage startup program that provides seed financing and mentorship in exchange for 5% in equity.

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/~3/140413776/

Social payment service Buxfer has added peer to peer payments to its money management system. The payment system is supported through Amazon’s new Flexible Payments web service we reported on earlier. Buxfer is one of the first companies on the service’s private beta along with Jungle Disk, Freshbooks, and Beetlabs. Buxfer will be footing the bill for the 1-2% transaction fees till the end of August. They will also be rewarding users that add their friends to the service.

Buxfer, similar to Billmonk (sold to Obopay last year), lets you track and tag your expenses with friends and groups. Social payment sites like these aren’t meant to replace beefier accounting applications like Quicken or Wesabe, but rather easily track account balances with a heavy social networking component. You can either add you payments to Buxfer manually or import a payment statement from your bank, Quicken, or Microsoft Money. Having your payments on Buxfer lets you manage your balances with friends and analyze your expenses over time through pie charts and graphs. Since we last covered them, Buxfer has added a Facebook, mobile, and iPhone application.

The new payment system adds the option to “send a payment”. Sending a payment requires the email of Buxfer account you want to send the payment to and the amount. Submitting the transaction will take you to Amazon Payment’s site, which will handle the rest of the process. If the recipient has an Amazon account, the money will simply be deposited. Unfortunately, If they don’t have an account, Amazon will just pester you to get your friend on the service before the transaction can be completed.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/140393355/

Billy Collins action poetry: Former Poet Laureate, Billy Collins, reads his poetry with accompanying animations. Forgetfulness is a good one to start with.

South Parkers animate words of religious expert and philosopher Alan Watts:

Trey Parker, one of the creators of South Park, was raised in Colorado, where his father attempted to teach him Buddhism. Now, years later, Parker and his animation pal Matt Stone have brought to life the teachings of Alan Watts, the comparative religion expert and philosopher. Under the FurryCarlos Productions banner, the two tapped South Park animators Chris Brion and Todd Benson to keyframe three of Watts’ recordings…

Related: Animation of a Samuel L. Jackson Pulp Fiction speech in type

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/557-billy-collins-action-poetry-and-alan-watts-gets-the-south-park-treatment

Fans turned photographers at indie rock shows

Band of Horses' Ben Bridwell on fans who take pictures at the band's shows: “You see it getting progressively worse. It’s almost like the skateboarding community, where everyone’s a fucking photographer now. You look at shots, and it’s hard to keep the photographers out of the shot, you know? It kind of seems like the same thing with indie rock; everyone’s got a fucking camera in their hand and, I don’t know, is there no sanctity left for live performance with going to a show and seeing it with your own eyes and remembering it? Do you have to tape every second, or even just your favorite song?”

The “Xylophone” wine & food tasting method

“Xylophone is a useful analogy for thinking about wine and food pairing…Before sitting down to taste, arrange your wines in a manner inspired by the percussion instrument of graduated wooden bars: from light-bodied to full-bodied, using the wine’s alcohol level (low to high) as an estimate. When taste-testing wines of similar alcohol levels, you might line them up by color (yellow to pink to red), which can suggest a crescendo of flavor intensity. Either way, it’s then easier to make generalizations about the styles of wine you enjoy best with certain foods: often lighter wines with lighter foods, and fuller-bodied and -flavored wines with heavier foods. Prepare a tasting sheet for taking notes. Listing the wines down one side of the page and the foods across the other, create a simple grid. Into each of the boxes, note your impression of each pairing using a five-point scale, from +2 (perfect) to 0 (neutral) to -2 (awful). After a few glasses of wine, you might skip numbers in favor of smiley or sad faces, a technique we learned from restaurateur Danny Meyer: The broader the smile or frown, the more intense the judgment.”

Design lessons from the kitchen

“Chefs organize their cooks and their space with a few key principles in mind: maximizing consistency of product, ensuring creative freedom to experiment, and encouraging effective problem solving under incredibly stressful conditions… For those who manage creative organizations, the professional kitchen can provide inspiration for how to balance these principles effectively.” [via AP]

iPhone fix request list

“The Macworld editors have all weighed in with a list of things they’d like to see the iPhone do or, in some cases, do better…It’s these consensus items that appear below—and that will make a great mobile device even better.”

BusinessWeek: The Best Product Design Of 2007

“This year’s awards run the gamut from ‘split-head’ hammers to ultralight jets to savings plans for shoppers.”

Great coders can’t write anything else

“The best developers I know write great quality code every time they touch an IDE. This is because they realize that writing good code is something you have to practice, something that you have to do over and over again to be able to do right. They realize that writing great code is something you do all of the time, not something you save for a party trick.”

IE-induced headache

“We have a text area named ‘tags’, which we use to allow users to edit the tags on their pages. Seems like a natural enough name, no? However, IE didn’t like that name. Oh, it handled it fine most of the time, displaying it, editing it, etc. It handled it fine, right up until the time you tried to print, and then IE choked on it. Perhaps IE uses that name internally during printing or something. Who knows? Changing the name to ‘edit_tags’ (and fixing all the relevant functional tests and auxiliary scripts that referenced the field as ‘tags’) caused the error to go away. Talk about bizarre. If I were Microsoft, I would be frankly embarrassed to own a product like IE.”

Thirteen simple rules for speeding up your web site

1. Make Fewer HTTP Requests
2. Use a content delivery network
3. Add an expires header
4. Gzip components
5. Put css at the top
6. Move scripts to the bottom
7. Avoid css expressions
8. Make javascript and css external
9. Reduce dns lookups
10. Minify javascript
11. Avoid redirects
12. Remove duplicate scripts
13. Configure etags

XRAY shows box model for any element on a page

“XRAY is the first in hopefully a suite of free cross browser tools for helping web designers and developers better visualize what their code is doing in a browser. XRAY is designed to help you get beneath the skin of your web page. XRAY let’s you see the box model for any element on a page in action – where is the top and left of an element, how big is each margin, how big is the padding, how wide and high is the content box?”

Online video is the future of marketing and advertising

“A job title of the future for marketing departments is Video Producer. Like a news producer at a television station, she decides every day what’s worth covering at the company and produces a short video segment for YouTube, the company blog or even the company intranet.”

Single-take music videos

“Cheap, lo-fi single-take videos are showing up all over.”

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/561-sunspots-the-single-take-edition

I sometimes get asked “why doesn’t Google eat it’s dogfood and use GWT”. I normally point them too:

• GWT has been out for just over a year (> 1 million downloads), so it is obvious that properties from 4 years ago may not be running GWT
• There are several parts of Google that do use GWT (such as Base)
• Just because we offer an open web toolkit doesn’t mean that it is the right tool for every web application out there.

We are starting to see more and more applications from Google make it out with a “powered by GWT” sticker. One high profile case is the new Google Mashup Editor which actually consists of three distinct parts:

• The Mashup Editor, which is itself an Ajax application.
• A server-side hosting framework, which provides developer services (e.g., source code management via Google Code project hosting) and mashup services such as Google Base and a data store that can be accessed via feeds.
• A JavaScript client library that implements the mashup UI controls and data processing functionality. The server-side components leverage Google’s scalable infrastructure and provide access to Google services via the Google data APIs protocol; the client-side components were developed exclusively using the Google Web Toolkit.

Rich Burdon, of the Google Mashup Editor team, wrote about why GWT was chosen. Here is a closer look:

Before starting the project, our team already had a lot of experience building complex AJAX applications by hand — and had experienced many of the problems associated with this approach. Here are some of the reasons why we chose to use GWT rather than rolling our own native JavaScript framework this time around:

1. Tools matter. As a veteran of the long-ago vi versus emacs debates, it’s interesting to see the same enthusiasm go into the Eclipse vs. IntelliJ IDE arguments. Whichever side you’re on (I fought for the latter in both cases, but we have members of both camps on our team), tools can make a huge difference in terms of developer productivity. You used to think twice before refactoring a large component that needed attention; having the tool take care of these kinds of complicated, repetitive (and error-prone) tasks makes life easier and can lead to better quality.
2. OO is a good idea. I remember figuring out how to make JavaScript objects polymorphic and finally understanding what a closure is. Indeed, my colleague Stephan Meschkat, who works on the Maps API, often reminds me of JavaScript’s inherent power and elegance. However, I like to have keywords like “interface,” “private,” and “final” at my disposal — even better to have my compiler (and my editor) remind me that I’m attempting to call a function with inappropriate arguments. Type safety saves debugging time, and OO abstractions can help to reduce complexity in your code.
3. Compatibility. Java’s original slogan of “write once, run anywhere” fell victim to the intense competition between browser developers. Although JavaScript, being a smaller core language, has fared somewhat better, the complexities of juggling different DOM implementations over a growing number of browser platforms makes writing cross-platform AJAX components difficult. GWT’s ability to insulate you from much of this complexity probably makes it a no-brainer for this benefit alone.
4. The client is only half the story. Both the Mashup Editor and the resulting mashups themselves interact with Google services; being able to code both sides of a remote method call in the same language has some obvious benefits. Aside from the relative simplicity afforded by the GWT RPC mechanism, both client and server components can share constant definitions and in some cases, simple functions.
5. Open systems are less scary. A programming framework is something that introduces abstractions. The benefits include making complex concepts simple and quicker to implement; the downside is that if you want to do something that the framework wasn’t designed for, you’re on your own. It was important for us to be able to get under the hood and tweak the native JavaScript. For example, the Mashup Editor’s template-processing functionality uses a native JavaScript library that we borrowed from the Google Maps API.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/140317492/google-mashup-editor-powered-by-gwt

Christian Effenberger is back with some more Canvas goodness. He has created Edge.js, a library that lets you apply an image mask (in the form of another image) to any image via unobtrusive CSS.

You initialize via:

And then you can simple add classes to the image: class=”edge imask1″.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/140308645/edgejs-mask-your-images-with-unobtrusive-javascript