Ajax Girl

Yahoo Mash, Yahoo’s new social network experiment, sent out the first batch of invitations moments ago. The service is invite only at this point. Get yours at InviteShare now.

I am seeding the first few invitations. Then it’s up to you. Once you get an invite, come back to confirm it and invite a few more people to keep things going. The more people you invite, the higher you will appear on waiting lists for future private betas.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/156639578/

A little more than two months after we first reported rumors about Yahoo!’s new social network Mosh, the company has given us a preview of a social network with a slightly different name: Mash.

The service includes features common to Facebook, MySpace, and My Yahoo. You can load a set of modules onto your profile page and move them around drag-and-drop style. The modules include Flickr RSS, Ego Boost, Common Friends, MyMoshLog2, Blog Module (RSS 2.0), Asteroids, Astrology, PimpMyPet, Hover, Kaleidescope, Guestbook, and My Stuff.

The modules gallery also states that “in the coming months we’re going to open up our module development platform to 3rd party developers,” which suggests that Mash will be following in Facebook’s footsteps at least to some extent (it will be interesting to see whether there will be canvas-like pages, too).

Users are encouraged to edit each other’s pages. Each time we visit our profile page, we are seeing new modules that others have loaded for us. This capability certainly adds to the “mashing” aspect of the social network. It is also appears as though Yahoo intends for users to mash their information together from across the company’s various properties, perhaps making Mash the main hub for Yahoo users.

While profile pages appear to have a pretty consistent structural layout (like Facebook), users can customize the design of their pages by changing colors and inserting background images (like MySpace).

Mash also has something called Pulse, which is very similar to Facebook’s news feed. The Pulse page shows “updates from your friends” that are basically Twitter-like messages reporting all of your friends’ activity on Mash.

Unfortunately, it looks like Mash lacks a vital feature of Facebook: search. In the top right of every Mash page there is a search box for regular Yahoo search, but that appears to be it.

Yahoo is calling Mash the next generation of profiles and has plans to roll it out quietly. Mash users can invite their friends into the network, so we’ll be getting a section for Mash up on InviteShare shortly (Update: We have set up an InviteShare page for Mash here). When you invite a friend into Mash, you can create a profile for them that they can choose to adopt or not.

Mash appears to Yahoo!’s way of saying adieu to its existing social network, Yahoo! 360, but no word yet on whether the company will actually be shutting down 360.

Mash’s blog can be found here.

More to come as we check this thing out…

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/156623456/

Pitzer College, located in Southern California, is offering a for-credit class called Learning from YouTube this Fall, taught by Alexandra Juhasz, a media studies professor. The class consists of students watching YouTube videos and then discussing them. They also leave comments on the videos themselves.

One of the students, Darren Grose, says YouTube is “a phenomenon that should be studied…You can learn a lot about American culture and just Internet culture in general.”

Pitzer isn’t known as an intellectual powerhouse among small liberal arts schools (although to be honest I am somewhat biased as I went to a rival school, Claremont McKenna). But this may still be just about the most ridiculous class the school, or any school, has ever offered.

The classes are being recorded and, of course, posted on YouTube. Here’s an example class.

In related news, we recently mentioned that Stanford is offering a class on Facebook. But in Stanford’s case, it is a computer science course that teaches students how to create Facebook applications. It’s not a class where students get college credit for sitting around and watching YouTube.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/156588395/

Website annotation tool Diigo will officially announce its new WebSlides feature next week.

The new widget is an embeddable player that presents feeds or bookmarks as live web pages in an interactive slideshow format, complete with full page content including links, comments, and ads. The widget can be sent to friends and colleagues or placed on websites, blogs, and social networks. A bit of good news for publishers: every slide view will actually register a page view for the content owner.

WebSlides also enables Diigo users to highlight important sections and annotate pages on the fly with sticky notes. Users can also bookmark, tag, share, and clip content from the pages in WebSlides for future reference in their own Diigo online folders.

To set up a WebSlides presentation, you simply enter a feed or list of bookmarks, add background music or voice narration, and click “Play”.

There is a lot of competition in the website annotation space, but Diigo’s WebSlides is the first slideshow widget to preserve total page content. Combined with Diigo’s research capabilities, WebSlides makes for a great product. The company will be presenting in the TechCrunch40 demo pit next week.

Our previous coverage of Diigo is here.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/156574415/

Chris Alden just took over as Chairman and CEO of blogging infrastructure startup Six Apart. Barak Berkowitz, CEO since 2004, steps down. Berkowitz will remain with the company as an advisor.

Alden joined Six Apart a year ago as part of the acquisition of Rojo, a company he founded.

Six Apart was founded in 2002 by husband and wife team Ben Trott and Mena G. Trott. Mena was the original CEO.

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/~3/156546624/

I recently had to call United’s customer service department. They have one of those voice prompt systems where you can answer questions by speaking into the phone and have the system automatically guide you to the right answer/representative. The problem: The system sucks.

Every interaction I’ve ever had with these voice recognition services feels like a battle. The system misunderstands what I’m saying. Or it confirms each entry by repeating it snail slooooow: “You said 32530021303. Is that correct?” I wind up feeling like I’m navigating a maze. It inevitably leads to me shouting answers or pleading “operator” in the hopes it’ll take me to an actual human (it doesn’t).

And whenever I hear someone else dealing with one of these systems, the same thing happens. They start out talking calmly but eventually wind up yelling into the phone.

Needless to say, any service that forces customers to scream is a bad idea. Screaming is something that we do when we’re frustrated or angry. But now that’s what I think of: United customer service = screaming. I can’t imagine a worse association for a company to have.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/593-dont-make-me-scream

How O'Reilly went animal

“Edie Freedman was hired to design the first book covers. She thought the books had the strangest titles — sed and awk? — that evoked images of the popular fantasy game, “Dungeons and Dragons.” While looking for imagery, she came across the Dover Pictorial Archives, a series of books (and now CD-ROMs) containing copyright-free collections of 18th- and 19th-century wood and copperplate engravings of animals. She encountered a pair of slender lorises and had an epiphany. ‘That’s sed and awk!’ She scanned several animals from the archive and placed them on mock-up covers, which she then presented to everyone at O’Reilly. O’Reilly had ten or so employees at the time, and people wondered if the animals were appropriate. But Edie convinced them to follow her instincts. Customers wound up loving the covers, and a brand was born.”

When good design goes bad

“Ah, well. We’ll start over. It’s better to have something we’re both proud off than to try and salvage the work done so far. Sometimes you have to go all the way through the design process before you realize that you’ve built the wrong thing, but it’s ok, it’s a learning experience, it’s not the end of the world to take a deep breath and go back to step 1.”

Leaked Google video discusses Google Reader changes

“Calling tags ’labels’ is called ’kind of a historic accident and needlessly confusing’…Very soon, Reader will recommend feeds to the user, based on previous subscriptions and other Google activity.”

Seventies design collection

“Here you will find about 280 pictures, big or small, from the 1970’s era. You can click on any thumbnail to zoom in. This will open a new window. Click on any of the categories below, to show or hide their thumbnails: Cars, Fashion, Film and TV, Furniture, Houses, Interiors, Art, Info.” [via MUG]

Styling file inputs with CSS and the DOM

“File inputs are the bane of beautiful form design. No rendering engine provides the granular control over their presentation designers desire. This simple, three-part progressive enhancement provides the markup, CSS, and JavaScript to address the long-standing irritation.”

A Brief Message

“A Brief Message features design opinions expressed in short form. Somewhere between critiques and manifestos, between wordy and skimpy, Brief Messages are viewpoints on design in the real world. They’re pithy, provocative and short — 200 words or less.”

Knockoffs fly in fashion world

“A debate is raging in the American fashion industry over such designs. Copying, which has always existed in fashion, has become so pervasive in the Internet era it is now the No. 1 priority of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, which is lobbying Congress to extend copyright protection to clothing.”

Non-news news: Face-to-face meetings are still needed to foster genuine "real" friendships!

“This is thought to be partly because very large numbers of friends are difficult to keep track of. Social networking sites have artificially expanded the ability to maintain contacts to an enormous degree. But Dr Reader’s ongoing study of more than 200 social networking site users shows that even they have only around five “close friends”, and these are almost always made through face-to-face meetings.”

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/601-sunspots-the-deep-breath-edition

Collin Jackson has written a JSONRequest extension for Firefox that exposes the JSONRequest communication API to web pages you visit.

It does this by adding a new window.JSONRequest object to your world.

An example of using this beast is on the main page itself:

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/156450548/jsonrequest-extension-for-firefox

Brian Shaler noticed that almost a year ago, Digg removed the “search your own
Diggs” feature, to the dismay of thousands of Digg users. To explain
why the feature had not yet returned, they cited hardware and software
solutions as being very complicated and expensive.

Brian decided to re-implement the feature himself using the Digg APIs, and we end up with The Digg Oracle:

Because the dataset is relatively small and user-specific, performing
tasks like searching/filtering and sorting can easily be done on the
client, using Google Gears. The tool downloads the selected user’s
entire voting history, indexes the stories in the local DB, then does
all the sorting/searching without connecting to Digg’s servers.

Here we see an original query, and the application starts to download the users usage data:

When the data is loaded, searching and filtering the data is extremely fast, even if you use Kevin Rose as your sample This is a great non-offline example of using the database and workerpool components.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/156433268/the-digg-oracle-data-mining-on-the-client

Research megatool Diigo will officially announce its new WebSlides for RSS feeds and Bookmarks feature at TechCrunch40 next week.

The new widget is an embeddable player that presents feeds or bookmarks as live web pages in an interactive slideshow format, complete with the full content, pages, links, comments, and ads. The widget can be sent to friends and colleagues and also placed on websites, blogs and in social networks. Each slide that is displayed actually registers as a page view for the content owner.

Webslides also allows any Diigo user to annotate each page on the fly with sticky notes to share thoughts or to highlight important sections. Viewers can also bookmark, tag, share, and clip content from the pages in WebSlides for future reference in their own Diigo online folders.

To use WebSlides, users enter a feed or list of bookmarks and add background music or voice narration. By clicking “Play,” the list transforms into a slideshow.

There’s a lot of competition in this space, but having looked at the product I can see why Diigo qualified for the demo pit at TC40. A widget that includes full content including advertising is a good thing for publishers, and it’s the first slide/ widget I’ve seen that does this. Combined with Diigo’s research capabilities it makes for a great product. Video demonstration is below.

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/~3/156407379/