Ajax Girl

One thing that has become a certainly in our little tech world - a few months can’t go by without rumors surfacing that a sale of Digg is imminent. CEO Jay Adelson and cofounder Kevin Rose are in a perpetual rumor cycle. The problem is, they seem to be the ones at fault for the rumors. The reason? They’ve been trying to sell Digg for nearly two years, on a nearly constant basis. And the guys they’re pitching keep leaking it all to the press.

Rumor History

Blogger Kevin Burton was infamously first to bat with a statement that a sale of Digg to Yahoo was a near certainty in January 2006, for $30 million (he was wrong).

We know with a high degree of certainty that Digg did try to sell itself to Yahoo, and probably others, for $20 million or more in May 2006. No offers were made, according to our sources.

By the end of 2006 the price had increased - they were asking for $150 and turned down soft offers in the $100 million range. At the time, Comscore said they had just 1.3 million users.

We have confirmations from potential buyers that Digg continued discussions throughout 2006 and into early 2007, looking for at least $100 million, but no offers were made.

Over the last few months Digg has been shopping themselves again - and the price is at least $200 million according to a source who’s been pitched. Again, no offer.

Now, we’re getting reports that a sale is imminent, in the $300+ million range. A source close to Digg says they’ve heard nothing about this. That doesn’t mean it isn’t happening. But we have no independent information that this time, the rumors are true.

Hire A Banker. Sell This Thing, Already.

In the past, Adelson has always said they have never tried to sell Digg. He says they will meet with companies when approached, but they are never the party trying to make the sale. The problem is that too many independent sources have told us that Digg has tried, hard and persistently, to sell to them. The company has been on the market for nearly two years. There is just no way to deny it.

Frankly, I don’t understand why they are so anxious to sell it. They’ve turned the corner on usage - most of the submissions and traffic today are based on non-tech stories. There is a real argument that Digg can be a mainstream news sorting service. Comscore shows them at 11.5 million monthly uniques, with a nice growth curve (see below).

There is no good reason to sell Digg when it continues to grow like a weed. But that doesn’t seem to deter Adelson and Rose from trying to dump this thing at every opportunity. They’re always asking for more than people want to pay, however, and they haven’t been able to create a bidding war to jack the price up.

Perhaps the most recent rumors are true. If they are, I congratulate the Digg team and investors. But if the rumors are as true as the previous ones (meaning not at all), then I suggest they hire an investment banker to put together a proper pitch deck, approach the key buyers, and get a real bidding war going. That’s the way to sell a company for an absurd valuation. The slow burn approach does nothing but create a never ending cycle of rumors.

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Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/181433164/

Multiply has been growing rather quietly internationally. The social media aggregator now has 7 million registered users and 10.5 million monthly unique visitors according to their internal numbers, nearly triple their 2006 traffic. Comscore’s most recent numbers show 12.5 million uniques for September.

The service acts like a meta social network where users can collect and share content from multiple social sites (photos, video, blogs). See our earlier comparison with Vox. Users post 1.25 million photos, 16,000 videos and 55,000 blog entries daily. However, while the U.S. is home to the largest share of their registered users, most of their traffic is international.

The Philippines is one of the most pronounced examples of their large international following. Alexa ranks Multiply as the 5th largest site in the Philippines - with more than 2 million unique monthly visitors. We had earlier reported that 39% of the site’s traffic comes from the Philippines. Therefore it’s no surprise that they’ve managed to land a multi-year ad deal with one of the Philippine’s largest networks, ABS-CBN. ABS-CBN has 67 televisions stations, 19 radio stations, 30 websites and reaches 97% of the Filipinos with televisions. Under terms of the agreement, ABS-CBN interactive will sell advertising and mobile services for Multiply’s Filipino users, with the two companies sharing revenues.

The deal highlights the importance of international markets U.S. press often take for granted. Sites like Friendster and Orkut have found large international followings while their U.S. markets are dormant. With a global internet, foreign markets are expected to become even more important in the future. According to research firm Datamonitor Plc., by the end of this year, Asia will account for 35% of the world’s social networking users, with 28% of users in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, 25% in North America, and 12% in the Caribbean and Latin America. Once again, startups concerned about getting big may want to get international.

Multiply

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Friendster

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/181400665/

The latest forecast for Internet advertising is out from eMarketer, which says that in the U.S. it will rise from $21 billion this year to $42 billion in 2011. During that time period, Web advertising’s share of the overall ad market in the U.S will also roughly double from 7.4 percent to 13.3 percent. Another data point: The average person online in the U.S. is expected to spend $114 online in 2007. That number is expected to grow to $199 per person in 2011. The numbers are based on data from the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PriceWaterhouseCoopers. Remember, these sorts of forecasts are almost always wrong. In a way, they are a better measure of current sentiment towards the online advertising sector, which remains exceedingly bullish despite all other forms of advertising struggling or sinking.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/181317026/

The theme of my email inbox this morning (it’s morning for me, anyway) is that for some reason a search for presidential candidate “Ron Paul” in Facebook Groups yields zero results. The reason isn’t because there aren’t any Ron Paul groups - a search for “Paul” shows hundreds. For some reason, the search is blocked.

Other candidate show up just fine. More than 500 groups show up for each of John Edwards, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Mitt Romney and others.

But the wacky Ron Paul? Nada.

I’ve got calls into Facebook but everyone is still in New York after the big announcement yesterday and they don’t seem to be super responsive today.

Update: Was just sent this as well.

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Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/181261795/

This is a big day for Protoscript friends. The triple release. The big one. This post is a long one two as it discusses:

• Prototype 1.6 Released
• Script.aculo.us 1.8 Released
• “Prototype and script.aculo.us: You never knew JavaScript could do this!” book released, and we have a great review by Stu Halloway

Prototype 1.6

They cleaned up, and 1.6 is a really nice piece of work. A lot of little nit-picks are now solved, and you are left with the lean mean machine that you know and love.

Highlights

• Ajax transport objects are now automatically wrapped in an Ajax.Response object.
• Ajax.Response includes support for accessing JSON response bodies as JavaScript objects via the responseJSON property.
• The class API now includes full support for inheritance and superclass method calls. (See Mislav’s tutorial for more info.)
• Class objects now have an addMethods method for adding instance methods after creation.
• Elements can be created easily with the new Element(…) syntax.
• Element#insert provides a unified API to DOM element and HTML fragment insertion.
• Element#select is an alias for getElementsBySelector and is now the preferred way to find elements by class name.
• Element#wrap lets you easily wrap an element inside another element in place.
• Enumerable methods on Array are now backed by native Array#forEach implementations when possible.
• Enumerable now has aliases for equivalent JavaScript 1.6 Array methods, and support for JavaScript 1.6’s context parameter for automatic callback binding.
• Enumerable#grep now calls the match method on its first argument, so you can use it to e.g. filter an array of DOM nodes by CSS selector.
• Event objects are now automatically extended with instance methods, so you can write e.g. event.stop() instead of Event.stop(event).
• Prototype’s event API now supports firing DOM-based custom events with Element#fire.
• The new dom:loaded custom event fires when the entire document has loaded and is ready for manipulation.
• Function#curry allows for partial application of function arguments.
• Function#wrap facilitates simple aspect-oriented programming and provides the basis for Prototype’s superclass method call mechanism.
• Function#delay delays invocation of the function by the given number of seconds.
• Function#defer schedules the function to run as soon as the interpreter is idle.
• The Hash API has changed, and you must now use Hash#get and Hash#set instead of directly accessing properties on Hash instances.
• String#interpolate is a shortcut for instantiating a Template from the string and calling evaluate on it.
• Object properties can now be used in template replacement strings.

Script.aculo.us 1.8

This is the last release before 2.0 comes out and features:

• Complete rewrite of Ajax.InPlaceEditor and Ajax.InPlaceCollectionEditor
• Full CSS inheritance in Effect.Morph
• New core effect: Effect.Tween
• Sound: play mp3 files for sound effects; uses native playback on IE and available plugins whereever possible
• Duration and distance options for Effect.Shake
• Performance improvements
• Tons of bugfixes

The Book (by Stu Halloway)

The skinny: If you develop with Prototype and Scriptaculous, you need
this book.

Prototype and script.aculo.us: You Never Knew JavaScript Could Do This! is a long book, by Pragmatic Press standards. At first glance,
this might seem doubly odd, since the libraries themselves are quite
small, totaling only in the 100s of KB. But before I even opened the
book, I hoped that the length might be justified, for two reasons:

1. Prototype and Scripty (hereafter P&S) are packed with dense,
   expressive, beautiful code, and they can do far more than their size
   might suggest.
2. Along with several other Ajax libraries, P&S embody a modern
   JavaScript style that embraces functional programming. This new style
   is not well covered in the JavaScript books currently in print (as of
   November 2007), so to learn P&S you also have to learn to think about
   JavaScript in a new way.

Once inside the book, I was delighted to find that both of my hopes
were addressed. Porteneuve dives straight into the deep end,
embracing JavaScript’s functional style immediately in Chapter 2 and
never dumbing down the example code. (Don’t worry, there are forward
and backward references to help you along. This is especially nice if
you are reading the electronic copy of the book.) You may need to
read some sections of this book multiple times, and that is a good
thing.

The coverage of both Prototype and Scriptaculous is thorough. Of
course the marquee features receive due attention: Prototype’s
Ajax.Request and Scriptaculous’s Effects each have their own
chapters. More interesting to me is the thorough coverage of the less
visible parts:

• Prototype’s functional capabilities are significantly enhanced for
  the 1.6 release. Chapter 4 shows how to use curry, bind (including
  multiple argument invocation), delay, and defer. You can even do some
  lightweight Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) with the new wrap method.
• Chapter 7, “Playing with the DOM is Finally Fun”, nicely mixes
  tutorial and reference. The Staff Manager example motivates each
  section, but each individual section also acts as a reference for a
  set of DOM extensions.
• The Event mechanism has been rewritten and enhanced for Prototype
  1.6. Chapter 6 covers the new unified event handling. Porteneuve
  motivates the event model by contrasting three approaches: the IE
  way, the standards way, and the Prototype way. With 1.6, portability
  improves again with synthetic events that fill gaps in the browser
  event model, e.g. dom:loaded. You can even fire and respond to your
  own custom events.
• I have been using Scripty for years and I never even noticed the
  sound API (Chapter 20).

Of course, no reviewer feels complete until a few nits have been
picked. So here are a few:

• Porteneuve embraces Prototype’s approach to JavaScript and the web
  (as do I). That said, there are many other approaches. It would be
  great to have an overview of the philosophical differences that set
  P&S apart from other JavaScript libraries.
• The book’s style is casual, even by Prag standards.
• Prototype and Scriptaculous are a rich buffet, and the book
  documents nearly every bite. Sometimes the book could be more
  opinionated about the menu. For example, I hate the $break feature in
  Prototype. Maybe Porteneuve does too–the example is certainly
  contrived.

These flaws are relatively minor. Overall I was impressed by the
amount of information in the book. I have been using P&S for years,
and I learned something new in almost every chapter.

For years, developers at software conferences have asked me “What is
the best way to learn Prototype and Scripty?” Until today, my answer
has always been “Read the source code.” Not any more. If you are
building applications with P&S, you need to read this book.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/181258843/prototype-16-scriptaculous-18-and-the-book

A new weekly web series called nextNYers will be filming five-minute-long interviews with tech startups based in New York City. The company behind the production of nextNYers, For Your Imagination, aims to give better exposure to local tech companies that have been around for a few years. The show is also being presented in partnership with NY-based tech blog CenterNetworks, which will post each week’s show. Meghan Mitchell is the host.

We’ve embedded the first show from the series - in which they interview the founder of Magnify.net - below.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/181261796/

Within hours of Facebook’s announcement of its social advertising plans, the backlash began. What about privacy? What about relevance? (I know everyone is sick of hearing about Facebook, but there are some important business issues at stake here, so bear with me). As far as privacy goes, there is none on Facebook, in that any information you share is fair game for targeting by advertisers. So get used to it. You don’t want to be targeted, don’t share information on Facebook. Perhaps the more important question, though, is around the relevance of the ads themselves.

Already, there’s been some insightful critiques on this front. Nick Carr started things off with his tart summary: “The medium is the message from our sponsor.” He goes on to point out that becoming a fan of a animated Sprite can is not exactly a revolution in advertising:

Henry Blodget asks, not unreasonably: Will advertisers pay people to recommend their products to friends? (That would be a bad idea, but you never know what Madison Avenue will try to do next).

And Umair Haque warns of adverse selection with Facebook ads that are presented as updates to people’s feeds (aka Beacons). Excerpt:

Yes, we all know referrals are powerful. But real referrals aren’t what Facebook’s offering. Real referrals aren’t broadcasting preferences; they are matching preferences. See the difference?

Beacon is essentially a biased market mechanism. That is, advertisers have control - but connected consumers (despite Facebook’s hype) don’t.

The synthetic relevance Facebook is pushing is a drug for the strung-out advertisers of the world: they desperately need a hit of something to make them believe they matter again.

As advertisers buy into Facebook - no one will be better off - except Facebook.

Marketers and firms won’t gain true connection with consumers.

And, crucially, consumers will be trapped into not just receiving crappy ads - but sending them as well.

These are all valid points. The best referrals come from people who know you have a particular need or are looking for something. They usually come out of a conversation. “Have you seen any good movies lately?” “Oh yeah, just last week we rented . . .” I only want referrals when I need them. If all my friends and casual acquaintances start bombarding me with referrals that are not matched to what I need, that could very quickly just become another source of noise I need to filter out.

And yet, it is just too soon to tell where all this will go. Granted, many of the advertising partners that have jumped on board this bandwagon are faceless consumer products companies. I am not sure I want to be a fan of Coca-Cola or Sony Pictures or Verizon. But some of the partnerships do make sense. I don’t mind identifying myself as a fan of the New York Times.

The social ads that will work will tend to be niche or high-end brands that people really like to show off because it says something about who they are. They will also work for other media sites where people already interact in a social way.

For instance, Epicurious.com now knows if you are a Facebook member and broadcasts any recipe you rate or save on the site to all your friends on Facebook (via their feeds). You can opt out if you don’t want to share this information, but it seems to me to be very similar to what people are already seeing in their feeds. “I like this recipe, check it out.” The New York Times will be doing something similar for travel ratings, movie ratings and reviews, and articles you save or e-mail (except, in that case, you will have to opt in to share the information and it won’t say who you are emailing it to). That too seems to me to be in keeping with the spirit of the Mini feed. “Here’s an article you should read.”

But those are not product endorsements. They are more akin to other Facebook applications, except that they are surfacing activity from a different site. Which is why I think that for this to work advertisers need to think more like developers. Help people do something useful, informative, or fun, and they will gladly broadcast that experience to the world. If people see these as ads, they will revolt. If they see them as indistinguishable from the stream of Facebook chatter already in their feeds (which is often inane, but addictive nonetheless), the messages will have a better chance of getting through.

Facebook

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When Comet was first coined there was a lot of buzz, and many thought that polling was dead. It turns out, that for certain use cases Comet is king, but it hasn’t spread as fast as some would have guessed (or liked). One core problem is that HTTP as we currently do it is braindead easy and commodity. Comet hasn’t been, although there are now more and more containers that grok it first hand.

Joe Walker has a nice editorial on the new Comet Daily on Why Comet is of growing importance.

Years of research gave him the following, highly technical, graph:

This does make some sense. It also makes sense that an event driven world is a nice one to play in. The question is how fast are people going to move in that direction, and how many applications really need it (you could say the same for offline and any other technology). If you can get away with polling, even if it isn’t efficient, eh.

There will always be the need for large companies and huge applications to use Comet, and this number will grow in size. Seeing what Google Chat has to do in the browser is a scary thing, and we need to make it just as easy to do the right thing, as we now allow polling.

More from the new Comet Daily

• Comet is always better than polling
• PubSub and Topics
• HTTP Streaming and Internet Explorer
• Educating Comet!

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/181202265/comet-is-its-time-coming

Mindmeister has taken their mind map tool and now allow you to map offline.

The tool itself is a nice Ruby on Rails application (includes pink fade effects! yellow is so 2006) that gives you a visual canvas to play with your mind.

Their approach to offline is similar to Google Reader in that the user has to say “hey, take me offline”. The interface to that is a nice little slider widget. At the point your maps are sync’d down to the local store.

I would love to see it auto sync, and I noticed a couple of issues when I actually went offline but didn’t tell the tool first (would be nice to have the tool grok that) but the mind map tool in general is a nice app to use. It feels like Geni.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/181194144/mindmeister-take-your-mind-map-offline

There are dozens of bookmarking services out there, but most are eclipsed by the size of Delicious. However, Blue Dot’s bookmarking service has remained a favorite of ours because of their ability to consistently innovate their interface. Today, with their re-launch as Faves.com, is no exception.

The relaunched site adds features making their bookmark database more relevant and easier to use for anti-social bookmarkers. At the core, it has the same social and privacy features of the old Blue Dot. However, they’ve added a new method of finding trusted links that doesn’t require building yet another social network. The new site adds a topic network that does a lot of the networking and recommending implicitly along with an easy-to-use feed reader for sorting through new links. It’s kind of like Digg and Delicious combined with Google Reader.

The topic network lets users follow and contribute to clusters of links by subject (software, business, Apple, etc.). When submitted, links are categorized by their system and ranked by a score similar to Digg. The score for each link is based on the number of votes, the “karma” of the submitter, and implicit votes such as the number of clicks a link has. Users whose links are more popular in a category, have higher karma.

Users can subscribe to these topics via RSS or through the site’s new link reader. The reader is like a specialized Google Reader for your bookmarks, which can be sorted by popularity, time, and read/unread. Each link lets you easily vote up ones you like or share them with friends. As you scroll through the links, they are marked read and moved out of sight for the next time you return. The reader makes it very easy to sort through dozens of new links in the time it would normally take me to review a few.

The URL change is also part of the Seattle based companies effort to gain greater reach, which they felt was slowed by the relative obscurity of a .us domain. While the site has attracted a significant audience of over 1.1 million visitors a month, the growth rate has stayed fairly level. They’re making a big bet that the new features and .com domain will give a boost those numbers. All in all, they look to be off to a smart start.

delicious

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