Ajax Girl

Looks like tonight’s theme is social discovery. Israel-based eSnips, a media-centric social network we reviewed over a year ago, is releasing a new feature called “Social DNA” meant to help you discover people similar to yourself.

The idea’s simple and already executed in one form or another by most online dating services. Users fill out quick and “fun” quizzes about a variety of topics. They also list their musical, literary, cinematic, and dietary preferences on the site. Social DNA then takes these two sources of input and compiles percentages meant to reflect how similar you are to others on different topics. You’ll find out that you and Sally are 64% alike in political beliefs but only 8% alike in musical tastes, etc. The site will also tell you who you match most closely in a particular community or group of friends.

Social DNA is cute enough but seems to confuse the purpose of eSnips even more than it is already confused (is it an online storage service? a social network? a promotional tool?). Plus, the feature doesn’t add much substance; I don’t expect many people will actually get to know each other after discovering that their “social genes” match up well. But who knows; maybe eSnips’ reported four million users will really dig Social DNA.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/184481817/

Social network for neighbors Fatdoor has raised $5.5M in its first round of institutional funding. The company has also brought aboard ex-Yahoo Jennifer Dulski as its CEO.

The investment group was led by Norwest Venture Partners with the participation of KeyNote Ventures. Dulski comes to Fatdoor after nine years at Yahoo where she served variously as VP/GM of Local Markets and Commerce, VP/GM of Yahoo Autos, and VP of Business Unit Marketing.

Fatdoor aims to connect you with your neighbors by providing a localized social network for your physical community. Although the site will be in private beta until the spring of 2008, a handful of details have been publicly available since at least June. The website will integrate with Microsoft Virtual Earth to display local business and residential listings on an interactive map. Once users claim their listings, they can add profiles and put down their interests. Users can then plan events and form local interest groups with the site.

Fatdoor will also pull in information from other web services such as business reviews from Yelp, events listings, and driving directions. Users will be able to add their own business reviews but they won’t be displayed outside of the network on Yelp’s website. Fatdoor’s homepage will display something akin to the Facebook news feed with information about upcoming events and recently created groups.

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SixApart has launched a new version of the their Movable Type (MT) blogging platform, Movable Type Community Solution (MTCS) that takes blogging into the realms of forum hosting, with some nice 2.0 touches.

Other sites have reported that the new version is something akin to a Ning competitor, but this isn’t the case. I asked Six Apart’s VP Anil Dash exactly what we are looking at

MTCS is about rescuing the huge parts of the web that are still suffering under circa-1997 technologies. I call it the “Dark Web” — all these conversations that are taking place on bulletin boards, forums, and message boards, but they don’t have any of the usability or identity benefits of modern web technologies. And that’s leaving aside niceties like good URLs (for Google indexing) and tagging and rich media support. I mean, you just don’t see a forum where you can easily upload video or audio assets, for example.

MTCS generates a member profile for every user in a system, providing a profile page that shows commenting, interactions etc, but Dash says that isn’t the exciting part:

If I look at your profile, and the only conversations you’ve inspired are flame wars, it’s easy to know you’re not a valuable contributor. But to the contrary, if every comment or post you write gets marked as a favorite, then I can start to think about promoting you (using MT4’s built-in permissions system) to be an author or administrator, either on the forums or on other blogs in the system. Maybe you can even make static content pages. (Just imagine, instead of having to “pin a post” at the top of a forum to define policy, you can just *make a policy page*. So obvious, but such an improvement.)

The cross action integration is where SixApart feels that MTCS excels:

Upload a user picture for yourself, and it’s stored (and tagged) in MT4’s built-in asset management system. Vote for something as a favorite, and it shows up on the MT4 dashboard as favorite content, so other authors know it’s what the community is looking for. And best of all, administration and community participation features are separate, as they’ve always been in blogging tools — that fixes the problem forums have always had of trying to shove administration and management tools into the user-facing part of the site.

MTCS supports third party widgets (SixApart is a member of OpenSocial) and OpenID comes as standard.

Dash emphasized that MTCS is a “serious commercial product.”

It’ll likely cost a few thousand dollars to start, and the target audience is serious, large-scale communities like media companies, major brands, educational institutions, and intranet/enterprise deployments. I suspect that smaller independent sites will mostly grab a small number of free plugins that reproduce some of this functionality on a smaller scale and use that with the free version of MT if they are price-sensitive.

A demo forum running MTCS can be found here. A number of other sites, including Gothamist, BoingBoing and SeriousEats are already using some of the functionality including commenter profiles and recommendation tools.

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Google has made a small change to AdSense that may make a big difference in cutting out errant clicks and even your AdSense revenue. They’ve redefined the clickable region for Google AdSense from the entire boxed region, to just the text link. Google Blogoscoped has a mock-up of the difference in the regions.

Although Google has filters to detect outright click fraud, unintentionally clicking on an ad region may be a less insidious yet hard to detect cause of wasted ad dollars. Last year, Google and Yahoo got into hot water over allegations of click fraud and eventually agreed to an independent audit. Google also wound up paying $90 million in a settlement, a small fraction of any potential earnings from fraud, but a wake up call for them nonetheless.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/184427703/

CBS News writers will vote Thursday on taking strike action in a move that would cripple news production on CBS television and radio.

The CBS News workers will join their drama and comedy colleagues on the picket line, along with Broadway stage hands who went on strike November 8. So far the growing number of striking workers has seen late night talk shows go off air (or into repeats), and the neon lights of Broadway dim as 27 Broadway productions have been canceled costing as much as $17 million a day.

Whilst there’s nothing quite like seeing a Broadway musical in person, audiences left with nothing but closed signs and picket lines will still want to spend their recreational time somewhere, and online content presents a great void filling alternative.

The CBS writers strike alone will not push many to online alternatives who aren’t already getting their news fix from the internet; there is always Fox, NBC, ABC or Cable as an alternative. However with strike action in the air there is always the chance that more writers from other networks may join the picket lines, and that would reduce television choice. The irony of course is that the original writers strike is all about sharing revenue from online content, where as the net result of their actions may actually see more people turning online for content and less people watching television. After the 1988 writers strike, network television lost 10% of its audience once the strike ended, at a time where there were far fewer alternatives to what viewers have today.

(image credit: idealterna on Flickr under CC)

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There’s a new sheriff in town at the venerable Wall Street Journal, and they certainly seem willing to try new things.

Like the New York Times, the WSJ is now adding Digg buttons to articles. And clicks from Digg get the added benefit of bypassing the paywall.

Links are supposedly being added now, although I can’t find any articles that include the digg button yet.

The WSJ also has links from blog search/discovery engine Sphere on their site, which creates a pop up window with related content.

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I’m curious what software test methodologies and tools you use. Are you religious about Test Driven Development (TDD)? Do you use Rails’ Test::Unit, or do you prefer alternate tools such as Behavior Driven Development with rspec? A list of the test-related plugins you use would be interesting to see.

We’re big believers in the benefits of testing, but I wouldn’t call it religious. I personally rarely get into the flow of writing my tests first, except for transformation-style methods that takes known A and turns it into known B. I find that test-first often doesn’t fit my brain all that great for molding beautiful APIs. I know, though, that it works wonders for others and I deeply respect that approach. On our team, it seems to work especially well for Jamis at times.

I’m perhaps also a little on the fringe in regards to how much I test. I don’t believe that getting 100% coverage is worth it in most cases. Especially not when it comes to testing view code. For our applications, it simply changes too often and the criticality of display bugs is low and very rarely realized anyway.

The areas of testing where I personally derive the most benefit is from object-interaction tests. Like testing the signup form that creates a handful of records at once and need to spread error checking across the lot. Or dealing with project limits in Basecamp that’ll interrogate multiple other classes. Or API interactions for the creation of Writeboards.

For people new to testing, though, I would recommend going all-out from the start. The only way to get a good grasp on when you can be more lax in your testing is to have done “too much” for a while and identified areas that could go with less without materially hurting your productivity now and in the future. So in that sense, easing your testing rigor is a late-stage optimization that needs to be done with great care. If you’re ever in doubt whether to spend time testing or not, test.

In terms of tooling, we’re using the vanilla Test::Unit flavor that ships with Rails. I’m personally not convinced that rspec holds much improvement over it and I tend to think the DSL-style has been taken a tad too far. But I do like the BDD-style focus of naming your tests in terms of “should” and I use that in my own style. In the large scheme of things, it really doesn’t matter one way or another. The important thing is that you test and if rspec and BDD makes testing more enjoyable for you, rock on.

Also, while I don’t think striving for 100% test coverage is worth it in most cases, it’s nice to know where you stand none the less. The rcov package provides a great way of seeing how you tests are holding up and where you might be lacking.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/701-ask-37signals-how-do-you-test-your-software

It didn’t make a lot of sense when we heard that Automattic, the company that created the Wordpress.com blogging platform and oversees the Wordpress.org open source project, turned down a $200 million buyout offer.

But apparently the investors weren’t ready to cash in their chips yet, and made CEO Toni Schneider and founder Matt Mullenweg a counter offer they couldn’t refuse: take a new round of financing, led by existing investor Polaris, and use most of that new money to cash out the founders.

The size of the round is reported to be as high as $50 million. It’s unclear how much of that goes to the founders, we’re just hearing “most of it.”

The company won’t confirm the deal - Schneider returned my email, saying “Can’t comment on anything at this time.” More as this develops.

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Poor Peerflix. It can’t quite seem to figure out what business it wants to be in. The DVD trading site, which already tried to rethink its business last December, has decided that maybe an online swap meet for DVDs isn’t such a great idea after all. Now it wants to become an ad network for movie-related sites. Oh, and it also bought a blog today, TheMovieBlog, for an undisclosed amount.

Peerflix will continue to operate its DVD-trading business, which pretty much runs itself on autopilot, says CEO Billy McNair. But today it is launching the Peerflix Media Network, which will be an ad network targeted at movie lovers. Peerflix ads will run across more than 40 partner sites, including Peerflix, TheMovieBlog, Pajiba.com, ComicBookMovie.com, BadMovies.org, ScreenRant.com, and AnimeMojo.com. All together, this collection of niche movie sites attracts about one million visitors a month. TheMovieBlog represents the biggest chunk of that, with visitors fluctuating between 300,000 and 650,000 per month, and Peerflix attracts about 100,000 visitors a month. The rest come from the other sites.

McNair clearly sees a bigger opportunity in advertising than in e-commerce. He explains the reasoning behind his shift in strategy:

We have a very loyal audience, but it is unclear to me today whether the trading side becomes part of the arsenal of the average consumer to acquire content, or whether it remains a niche play. We could extend the trading platform or extend the movie experience. We felt the smarter play was to extend the movie experience.

Swapping DVDs always seemed like more hassle than it was worth to me. But Peerflix has been able to gather 300,000 registered users, with about 10 to 20 percent of those active in any given month, according to McNair. The problem is that there is not much growth there.

McNair says he was able to finance the blog acquisition and the new ad network from operations, and that he has not yet burned through the $10 million in capital he’s raised so far from Battery Ventures, 3i, and BV Capital. (The last round was in October, 2005). And he does not rule out more blog acquisitions.

But he may find that swapping DVDs is easier than swapping business models.

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So the rumors are correct. The picture above, Flickr confirmed via a phone call, is in fact the 2 billionth image uploaded to the site. The photo was taken by “yukesmooks” in Sydney on November 10th with a Canon EOS Digital Rebel XTi. It has the beautifully minimalist title “Picture 098.”

You can apparently find various milestones by typing in the URL http://flickr.com/photo.gne?id=XXXXXXX, and replacing the X’s with the photo number. Sadly, most of the big milestones are really, really boring pictures.

Flickr says 3-5 million new photos are uploaded to the site daily. That means we just have to wait until…well, someone do the math…for the 3 billionth photo. I hope it’s a good one.

Update: Just as a point of comparison, Facebook has 4.1 billion photos on their site.

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