Ajax Girl

Steve Souders and Stoyan Stefanov have released YSlow 0.9:

There are two big features in this release. By integrating more tightly with Firebug’s Net Panel, YSlow now finds non-DOM components such as Ajax requests and image beacons. And YSlow now crawls frames and iframes and analyzes those resources as well. There are several other new features and bug fixes described in the release notes including highlighting 404s, better detection of CSS expressions and JavaScript minification, and searching within the YSlow panel.

These features make YSlow stronger at identifying performance improvements for Web 2.0 applications. It’s great that YSlow does even better performance analysis of pages, but be forewarned that your previous YSlow scores will drop if these new-found components exhibit bad performance characteristics. As mentioned in Rule 14 - Make Ajax Cacheable, some of the performance improvements that are readily applied to static content (far future Expires header, gzip compression, minification) can also be applied to Ajax responses. Whether it’s Web 1.0 or Web 2.0, YSlow 0.9 helps you figure out what to fix to make your pages faster for your users.

Stoyan Stefanov goes into more detail on the new features, and you can check out the release notes.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/195909876/yslow-09-release-grokking-xhr-and-more

When we recently wrote about the release of Yahoo Messenger for Windows 9.0, one commenter called it “sad” that the version for Vista had not yet been released. Others sounded an outcry over the lack of tabbed windows in version 9.0.

Well, my friends, both are finally here - Yahoo has released a version of messenger for Vista and it has tabbed windows.

It has also been fully skinned for Vista and integrates into that operating system’s gadget bar. Other features include the ability to change layout of our contact list and automatic filtering of contacts as you enter search terms.

Yahoo says it will maintain both this new version for Vista (still labeled as “preview”) and version 9.0 released just over a month ago.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/195911299/

This is neither a device nor specifically a service, but it’s a fairly cool idea. These greeting cards, called ReProduct, come with 2-way envelopes (think Netflix) and you can pop the cards into a pre-paid return envelope and send them back to Shaw Industries where they will recycle them into carpet tiles. That’s right: some day you might be walking on the Christmas card you sent to Aunt Gert.

via CG

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/195884838/

Causes is one of the most popular Facebook Applications, with over 300,000 active users. The service, which leverages virality to spread the word about worthy causes, aggregates 40,000 causes that benefit 13,000 nonprofits worldwide. In many ways, it’s a pyramid scheme for good.

Now founders Sean Parker and Joe Green are leveraging another phenomenon to increase participation even further: virtual gifts. Facebook has been selling them since February this year. A number of unofficial virtual gift applications created by third parties have also launched on Facebook. Clearly, they are here to stay.

But now you can give a gift that says a little more than “I spent a dollar on you.” With Gifts from Causes, you can give a $10 - $200 gift to a friend. Each virtual gift (see image below) benefits a different charity. 100% of the proceeds (minus only credit card fees) go directly to the charity.

$10 gives two blankets to people in a disaster area. Or one insecticide-treaded bed net to a child in Africa to fight Malaria. Or a soccer ball to a poor child. etc. So the next time you want to send your boyfriend a rose, think about spending $15 instead and sending him a teddy bear. In the real world, a sick child will receive a real teddy bear, thanks to your generosity.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/195860392/

After hundreds of man months, the marketing team behind IE has come up with a name (which has been holding back the product). They looked at:

• IE 7+1
• IE VIII
• IE 1000 (think binary)
• IE Eight!
• iIE
• IE for Web 2.0 (Service Pack 2)
• IE Desktop Online Web Browser Live Professional Ultimate Edition for the Internet (the marketing team really pushed for this one
• Ie2.079 (we might still use this for the Math Major Edition)

and ended up with IE8. They also let people know that silence != inaction:

Of course, some people care about other aspects of IE8 much more than they care about the name. As I’ve walked different people through the plan, I’ve gotten “Does it have feature X?” “When is the beta?” “When does it release” and even the more thoughtful “What are you trying to accomplish with this release?”

You will hear a lot more from us soon on this blog and in other places. In the meantime, please don’t mistake silence for inaction.

Dean Hachamovitch
General Manager

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/195823361/ienext-has-a-new-name-ie8

Cliff Shaw, founder of ProtectMyPhotos and DocSyncer, is having an up and down week.

First the bad news. ProtectMyPhotos, which launched in October 2006, is done. They spent $280,000 in seed capital to try to make the idea work, but ultimately they couldn’t compete new backup services like Mozy and Carbonite. Mozy was recently acquired by EMC for $76 million, and Carbonite has raised $21 million in capital.

We’re therefore putting ProtectMyPhotos into the TechCrunch DeadPool.

But Shaw also writes to tell us that his second startup, DocSyncer, is going gangbusters. The product auto-syncs word documents on your hard drive with Google Docs. In the last five days, he says, users have auto-uploaded more than 200,000 new documents to Google Docs via the product, making DocSyncer by far the largest single contributor to Google Docs. The product appears to have legs.

There’s still no guarantee that DocSyncer will make it as a business, but users like the product. That’s a good start, and now Shaw can focus all of his energy on making it work.

DocSyncer

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Mozy

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Carbonite

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/195811994/

The Financial Times has a profile of French (now Silicon Valley) entrepreneur Loic Le Meur today.

Loic is an accomplished entrepreneur - he founded uBlog (merged with Six Apart), organizes the annual Le Web conference and has now created Seesmic (note that I’m an investor in Seesmic). So even though he’s French, his advice, when given, is worth listening to.

Included in the article are his ten rules for startup success. Reprinted below.

1. Don’t wait for a revolutionary idea. It will never happen. Just focus on a simple, exciting, empty space and execute as fast as possible
2. Share your idea. The more you share, the more you get advice and the more you learn. Meet and talk to your competitors.
3. Build a community. Use blogging and social software to make sure people hear about you.
4. Listen to your community. Answer questions and build your product with their feedback.
5. Gather a great team. Select those with very different skills from you. Look for people who are better than you.
6. Be the first to recognise a problem. Everyone makes mistakes. Address the issue in public, learn about and correct it.
7. Don’t spend time on market research. Launch test versions as early as possible. Keep improving the product in the open.
8. Don’t obsess over spreadsheet business plans. They are not going to turn out as you predict, in any case.
9. Don’t plan a big marketing effort. It’s much more important and powerful that your community loves the product.
10. Don’t focus on getting rich. Focus on your users. Money is a consequence of success, not a goal.

seesmic

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SixApart

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/195733748/

Finally heeding calls to apologize for the privacy disaster surrounding Facebook’s Beacon advertising program, CEO Mark Zuckerberg took responsibility for the company’s mistakes in a blog post this morning. Excerpt:

We’ve made a lot of mistakes building this feature, but we’ve made even more with how we’ve handled them. We simply did a bad job with this release, and I apologize for it. . . . Instead of acting quickly, we took too long to decide on the right solution. I’m not proud of the way we’ve handled this situation and I know we can do better.

He also announced a new privacy control that lets Facebook members opt out of Beacon completely. (Before, you had to opt out on a case-by-case and site-by-site basis).

These were the right moves. Even if Facebook members have not yet started flocking to the privacy settings page in reaction to Beacon, the bad PR was not going away. It still might not go away, but at least Zuckerberg is addressing the issue straight on. In his post he explains the thinking behind Beacon:

When we first thought of Beacon, our goal was to build a simple product to let people share information across sites with their friends. It had to be lightweight so it wouldn’t get in people’s way as they browsed the web, but also clear enough so people would be able to easily control what they shared. We were excited about Beacon because we believe a lot of information people want to share isn’t on Facebook, and if we found the right balance, Beacon would give people an easy and controlled way to share more of that information with their friends.

But we missed the right balance. At first we tried to make it very lightweight so people wouldn’t have to touch it for it to work. The problem with our initial approach of making it an opt-out system instead of opt-in was that if someone forgot to decline to share something, Beacon still went ahead and shared it with their friends.

Some of this may just be Zuckerberg’s handlers an investors telling him he has to flog himself in public. When he announced Beacon and Facebook’s Social Ads initiative and was asked at the press conference whether he thought people would be put off by Beacon, his attitude was very different. “It is an ad-supported service,” he pointed out. I was in the room. His tone definitely implied that Facebook members are getting an awesome service for free, so they have no right to complain about how Facebook chooses to advertise to them. But that is such a walled-garden mentality.

Maybe Zuckerberg is finally beginning to realize that he does not have permission to track his customers indiscriminately across the Web. Nobody does anymore. Other Websites and advertisers take note: this could soon be you. Facebook is taking the heat because it is big, high-profile, and pushing the envelope. But it is not alone.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/195680812/

Video sites are moving towards full-screen, immersive experiences where there are lots of things viewers can do besides hit play. One of the better examples of what is possible comes from a small Isreali startup with a 26-year-old founder and no VC funding called Tvinci. The startup’s media management technology powers the social video player for MTV Israel. If you play a video on MTV.com, you see this MySpace-inspired train wreck:

If you watch a video on MTV Israel, which is in private beta and will launch early next year, you will see something like this:

The video control box can be dragged around the screen anywhere you want it. You can minimize or maximize the video to whatever size you like. You can add comment bubbles, reorder items in your playlist by dragging them around, check out your friends’ playlists, or see other peoples’ playlists who share your taste in music videos. You can preview other videos and channels through a Coverflow-like rotation of thumbnail images overlayed on top of the video you are watching, allowing you to browse while enjoying a video rather than stopping the video to find a new one. The sidebar with your playlist pops out when you need it and hides away when you don’t. When you get bored with your playlist, you can watch your friends’ or find videos by mood (the videos are tag-based, so this could be set up for other categories as well). Of course, you can rate each video or leave comments. There are also chat and RSS feed widgets you can add to the player.

Tvinci also supports video uploading from viewers and video recommendations based on what your friends like. MSN Israel also uses the platform. Hopefully, we’ll see this stateside soon. Co-CEO Ido Wiesenberg hints that he is in talks with major media companies to do just that. He is also working on Facebook and OpenSocial apps so that videos can be shared between social networks and sites like MTV.

Unfortunately, you have to be in Israel to experience this for now because most of the videos are geo-blocked (due to licensing). but TechCrunch readers can try this site that Tvinci set up for us that replicates what can be seen on MTV Israel, without the restricted videos.

Here are some screenshots:

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/195652512/

We’ve written before about JibJab’s Sendables electronic video greeting cards that cost $0.50 to $3 each. Now, they found a sponsor in Pepsi for two holiday greeting videos through former Yahoo exec Lloyd Braun’s new company BermanBraun, which works with Pepsi to create online video branding opportunities like this one. You can upload a photo of your head and that of your friends (or frenemies) to personalize the cards, just as you can with JibJab’s Starring You series. A “This Sendables is free thanks to Diet Pepsi Max” message flashes for a few seconds before the greeting starts, and if you don’t blink, you will see that you are actually part of the promo. In the Snowball Fight card below, which the folks at JibJab made for us, you can see Mike and me in elf costumes doing a cartwheel over the sponsorship message. So not only can the audience now star in JibJab videos, but it is also being roped into pitching products. Hey, where are our royalties?

And now a message from Jibjab’s sponsor:

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/195583533/