Ajax Girl

Former Technorati CEO David Sifry has launched Web Hot or Not?, a Hot or Not site for websites. Sifry left Technorati in August 2007.

For the one person reading this who doesn’t know how Hot or Not style sites work, the site presents a website which must be scored between 1 or 10, 1 being not, 10 being hot.

MG Seigler writes that “Quite frankly I’m shocked it has taken this long for someone to come out with this.” I like MG, so perhaps its the intense jetlag talking when I write what the? Sure, on the surface it’s an obvious idea, but the reason why its taken this long for a site like this to appear is because the idea isn’t a very good one.

David Sifry hints that it might be a lark, and if that is the case then we’ll let it slide and recommend people take a look, it should provide seconds, maybe even a minute or two of interest. If, as Sifry suggests “Who knows where it’ll go” (meaning it might take off), I’m off to buy alcohol. Cheers.

Update: you can vote for Web Hot or Not on Web Hot or Not here.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/224373644/

Mobile social networking startup MocoSpace raised a $4 million B round from existing investors General Catalyst, Bob Pittman’s Pilot Group and former eBay exec Michael Deering. The previous A round was $3 million in January 2007.

MocoSpace is a mobile-only social network with two million members and serving one billion pageviews a month (from mobile phones). When we last wrote about MocoSpace in August, it had half as many members and pageviews. Strangely, MocoSpace does not connect its members to their friends on online social networks such as Facebook or MySpace. This silo mentality seems a throwback to the days when mobile apps didn’t need to talk to the Web. I guess the kids who use MocoSpace always have their cell phones with them anyway. CEO Justin Siegel explains why he is ignoring the big social networks:

At this point we’re not joining, but it’s not a “political” stance. Our CTO doesn’t believe it’s relevant to us at this point. We’ve talked about letting people import their profiles, but we’ve been able to grow at a nice clip without doing that.

Competitors in the increasingly crowded mobile social networking space include Aka Aki, Loopt, Mig33, Pelago, Twipster, Zannel, etc.

MocoSpace

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Loopt

Loading information about Loopt…

Twipster

Loading information about Twipster…

Zannel

Loading information about Zannel…

cb_widget_report_widget(”cb_widget_1201363587″); cb_widget_report_element(”cb_widget_0_1201363587″,”mocospace”); cb_widget_report_element(”cb_widget_1_1201363587″,”loopt”); cb_widget_report_element(”cb_widget_2_1201363587″,”twipster”); cb_widget_report_element(”cb_widget_3_1201363587″,”zannel”);

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/224351574/

I know I’m starting to sound like a broken record, but in case you haven’t heard: The era of paid music downloads is coming to an end (despite the fact that online sales are growing).

Qtrax, which has signed all four major labels (EMI, SonyBMG, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group), launched yesterday with 25 million songs (compared to around 3 m for Amazon and 6 m for iTunes)

It isn’t pretty - the downloaded songs are not compatible with iPods and have to be played via a proprietary player built on the Songbird platform. Ads are displayed during playback, even on music devices. For now the service is Windows only, so Mac users are left out. And right now the service is down completely from all the attention it’s getting.

For most people, BitTorrent and the music search engines are all they need for their illegal-but-highly-convenient music needs. Any additional hurdles means not a ton of usage. And since services like Imeem and Last.fm provide free on demand streaming music with ads, there is already real competition out there for Qtrax.

But the trend is clear - labels have given up on DRM completely and are willing to experiment with ad supported free downloads. Once they give up on the ad supported part of the model and just realize that recorded music is nothing more than marketing collateral for other revenue streams like live performances, we’ll have gotten somewhere. But my guess is that one of the labels has to go out of business first for that to happen.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/224118346/

Amazon has made the important, if vague, announcement that its DRM-free MP3 downloads will be made available internationally starting in 2008.

Taking its content from all four major record labels internationally will strengthen its position as a superior DRM-free music provider to Apple’s iTunes Store, which doesn’t even offer content from all the major labels yet. Amazon currently provides 3.3M songs from 270,000+ artists, encoded at 256kbps, and priced anywhere between 89 and 99 cents each. Things are similar with iTunes Plus, Apple’s DRM-free music collection: songs are 99 cents each and encoded at 256kbps. However, Apple only provides “up to 2 million iTunes Plus songs” in comparison to Amazon’s 3.3M, giving the latter company a substantial edge with its scope.

Amazon’s MP3 store launched in September and signed up the last major label just this month. The company is declining to provide a “specific launch timeline for individual Amazon international websites.”

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/224092240/

Facebook announced Friday a new JavaScript client library that will allow Facebook apps to be displayed on any website.

The client library allows users to make Facebook API calls from any web site and create Ajax Facebook applications on that website.

Wei Zhu from Facebook explains the benefits:

Since the library does not require any server-side code on your server, you can now create a Facebook application that can be hosted on any web site that serves static HTML. An application that uses this client library should be registered as an iframe type. This applies to either iframe Facebook apps that users access through the Facebook web site or apps that users access directly on the app’s own web sites. Almost all Facebook APIs are supported.

Nick O’Neil at All Facebook writes:

Want to build your own social gaming platform that resides on your own website but leverages the power of users’ Facebook relationships? Now you can! There had previously been applications that could leverage the Facebook API prior to the launch of the platform but there are some significant differences now versus before. The first significant difference is the broader access to Facebook’s core features that the platform provides.

I’m not sure anyone saw this move coming, but Facebook may have just changed the game again by essentially becoming an application host. It’s a clever move by Facebook in a year its competitors will get more serious about offering platforms themselves.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/223878139/