Ajax Girl

I was so damned excited yesterday to see Yahoo preparing to put up a Mel Gibson style Braveheart fight against Microsoft, Google and anyone else that tried to screw with their freedom. But if the reports of Yahoo exploring a merger with AOL are true, this battle could sizzle out quickly and pathetically.

AOL’s great, and I appreciate the effort they are putting into creating quality, cutting edge web services. But AOL plugs none of Yahoo’s holes - no search marketing platform (Google handles that for them). No algorithmic search technology (ditto). And very few actual searches (they have 5% market share, or less).

Now I certainly don’t have the answers Yahoo needs to stay independent and relevant (that’s why I still think the Microsoft deal is going to happen), but making one more big mistake is not going to suddenly turn everything around. If Yahoo wants to take control of AOL’s various properties and users, fine. But they still need to figure out a way to compete with Google.

By the way, the Times is using “A source close to Yahoo!’s thinking” in reporting these rumors. I’m not even sure what that means.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/232924496/

January U.S. Comscore stats for MySpace are released on Monday, but we’re hearing they’ll show a big surge in a number of key areas. Average time spent on the site increased to 204 minutes (up 14%), the highest it has been since August 2007. Unique visitors are supposedly up 13%, with Facebook showing a decline of 800,000 or so unique visitors in the same period.

We’ll try to get our hands on the actual stats tomorrow to verify. But it should be noted that these will be U.S. numbers only; worldwide numbers for January, where Facebook is showing most of its growth, won’t be released until later.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/232939934/

The idea of a “tip jar” on blogs and other content sites to help bring in a few extra dollars has been around for years. Donations and payouts are generally made through PayPal, and there are a number of plugins for various blogging platforms to make the process easier.

New Y Combinator startup TipJoy is designed to make it even easier to get people to click that tip button. Readers are not required to create an account or have a PayPal account to leave a tip, so there is little friction to them getting started. If they want to leave a tip they just click the button and type in their email address. I’ve added a tip button below to show how it works - any money we receive we’ll be distributing back to other bloggers who add the button, and/or donating to charity.

If you leave a tip as a new user, you start to build up an account debit. You can eventually pay that off via PayPal (TipJoy keeps 2%), although no one comes after you if you choose to skip out on the bill. You can also start to ask for tips on your own site, and anything people leave for you offsets what you’ve given to others.

The Tipjoy site shows popular sites that have received a lot of tips, and you can also send any URL or email a tip directly as well. As a tipper, you can choose the amount you’d like to tip by default (starting at ten cents). Then, every time you click the tip button on a participating site, that amount is added to your bill.

If you want to cash out of your tips you can choose to either receive an Amazon gift card or donate the amount to charity. For now, you can’t receive cash since the company wants to avoid becoming a regulated money transfer service. In the FAQs they suggest they’ll be adding this functionality eventually.

I like the service because it creates a network around the idea of tipping for content. Users are both tippers and tippees, keeping a balance that they pay off eventually. I also like the fact that people don’t have to pay off that bill. It creates an interesting psychology where people find it very, very easy to leave the tip, and then may feel guilted into paying off the bill. At the very least, TipJoy is an interesting human psychology experiment.

The service has a number of options for integrating buttons and graphics on to the site. I imagine they’ll be adding plug-ins and other tools as well over time.

TipJoy was founded by Abigail Kirigin and Ivan Kirigin.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/232822578/

San Francisco Iminta launches into private beta today. Like a number of other startups, you tell the service the various social networks where you have accounts (delicious, flickr, YouTube, Lastfm, etc.) and the service creates a master list of everything you are up to on those sites. Your friends can then subscribe to your master feed, and/or you to theirs.

There are other services that are very similar - FriendFeed (still in private beta) and Plaxo Pulse are the most well known, but others include Mugshot, Readr, 30boxes and Spokeo.

For the most part, Iminta has features that are similar to those services, particularly FriendFeed. There are some differences worth noting, however. Whereas FriendFeed has only a single setting to make your feed public or private, Iminta allows you to create groups of friends and determine which groups see what content. On the flip side, they allow people viewing your feed to strip out some of your feeds. So if you Twitter too much, for example, your friends can choose not to see that, but leave everything else. Iminta also allows you to filter data by type when you are viewing a number of friends, or all of your friends, at once.

It makes for a less simplified interface than FriendFeed, which has its pros and cons. But as you add a lot of friends, the ability to manage the data is, in my opinion, a good thing.

Another thing I like about Iminta, and the reason I’m writing about it, is that the company has been bootstrapped to date by founder Aaron Newton (an ex CNET product manager) - I always like the non-funded startups. Newton says he began working on the site a year ago just because he wanted the product for himself and his friends. He got more serious about it, and left his job at CNET, when he first heard about FriendFeed in October.

You can request an invitation on Iminta now, and Newton says they’ll bring in as many people as they can and keep the service stable. Once you are in you can also invite your friends - so we’ll add Iminta to InviteShare today as well.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/232717689/

For you Sunday-morning gadget hounds out there, CrunchGear is liveblogging the Sony Ericsson announcement at Mobile World Congress 2008.

See it Live

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/232710269/

As if we needed yet more evidence that trying to fight piracy is a futile exercise, just look at the case of a company called MediaDefender. The company acts on behalf of media companies to monitor and sabotage the sharing of movies, music, and video games on peer-to-peer networks. It seeds BitTorrent, for instance, with fake files to try to make P2P file-sharing a hassle and annoyance. Last September, a hacker fought back by uploading to BitTorrent internal e-mails and documents outlining MediaDefender’s tactics, rendering them much less effective.

For a blow-by-blow, on how the teenage hacker compromised MediaDefender’s own defenses and why he felt compelled to disseminate its secrets on the Web, read Dan Roth’s story “The Pirates Can’t Be Stopped” in Portfolio. (In case you have not seen it, the story has been out for a few weeks). The hack ended up increasing MediaDefender’s costs by 28 percent, including nearly $1 million in legal fees and “service credits” it had to offer to unhappy media customers. Here’s an excerpt from the story, which shows how exposed the company became to the righteous teenager (who refers to the company as Monkey Defenders):

One file contained the source code for MediaDefender’s antipiracy system. Another demonstrated just how deep inside the company they had gone. This file featured a tense 30-minute phone call between employees of MediaDefender and the New York State attorney general’s office discussing an investigation into child porn that the firm was assisting with. (MediaDefender refused to comment for this story.) The phone call makes clear that the hackers had left a few footprints while prowling MediaDefender’s computers. The government officials had detected someone trying to access one of its servers, and the hacker seemed to know all the right log-in information. “How comfortable are you guys that your email server is free of, uh, other eyes?” an investigator with the attorney general asked during the call.

“Oh, yeah, yeah, we’ve checked out our email server, and our email server itself has not been compromised,” the MediaDefender executive said.

But, of course, it had.

“In the beginning, I had no motivation against Monkey Defenders,” Ethan tells me. “It wasn’t like, ‘I want to hack those bastards.’ But then I found something, and the good nature in me said, These guys are not right. I’m going to destroy them.”

And so he set out to do just that: a teenager, operating on a dated computer, taking on—when his schedule allowed—one of the entertainment world’s best technological defenses against downloading.

The story also has some good details on how MediaDefender went after the Pirate Bay.

It’s a cautionary tale for media companies everywhere. Treat file-sharers like pirates, try to clamp down on them, and they’ll always find new ways to fight back. There are too many of them. They are smarter than the media companies and the industry’s digital lapdogs. Treat them like consumers, and they’ll respond better.

(Photo via Casey West).

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/~3/232707864/

Looking through my site FTP directory, I came across a folder for “photos” and remembered that I never finished setting it up or linking to it on my site. There’s now a photos link in the navigation of this site, where you can see recent photos I post to Flickr, as well as my current photo sets.

Source: Emily Chang
Original Article: http://www.emilychang.com/go/weblog/comments/photos-added/

It’s open bug hunting season over at uTest which is rolling out its QA marketplace and community.

The startup is trying a crowdsourcing approach to testing software bugs. Anyone can sign up to test software and make some cash. uTest estimates that its testers will be able to rake in anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars per month, depending on tester-expertise and bug pricing.

It is important to note that bug prices will fluctuate in real-time based on a variety of parameters, including: Bug type (logical, GUI), type of application (Web, desktop), number of testers that fit the required profile for the testing environment, bugs left to find, and more.

Over 2000 testers from around the world have already signed-up, so it seems the company’s pay-per-bug model is resonating well across testing professionals.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/232641540/

Heroku is a new YCombinator startup that joins the growing number of “use your browser to build your apps” type of applications.

You can create new Rails applications, and they are magically hosted up in the cloud. You can import your own Rails application, or you can use the inline editor and tools to built the application directly in the browser.

Heroku itself is a Rails application. I wonder if they now self hosting

Being able to quickly build an application and have it running live is great (using Amazon EC2), and this is just the beginning. They already tie into the usual tools like Rake, but there is room to go further and have nice DB utilities, cloning of functionality, and much more.

The editor itself could use a bunch of work too. I can never see where the cursor is, let alone have all of the Textmate / Aptana / IntelliJ goodness.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/232634537/heroku-web-based-rails-hosting