Ajax Girl

Big news tonight from Seattle based wiki/social networks startup Wetpaint (we covered their growth spurt last week): they’ve raised a $25 million third round of financing, bringing the total amount of capital raised to nearly $40 million, and they’ve launched an embeddable wiki product called Wetpaint Injected.

The round of financing was led by DAG Ventures, with investors from previous rounds also participating.

Wetpaint Injected was internally called “Balco” - it is an embeddable version of a Wetpaint wysiwyg wiki for third parties. It isn’t a simple javascript or Flash embed. It’s a deeper integration that requires an insertion of code into a site’s back end application files. That allows the wiki to be created at the server level, not simply rendered in the user’s browser like most widgets. The idea is a pretty straightforward way to go about doing this, but has significant SEO benefits for the partner because the wiki content is embedded directly into the HTML of the website.

Launch partners include Flixster, IGN, and Nuwire (IGN screen shot to right). The product is free for publishers to use for up to 100,000 impressions per month - over that and Wetpaint charges either a revenue share or CMP basis.

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/~3/293215827/

Microsoft and Yahoo are back at the table, Microsoft says today. In a press statement, the company says:

in light of developments since the withdrawal of the Microsoft proposal to acquire Yahoo! Inc., Microsoft announced that it is continuing to explore and pursue its alternatives to improve and expand its online services and advertising business. Microsoft is considering and has raised with Yahoo! an alternative that would involve a transaction with Yahoo! but not an acquisition of all of Yahoo! Microsoft is not proposing to make a new bid to acquire all of Yahoo! at this time, but reserves the right to reconsider that alternative depending on future developments and discussions that may take place with Yahoo! or discussions with shareholders of Yahoo! or Microsoft or with other third parties. There of course can be no assurance that any transaction will result from these discussions.

This is clearly in response to Carl Icahn’s bid to replace the Yahoo board and bring the company back to the table at Yahoo, and continued speculation that Yahoo may jump into bed with Google on a search deal.

For now, the discussions are centered on “a transaction with Yahoo but not an acquisition of all of Yahoo.” That could mean a pooling of search assets to block Google, for example. And of course, once they are at the table a full acquisition could still happen. I enjoy the jab at the end of the statement that suggests Microsoft is willing to negotiate with just about anyone who claims to control Yahoo at this point - “discussions that may take place with Yahoo or discussions with shareholders of Yahoo or Microsoft or with other third parties.”

We’re back in business on this deal, and the recent logo has been shelved for now.

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/~3/293036089/

I’ve been re-exposed to “industry” web design practices while staying with some friends in Germany who work at a large agency. In particular, I’ve seen that hierarchical navigation and site organization tactics are no distant memory. A lot of clients still come to the table with an org chart and ask their designer to implement the same structure on their website. The result is a website that reads like an office directory in the skyscraper lobby. Or the hierarchy approach can lead to terms that simply block customers from finding what they want. For example, my friend did some work for a shoe company who wished to hide six different kinds of shoes behind a gate called “Performance”. When my friend asked 40 uninvolved people in his office what the category “performance” meant to them, only 10 had even a vague idea. So hierarchies have their problems. What other organizing methods could we consider instead?

Instead of thinking in terms of hierarchy or up-front structure, I think it’s better to work with paths. A path is a line that goes from a starting point A to an accomplishment B. Each customer who comes to the site doesn’t care about the overall structure. They care about getting from A to B. That’s a path. Where are your golf shoes? That’s a path. Does my cell phone support international calling? That’s a path. Collect all the paths you can think of in a pile, pull out the 8 paths that 80% of your visitors come looking for, and that’s your home page. When paths overlap or the same customer needs them, weave them together. Add the occasional fork. DRY out paths with lots of overlapping information for efficiency. These operations feel concrete, and they connect directly with customer goals instead of organizational box drawings or hand-wavy concepts.

Lines are better than boxes for mapping the contours of your domain. So next time you work with a hierarchy-minded group, try to pull them out of the boxes and talk with them about individual starting points and goals for their customers.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1030-think-about-paths-instead-of-hierarchies

Bill Gates is sure taking his sweet time retiring. While he is busy hyping yet another Microsoft research project to the CEO Summit, Google has vaulted several huge steps ahead in the cloud infrastructure battle with Friend Connect. Mike Arrington’s audience with WonderWall given all due props, what on earth does this have to do with how to spend the 44 billion left on the table after the Yahoo meltdown?

The product manager of this gizmo is none other than Chris Pratley, the genius (seriously) behind OneNote, the Tablet product that briefly made that platform relatively salivating on my way out the door to Macland. Of course, in the OneNote days, it was impossible to get past Allchin and the Office Palace guards to encourage a free OneNote player for the browser. Now Mesh is in the oven, and Silverlight is that freely redistributable player. The times they have a-changed.

But Bill’s pet projects will just not cut it while Google methodically mows down the marketplace with these silly little social media chunks of code. It’s not that Friend Connect is going to slow Facebook down; to the contrary, it’s going to consolidate Facebook’s equity in social metadata and create a groundswell of OpenID adoption which in turn will drive Open Social app development.

Each new OpenID registration produces warm fuzzy feelings for Web site owners who become part of an expanding network of reuse of the original log-in. The terms of service for accessing social clouds will normalize over the next few months as users gravitate toward sites that leverage their original investment in OpenID registration. It’s a Frequent Flyer strategy, producing affinity based on less work, common interface guidelines, and pressure on Facebook and outside clouds to modify their terms of service to avoid having to reinitialize access to their social data over and over.

The same dynamics are starting to accelerate in real time streams over Jabber and XMPP. Facebook is soon to open access to their Chat service, eventually allowing the kind of piping currently enabled between Gchat/Talk, iChat, AIM, and Twitter, which together produce a common set of streams that all are recorded and archived in Gmail’s Chat repository and made available to a single search. Once users don’t care how or even if this aggregation is going on, they view the composite service as the application, removing the motivation for switching.

Of course, the last time we saw this type of viral spread, it was Adsense carried on the river of the blogosphere. Now, with Twitter’s social graph being formed out of the combination of follow and filtered Track, Friend Connect can provide infrastructure to model the unique characteristics of Twitter’s dynamic graph using Facebook’s avatars. LinkedIn’s business relationships, and, eventually, Open Social widgets across high-value sites. Oh, by the way, MyBlogLog — see ya.

But don’t think that just because Google will prosper that Microsoft won’t. Live Mesh can fit into this like a glove, feeding downstream vertical versions of affinity groups to skinned Silverlight containers. We’re within weeks of offerings already from Twhirl, FriendFeed, Summize, and others we just haven’t been told about yet. All Microsoft needs to do is get Bill his gold watch and get back to work.

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/~3/292877145/

These stories are becoming more common as Internet companies operate under the laws of many counties.

In February A Moroccan man was arrested for pretending to be the Moroccan king’s younger brother, Prince Moulay Rachid, on Facebook. Facebook complied with Morrocca information requests about the man, leading to his arrest. The man was granted a royal pardon after his sentencing, and was out of jail by mid March.

Today we’re hearing of another arrest, this time in India. 22-year-old IT professional Rahul Krishnakumar Vaid. His crime was writing in an orkut community named “I hate Sonia Gandhi.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonia_Gandhi is a prominent politician in India.

Vaid was charged under section 292 of Indian Penal Code and section 67 of the Information TVechnology Act because he created a profile and then posted content in vulgar language about Sonia Gandhi in the community.

During investigations, the cyber crime cell of Pune police communicated with Google (which owns Orkut) seeking details about the who formed this forum and circulated the obscene content. It was known that the vulgar message about Sonia Gandhi was circulated through an email address – Rahulvaidindia@gmail.com . The owner of the email id Rahul Vaid was traced, using information supplied by Google, to Chakarpur in Gurgaon city of Haryana.

He was thn charged under section 292 of Indian Penal Code and section 67 of the Information Technology Act because he created a profile and then posted content in vulgar language about Sonia Gandhi in the community. If he’s convicted, he can be imprisoned for up to five years and may have to pay a fine up to Rs one lakh.

This is an issue that needs to be addressed everywhere, but the hot spots right now are areas where extreme laws make what would be legitimate actions in the US or Europe into fairly serious crimes in their jurisdictions. Our companies have to decide if they’ll defy the law and take the consequences. On the upside, users will flock to them knowing their data is secure.

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/~3/292753949/

When it comes to Web video, CBS has been one of the most promiscuous media companies out there. And no, I am not talking about its $1.8 billion acquisition of CNET (which does have some video assets). Rather, CBS has taken a strategy of superdistribution when it comes to spreading its videos across the Web. It wants its videos everywhere. Thus CBS has struck distribution deals with more than 300 sites—including YouTube, AOL, MSN, Joost, Veoh, Bebo,and TVGuide.com. These are collectively lumped together into the CBS Audience Network, against which CBS sells its own ads.

Now the CBS Audience Network also has its own site, where it highlights its top partners and the most popular CBS videos on each of them. You can see how many times each video has been watched and the number of comments for each one. (An iPhone demo and a Borat interview on Letterman are the two most popular, with 8.9 million and 5.7 million views, respectively). Right now, though, only the top videos from YouTube are visible. But it looks like AOL, Bebo, MSN, TV.com, and Joost will be coming soon.

It is not clear how appealing a destination the site will become for consumers, although you can watch the videos without leaving. It feels to me more like a site that CBS is putting up for the benefit of advertisers, almost as brochureware so that they can easily see at a glance CBS’s video reach across the Web. Superdistribution (which basically means putting your content everywhere) sounds good in theory, but perhaps it is not such an easy sell to advertisers who like to see exactly what they are buying.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/292690023/

Scribd, the “YouTube for documents”, has announced that it will be removing all pornographic material from the site beginning May 21.

Here’s the announcement from the site’s blog:

Over the next month, we will be updating Scribd’s Terms of Service to prohibit pornographic documents and images. It’s become clear that adult content is limiting Scribd’s usefulness to educators, parents, students, and publishers - exactly the types of users that benefit the most from our site and services.

Starting today, there will be a one week grace period to allow users with adult content on Scribd to download it to their local computer before it is removed from the website.

So how will this affect the YCombinator startup? The site has seen impressive growth since its launch in March 2007, and now says that it has 17 million monthly visitors. It’s also recently been adding new features including an API and iPaper, a replacement for FlashPaper that allows authors to monetize their documents. But there have been claims (NSFW) that much of Scribd’s traffic is generated by pornographic and pirated material (the “Adult” group is one of the largest and most active on the site).

Should we expect Scribd’s traffic to take a nosedive? Unlikely. Porn may have helped Scribd gain momentum in its infancy, but the site has long since proven its use as a blogging tool and a document repository. If anything, it’s surprising that it took Scribd this long to make the switch.

Other players in this space include edocr and Docstoc (both of which are porn-free).

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/292685016/