Ajax Girl

For most people on the Web, if Google or Yahoo cannot find something, it doesn’t exist. That has been one of the biggest drawbacks to creating a Website or application that displays itself as a Flash (SWF) file. Search engines could see the file, but they could not see what was in it. Until now.

Adobe has come up with a way for the search engines to read SWF files and index all of the information they contain. That means any text or links in a Flash application can now be indexed. This is a huge step forward for Adobe and anyone who develops in Flash/Flex. Michele Turner, Adobe’s VP of marketing for its platform business, explains:

We are releasing technology to Google and Yahoo that enables them to crawl and index SWF files. They are now searchable. This will open up millions of Flash files to search.

Adobe has created a special Flash player for the search engines that acts like a virtual user going through each application. It actually goes through the runtime of each Flash application and translates it into something the search engines can understand. So all of those fancy interactive Flash Websites and other rich Internet applications that have been invisible to search engines, can now be seen by them.

Turner acknowledges that this invisibility so far “has been a big problem for those developing rich applications.” After all, it doesn’t matter how pretty your Website is if nobody can find it. Flash applications and Websites (many ironically created by ad agencies) have not been able to take advantage of any of the search-engine juice that so many online ad campaigns depend upon. This should be seen as part of Adobe’s larger efforts to remove any remaining restrictions associated with Flash (in April, for instance, it opened up the Flash runtime as part of its the Open Screen Project).

Google is already rolling out the SWF-indexing technology, while Yahoo still “has some work to do,” says Turner. Even so, this won’t solve all the problems with Flash content showing up on search engines.

Becoming visible is one thing, actually ranking highly is another. Google currently can find about 73 million Flash files on the Web. But until Adobe makes it easy for the average Webmaster or blogger to link deeply into those Flash files, they are not likely to appear at the top of many search results.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/323746571/

Slide and Vh1 excel at making products geared towards America’s lowest common denominator. The first makes SuperPoke, a popular social network app that lets you send text messages saying you’ve done “stuff” to your friends. The latter produces reality show classics like “Flavor of Love”, “Rock of Love”, and “I Love New York”. And next week, their powers will combine to bring you VH1’s SuperPoke!Fest: a four day reality show marathon to promote a new show called “I Love Money” that will give users a chance to see their very own SuperPokes live, onscreen!

Beginning July 2, Facebook and MySpace users will be given a choice of 30 Vh1-branded SuperPoke actions that will let users “get romantical with” and “slip the tongue to” their friends. Each of these special Vh1 SuperPokes will be entered into a lottery, and the luckiest 10,000 users will get to see their poke displayed for a few seconds on TV.

I’m sure this sounded like a great idea during a marketing meeting, but did anyone ever pause long enough to realize that SuperPokes can be annoying, even when you know the people involved? I don’t care if OLIVER B has slipped the tongue to some girl I’ll never meet. And why is VH1 taking up about 40% of the screen to display these things?

The event is also likely to flood Facebook and MySpace with spammy messages from Slide as users vie to get their first names displayed on television. Slide probably won’t mind so long as it can maximize the number of users it reaches, but the rest of us may have to deal with a new onslaught of SuperPokes.

According to Slide, we’ve got even more of these promotions to come - let’s hope they take a different approach:

“This partnership, the first of many to come, offers our enthusiastic users the chance to become SuperPoke! stars on the television network they already know and love. Now, SuperPoke! is not only fun and social, but it might get you on TV too.”

Slide has recently been in the news for having their popular Top Friends application disabled by Facebook. The application apparently has a security hole that allows Facebook users to view portions of any Top Friend user’s profile - something that is clearly in violation of Facebook’s privacy policy.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/323702666/

Fox Interactive Media, the News Corp subsidiary that controls most of its online assets, has signed a 12 year lease agreement for a new facility in Playa Del Rey. All FIM companies in Southern California will move to the new facility starting in June of 2009. For those wondering about FIM and MySpace’s future growth, this move should settle speculation. The site will house over 300,000 square feet of commercial space and is part of a development called Horizon at Playa Vista (a rendering of the development is above). The area is quickly becoming LA’s media hub, with EA, Rubin Postaer and others now with offices in the area.

The internal memo from Peter Levinsohn, President of Fox Interactive Media, is below.

About a year ago, I communicated with you about our space and parking challenges, and our ultimate plan to find a facility that could accommodate all of our LA-area team in one location. After an extensive process, I’m thrilled to inform you that we have found the ideal location for Fox Interactive Media’s new headquarters.

The new facility is located in Playa Del Rey (Horizon at Playa Vista http://www.horizonatplayavista.com/) and houses more than 300,000 square feet of commercial space. Playa Del Rey is the first newly-built community in Los Angeles in over 50 years and has become a creative hub for technology companies, including EA, the largest video game company in the world. The site itself should be amazing – including an exclusive gym, internal and external eating facilities, volleyball courts, and lots of green space for outdoor activities. Just beyond the newly-built facility will be a host of restaurants, shopping locations and living options.

FIM has experienced phenomenal success in its three-year history, and we have plans for even greater growth and achievements in the coming fiscal year. Given our tremendous track record, it’s only fitting that we should enter into the single biggest real-estate transaction in Los Angeles in the last 25 years. When we move to our new facility between June of 2009 and January of 2010, not only will we enjoy the distinction of having one of the largest corporate headquarters in the LA area, but we will be housed in a state-of-the-art facility that reflects our corporate identity and culture.

In the coming weeks and months, we’ll be providing you with more information about the site and the surrounding area. We’ll also provide a schedule for the phased move, as soon as those details have been decided.

I have appreciated your patience during the past year, as we’ve shifted groups to new locations to manage our growth and endured numerous space constraints and challenges. Soon, we will have an opportunity to collaborate more effectively, as well as to create a work environment that speaks to the creativity and innovation that has come to be synonymous with Fox Interactive Media.

I hope you are as enthusiastic as I am about this exciting milestone for our company.

Peter Levinsohn

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/323672116/

FriendFeed, the popular social network feed aggregator, has released a new version of its site that has been optimized for the iPhone. While FriendFeed has always featured a relatively spartan design, the standard version sports small fonts that make text difficult to read on the iPhone’s screen. The new version has increased the font size, and has further tweaked link placement and picture sizes to make the site more accessible to mobile users.

The site also includes a new “Post photos from your phone” link that will let users submit photos to FriendFeed straight from their iPhone. Each user is assigned a unique email address (something like jason+nota483realone@mail2ff.com). To submit a picture, users simply send photos chosen from the iPhone’s integrated photo viewer to the assigned address. The feature works well, but you’ll need to manually enter the obfuscated email address - there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to save it to your address book.

You can read more details at the the official announcement here.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/323648099/

The indignity of it all. On top of everything else that Yahoo is dealing with right now (testy shareholders, departing executives, reorganized employees), it also just got dumped by Maxim.

The magazine’s site, Maxim.com, now uses Quintura to power its search instead of Yahoo. Its sister sites Blender.com and Stuffmagazine.com, will also soon be dumping Yahoo as well. All three sites are operated by Maxim Digital, which is owned by the private equity firm Quadrangle Capital Partners, where former Yahoo COO Dan Rosensweig happens to be an operating principal.

Quintura’s search interface creates a semantic tag cloud above the results. By clicking on different tags, users can refine their search and reorder the results.

I’m a big fan of the search tag cloud. But I’m not sure the final results are any better than Yahoo’s, and they certainly take longer to come up. The appeal to publishers like Maxim Digital, though, is that they can keep searchers on their sites longer by helping visitors find exactly what they are looking for—which in the case of Maxim readers is “hot girls” and “stupid fun.”

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/323617897/

There has been much talk of Twitter users moving over to FriendFeed since Twitter replies were down for the majority of last week. Twitter announced that they were back on Saturday in their blog, but seeing as the outage may have inspired some users to flock to FriendFeed, I decided to take a look at the 3rd-party applications and scripts that enhance the FriendFeed functionality.

For those of you moving on to FriendFeed’s greener pastures, here are 13 essential tools for an organized, “noise”-free experience.

Gridjit is a new web application, that is currently in private alpha, that organizes your FriendFeed and Twitter timelines into columns. It spreads out your timeline by user and shows that user’s most recent posts in boxes that are distributed across three columns. You can also post to Twitter and FriendFeed from the site. It’s a very new service, so there may be bugs, but if you’d like to try it out, Gridjit has supplied us with 250 invites. Enter the code dde60be to try it out.

Alert Thingy enables you to see your FriendFeed timeline from your desktop and receive updates through notifications (covered here). You can post updates and comment from the application, as well as post to Twitter or Flickr. Alert Thingy runs on Adobe AIR.

Twhirl, a popular desktop application among Twitterers, allows for FriendFeed posting and has a timeline tracker. It also supports posting to Twitter, Pownce and Jaiku, and allows for filtering news by “rooms”. Since Twhirl is a widely-used Twitter client, this should allow for an easier FriendFeed transition. Twhirl runs on Adobe AIR so it is available for Windows and OSX.

bTT by Sobees is a desktop FriendFeed application that is part of Sobees’ desktop suite bSuite. It is currently available for download independently of bSuite. bTT allows FriendFeed updates, comments, comment replies, and likes. It is currently available for Windows.

MySocial 24×7 is a Firefox plugin that allows you to access your FriendFeed timeline from your sidebar (covered here). You can filter your timeline by friend, or by feed source (Youtube, Amazon, RSS). MySocial 24×7 has also released an Adobe AIR desktop application (covered here). The desktop application provides the same functionality of the Firefox sidebar in an attractive desktop application.

NoiseRiver is a new web application launched yesterday, from FeedEgo, that uses FriendFeed’s API to filter out some of the noise. You can login through the site, and import your keywords from del.icio.us, or input them manually, and NoiseRiver will color code your feed according to your interests or neighborhood. When you input your keywords, you can rate your them with a slider from “love” to “hate” and from then on your timeline will be color-coded, green or red, to show what you’ll probably like or not. NoiseRiver provides a full FriendFeed user experience, allowing for sharing and comments.

FriendFeedMachine is a web application that allows you to organize your friends list into close friends, and people you just want to follow. It does a lot to clean up the problem of “noise” in FriendFeed, by making sure that what your friends say doesn’t get lost in the mix with heavy posters.

Feedalizr, enables you to post text, links, images and video to FriendFeed from your desktop. You can drag and drop images into your post, or you can take a picture with your webcam. You can also post video through Feedalizr through your webcam. It hosts the video on the Feedalizr site, and includes a link in your post. You can filter your timeline, and just yesterday they added a new feature that allows you to take advantage of tabs. You can open new tabs with specific user’s timelines, separate from your main friend timeline. Feedalizr runs on Adobe AIR.

Filter by Service is a Greasemonkey script that allows you to filter your timeline by service. It displays a box with all of the service icons, and you can filter the public timelime, your friends timeline, or any user’s timeline by service. For example, if you are browsing TechCrunch’s timeline and click on the Twitter service icon, you will see TechCrunch’s tweets. A similar script, Filter Icons, places the service icons in a neat row on the top of the timeline, but it does not display all of the service icons, just the ones that are used on the page.

Remove Visited Links, a Greasemonkey script, removes links that you’ve already visited. A very useful script that really cleans up your timeline by removing content that you’ve already viewed.

Read Later, is a Greasemonkey script that adds a “Later” link under every post, and adds a “Read Later” tab to the top. This enables you to bookmark things, within FriendFeed, that you find interesting and want to save for later.

FriendFeed Comments is a WordPress plugin that can take comments and likes made on FriendFeed, and place them into the related post on WordPress. On your blog, you will see the comment along with the commenter’s FriendFeed image and link. The plugin also allows (as an option) a separate FriendFeed comment entry, so your readers can enter FriendFeed comments from your blog page.

FF To Go is a mobile site that you can access from any mobile phone’s web browser. It has a simple interface that shows the 10 most recent posts from you, your friends, or the public timeline. It adds no special features, but remains consistent with the FriendFeed user interface.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/323613240/

Aza Raskin released a new project today called Algorithm Ink. For the full story check out his explanation and video. The app is basically a “grown up version of Logo”—a front-end to a simple programming language for creating fractal images. While the fractal art is the main attraction, I was more interested in the unconventional UI.

Algorithm Ink continues the style that Aza demonstrated six months ago with Songza. His UI comes from another planet where Microsoft Windows never caught on and Hypercard rules the world. There are no native form widgets, no scroll bars, and nary a “ or Cancel” in sight. Normally this is a recipe for confusion, but in Aza’s case the results are often models of clarity and intentionality.

On Songza, the most noticable break from convention was the mouse-flower. Traditionally, a web UI for playing a song would consist of the song’s title, a widget to play/pause, and some adjacent links to share, rate, etc. Instead Songza only shows the song title. When you click the title, a flower opens with an action on each petal like “Play” or “Share.” You can click a petal or mouse away from the flower to dissolve it. The jury’s still out on mouse-flowers, but the clutter-free UI they enabled should raise an eyebrow.

On Algorithm Ink, the header is what interested me. Each of the grey buttons (Edit, Save, Browse, etc.) is actually a toggle between an “on” state and an “off” state. When a button is “on”, a panel appears on top of the canvas with the functionality for that button.

The grey buttons toggle overlaying panels

For example, when you click “Edit”, the button turns on and a panel is revealed with the code for the current artwork. You don’t “Save” or “Cancel” to leave edit mode. Instead you click the red “Draw” button to apply your changes, or click Edit again to hide the panel.

The Edit button is on and the panel is visible

Each of the buttons has its own custom panel. Edit displays a long narrow sidebar, while Save displays a thin horizontal strip. It’s note-worthy when different features of an app actually look different. We’re all guilty of leaning on our templates to the point that each screen in our apps looks a bit like the others. In Algorthim Ink, the Edit mode is tall and narrow. The Save mode is wide and thin. These differences give the app character and also help users develop a kind of “muscle memory.” They can remember the screens by shape as much as by name.

The Save button is on and the panel is visible

My favorite thing about these grey buttons is that they don’t just turn panels on and off. They also exclude each other, so that if you are using the Edit mode and you click the Save button, the Edit panel will disappear and the Save panel will replace it. You could say the buttons are “mutually-exclusive modes”. A simpler way is to say they act just like tabs.

Look closely at how a typical tabbed interface works. You click a tab, and the whole screen reloads to a new screen. The tab bar on the new screen has the same options and position as the old screen, except the tab that you clicked changes appearance to indicate that you are “on” this tab to the exclusion of the other tabs.

In Algorithm Ink, the buttons work in exactly the same way. Except there’s a twist. The “tabs” (grey buttons) don’t replace the screen, or even replace part of it. Instead they hide and reveal panels which overlay a single screen that never changes. Your art never goes anywhere, but the panels which allow you to perform actions come and go.

These overlay tabs may not be as eye-catching as a mouse-flower, but I think they’re very interesting. It’s hard to put my finger on what exactly I like so much about Algorithm Ink, but it’s plain to see that the approach is different. And in our current UI climate, well-executed difference is itself enough to deserve some thought.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1117-fresh-ui-ideas-from-songza-and-algorithm-ink

Personalized home page service Netvibes has quietly rolled out a new social feature called Buzz. The Buzz section tracks what links are getting starred the most throughout Netvibes network of home pages.

Netvibes users can star any of the links they like on their homepages, RSS readers, YouTube boxes, Digg widgets, and other widgets. And when items have been starred, they show up in users’ public activity streams, which can be displayed on home pages using an activity widget. With Buzz, these starrings are aggregated and displayed on a Digg-like front page where people can see what others are starring the most.

Buzz hasn’t been formally announced yet, but this is the first new feature we’ve seen since Tariq Krim announced he was stepping down from his CEO position.

While Netvibes lags behind giants iGoogle, My Yahoo! and MyAOL, it is the favorite among many early adopters for being fast and ad-free. With 2.4 million worldwide uniques in May, it makes sense to leverage its traffic for a link popularity tracker. There are already many social bookmarking sites, but adding a feature like this to an already-popular personalized home page service makes for easy adoption.

Buzz is currently on a separate page (and probably still in development), but we expect Netvibes to provide users with a widget that can be used to track popular items on their home pages. The name choice probably won’t go unnoticed by Yahoo either.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/323542802/

1938 Media, the controversial (and hilarious) video blogging site founded by Loren Feldman, has been the center of attention over the last few days. Now big partners are starting to take notice, and Feldman is inking some interesting distribution deals.

The site grew in popularity after Feldman began mixing puppet parody shows into his usual punditry, specifically targeting hyper-sensitive tech industry insiders who were sure to fire back. But those parodies have drawn significant criticism from those targeted as well as a few sympathetic bloggers. In response Feldman agreed to stop some of the harder hitting stuff aimed at social media consultant Shel Israel.

The puppet videos are definitely a hit, however, drawing sponsors and, earlier this month, a distribution deal with CNET.

The CNET deal has yet to go live, and chances are it never will. The recent controversy may have given CNET cold feet. Feldman says the deal is “on hiatus” for now.

But starting today Verizon Wireless’ 3 million mobile VCast users will have access to Feldman’s video content on their phone, as well as 1 million Fios broadband cable subscribers via video on demand. The deal, which will pay Feldman an undisclosed license fee, puts the 1938Media brand next to YouTube, Break.com and other high profile partners.

Effectively Verizon has created a 1938Media channel and has given Feldman the ability to bring in third party video content as well. To start, Mahalo Daily, Revision3, Ze Frank and Jay Grandin content will be included.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/323509231/

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s announced earlier today a deal California had made with Tesla Motors to bring that electric car company’s manufacturing to the Bay Area.

Watch above as he is joined by Treasurer Bill Lockyer and Tesla Motors President Ze’Ev Drori to deliver a few words about the significance of keeping Tesla in California.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/323503805/