Ajax Blog

I’ve written some notes on the Google Gadget API and how to write a gadget, targeted at developers who already know Ajax.

What’s a Gadget?

• The gadget is an XML file sitting on your server. In my case, http://ajaxify.com/run/widgets/google/diggroundup.xml. It will get cached, so effectively it must be a static file.
• The user adds your gadget to their igoogle portal, or codes it into their own website, by specifying this URL (it may be done indirectly - via the gadget registry. You’ll appear in the registry if you’ve submitted your gadget to igoogle.)
• The gadget is rendered as an iframe, so you have all the usual security constraints which stop you borking the portal and other gadgets. This also means you can’t communicate with other Gadgets other than via than remote calls to a common third-party server (or has anyone tried hooking them together using the iframe-fragment identifier hack? ).

It’s based on a Digg Roundup tool, where the gadget show Digg stories according to user preferences such as topic and whether to go for popular or upcoming stories.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/129240596/how-to-write-a-google-gadget

The focus and experimentation on IPTV is switching away from watching short clips on YouTube to watching full length shows on downloadable TV applications like Joost, Babelgum, Veoh TV , Netflix (which now has a Silverlight application) and others. YouTube continues to grow, but people are not looking to find full length TV shows there.

That isn’t stopping the competitors from trying to get a piece of the action, though.

YouTube has a slew of direct competitors, but the network effect kicked in long ago for YouTube and its unlikely that loose copyright policies or higher quality videos are going to make any kind of dent in their market share. But the networks are still goggling that $1.65 billion price tag for YouTube, and they want their pound of flesh.

Competitors Running In Circles

Hitwise published some statistics earlier this week showing that YouTube has 60% market share of the U.S. video sharing sites - they have more visitors than all of their competitors combined. They continue to grow at a fast clip even after the networks started massive litigation against them.

Comscore worldwide data is nearly identical, showing YouTube with a 66% market share. See the chart to the left for the side-by-side numbers.

It’s clear that the market is probably big enough for a few competitors to be successful, but no one is knocking YouTube off the thrown any time soon.

Clown Co Still Clowning Around

In March we saw the dramatic introduction of a new service, backed by News Corp. (owner of MySpace) and NBC. They dubbed it “NBC Universal and News Corporation’s Online Video Joint Venture,” which isn’t exactly catchy. When rumors started that Google execs were referring to it as “Clown Co.” the name stuck. Until they name this thing, there’s really nothing else to refer to it as.

Lack of a name hasn’t stopped them from making some bold steps, though. This week they named Jason Kilar, a Harvard MBA and former Amazon executive, to lead the unit. And now there are reports saying they’ve been out trying to raise $100 million in venture capital on a billion dollar valuation. YouTube raised just a fraction of that.

To be fair, Clown Co. isn’t supposed to be a direct competitor to YouTube, and has promised a more distributed approach. And they’ll have (legally obtained) content from both NBC and News Corp. properties, a big advantage over competitors. We’ll have to wait and see once it launches. But the naming problem, as well as the fact that the parent companies described it as “the largest advertising platform on earth” in a media call, suggest it is off to a very bad start.

News Corp. Places Another Bet

News Corp. which owns MySpace, is placing a second bet beyond Clown Co. This week they announced the launch of MySpace TV, a direct competitor to YouTube. MySpace has been collecting video clips from users for well over a year, and their recent $300 million acquisition of Photobucket adds more to the library.

Having the MySpace property behind MySpace TV is a great competitive advantage, although Google’s search engine is behind YouTube, which more than evens the playing field. And since MySpace has shown a willingness to block third party videos if there is even a hint of advertising, YouTube may, over time, find it can’t do much there.

For that reason, MySpace TV is the biggest direct threat to YouTube. But in my opinion it won’t be enough to knock them from the top spot even in the long run. YouTube is now firmly entrenched in the mainstream user’s head as the site to go to see user generated videos and copyrighted video clips, and they are backed by Google. No one is taking that from them any time soon.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/129223564/

An interesting thing happened during yesterdays iPhone launch and it wasn’t just observing Robert Scoble’s mastery of self promotion (in a good way of course). Thousands of people* who were not lining up for an iPhone, be that because they simply weren’t interested in doing so or as in my case were unable to due to geography, experienced the highs and lows of iPhone day vicariously through live streams.

The day wasn’t without issues, Kristopher Tate’s Zooomr/ Ustream feed had technical issues at times, but on the whole the experience was something special. From the interviews on the street, through to the screams of those entering the Apple store to applause, through to the first addition to America’s Funniest Live Video Streams 2020 when Tate had his credit card declined.

The difference on iPhone Day was that instead of turning to blogs or waiting for the mainstream media to report the facts hours later, we were all able to watch it all in first person. The promise of user generated live media was delivered. The seed of a revolution was planted.

Lifestreaming has been covered before on TechCrunch; I remain unconvinced about the likelihood of Lifestreams such as Justin.tv (the man, not the service) being anything more than a niche pursuit, yet what we saw on iPhone Day was different: this was Eventstreaming.

Eventstreaming is the missing link in Web 2.0’s challenge to network television.
(more…)

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/~3/129194690/

Now we can get our hands on an iPhone, developers are testing out Safari to see what is actually available. How is the DOM? What events get fired? How does the keyboard send onkey* events? How is scrolling handled? How is the JavaScript support?

Abe Fettig has been jotting down his notes, which include:

• Poking around the DOM, I don’t see any special objects, with the possible exception of window.offscreenBuffering (set to true).
• Bookmarklets work, although you have to go through the bookmarks menu to get to them.
• Safari crashes are handled gracefully - the main screen fades back in, and you can jump right back into Safari. It will then load page you were visiting when it crashed.
• Drag and drop, and other behaviors based on picking up mousemove events, don’t work. CSS-based element drag and drop doesn’t work either. Dragging one finger around the iPhone’s version of Safari causes the window to scroll, and that’s it. I assume that scroll events do work. I’m sure somebody is already working on a version of drag and drop based on window scrolling.
• For documents with no width set, the iPhone uses a default width of 980px.

Joe Hewitt isn’t too happy with his experiments:

My first task has been exploring the DOM events that you can handle. You do not get “mousedown” when you touch the screen. You get “mousedown” and “mouseup” at the same time when you release your finger. The “mousemove” event does not seem to fire at all. There is no way to handle double-clicking because that is the action for zooming, and calling event.preventDefault() doesn’t seem to override that.

If Safari is the current SDK, we need help as developers to build, and debug, applications.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/129175427/iphone-safari-notes-and-quirks

No surprise really: iPhone buyers are flooding eBay with their new iPhones with bids starting from $1 and buy it now prices as high as $1500.

For those outside of the United States desperate to get their hands on an iPhone, a number of listings offer worldwide shipping; this listing for example posts to Australia for $50. However be aware that the iPhone does not support simcards and today no one has worked out how to unlock the phone from AT&T, although you could always buy it now and work that part out later (or use the iPhone as an expensive video iPod). MacNN has screenshots on the iPhone’s innards for those interested in hacking it.

If you do sign up for an AT&T plan and live outside the US, be warned that AT&T’s international roaming rates would make a drunken sailor blush.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/129134231/

A 3G iPhone for Europe will be announced Monday, according to an unconfirmed report from Guy Kewney at Newswireless.

Engadget points out that Kewney was recently eWeek.com’s European wireless editor and would be well placed to know.

The European 3G iPhone is said to be distributed via Carphone Warehouse with Vodafone in the UK and T-Mobile in Germany the European carriers. No word yet on other European countries. The phone is said to go on sale in Europe before the end of the year.

If the rumor is true (and it is just a rumor at this stage) it’s a positive sign for the rest of the world, particularly Australasia where the slower 2G systems are being phased out as 3G coverage is already ubiquitous. It would also create two tiers of iPhone users: Americans with the slower 2.5G versions and the rest of us with much faster 3G versions; as the saying goes: all good things come to those who wait.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/129118355/

Thousands of people are eagerly waiting in line to get their hands on the iPhone. However, for those of us tied into long term contracts or who just find the high price tag too much cash to part with, we’ve compiled a list of how to emulate iPhone’s features on your everyday handset.

Visual Voice Mail

Perhaps the most talked about feature, visual voice mail easily lets you play your messages out of order with more detail about who called and when. There are a couple of startups who offer this feature, Callwave and Gotvoice. Both of these programs also have other features like voice-to-text, or voicemail-to-email.

Browser

People have been gushing over iPhone’s browser, which lets you surf the “real” internet through a zoom and scan interface. Opera has recently come out with Opera Mini 4 Beta that has the same zoom navigation feature controlled by your number pad. Microsoft has their own version for Windows Mobile called Deepfish in limited beta.

Email

iPhone offers a rich HTML email interface including attachment support. Microsoft Exchange support stirred up quite a bit of controversy, but that may be resolved. Email has been offered on cell phones for a while now. Either Gmail, Yahoo, and Windows Live mail will work on your phone. Of course, Blackberry users need not apply.

Maps

iPhone is featuring a version of Google Maps that takes advantage of the touchscreen interface. A simpler Google Maps version is available for the rest of us and Yahoo is expected to release a mobile maps product on its Go platform soon. For voice and maps integration, readers should check out TellMe as well.

Music

Apple is claiming the iPhone is the best iPod to date. We’ve covered several other mobile solutions for playing music on your phone. The most recent player has been MusicStation, which mimics iTunes and plays songs with accompanying album art. If you’re only interested in playing the music you already own, you should also check out MyStrands, Avvenu, and Pandora.

Widgets

iPhone also lets you get information like weather and stock quotes through widgets. There are several companies already offering content widgets on a variety of phones. You should check out Bluepulse, Widsets, and GetMobio for ways of getting the content you crave to your phone.

Of course, if you’re willing to spend a couple days installing all this software, you might as well wait in line.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/129104340/

Adeel Khan has created another HTTP shell called htsh using PHP on the backend and jQuery for the front end. It currently supports most common commands, like cd, chmod, cp, edit, exit, ls, mkdir, mv, rm, rmdir, touch, unzip, and zip. It is also very easy to add your own commands. It even supports tab-completion.

There is a demo to play with that doesn’t have all of the commands enabled for security reasons.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/129010530/htsh-http-shell

Since all you people seem to want to hear about is the iPhone, here’s a pretty good parody ad from CollegeHumor. They say they’ll have two more up on the site today - check here.

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/~3/129006755/

Are we headed towards a world dominated by amateurish art, truthiness, photos of cute animals, and video clips of people being hit in the nuts? That’s the fear expressed in The Cult of the Amateur: How today’s Internet is killing our culture (review), a new book by Andrew Keen. The book examines what Keen sees as the dark side of information democratization.

Mr. Keen argues that “what the Web 2.0 revolution is really delivering is superficial observations of the world around us rather than deep analysis, shrill opinion rather than considered judgment.” In his view Web 2.0 is changing the cultural landscape and not for the better. By undermining mainstream media and intellectual property rights, he says, it is creating a world in which we will “live to see the bulk of our music coming from amateur garage bands, our movies and television from glorified YouTubes, and our news made up of hyperactive celebrity gossip, served up as mere dressing for advertising.” This is what happens, he suggests, “when ignorance meets egoism meets bad taste meets mob rule.”

The book grew out of this essay published last year by The Weekly Standard. In that piece, he argues personalization is just another word for narcissism.

The consequences of Web 2.0 are inherently dangerous for the vitality of culture and the arts. Its empowering promises play upon that legacy of the ‘60s—the creeping narcissism that Christopher Lasch described so presciently, with its obsessive focus on the realization of the self.

Another word for narcissism is “personalization.” Web 2.0 technology personalizes culture so that it reflects ourselves rather than the world around us. Blogs personalize media content so that all we read are our own thoughts. Online stores personalize our preferences, thus feeding back to us our own taste. Google personalizes searches so that all we see are advertisements for products and services we already use.

Instead of Mozart, Van Gogh, or Hitchcock, all we get with the Web 2.0 revolution is more of ourselves.

He says not writing may be the new rebellion…

Orwell’s fear was the disappearance of the individual right to self-expression. Thus Winston Smith’s great act of rebellion in Nineteen Eight-Four was his decision to pick up a rusty pen and express his own thoughts…

In the Web 2.0 world, however, the nightmare is not the scarcity, but the over-abundance of authors. Since everyone will use digital media to express themselves, the only decisive act will be to not mark the paper. Not writing as rebellion sounds bizarre—like a piece of fiction authored by Franz Kafka. But one of the unintended consequences of the Web 2.0 future may well be that everyone is an author, while there is no longer any audience.

Keen’s got a point in some areas but it all seems rather elitist. One man’s “mob rule” is another’s democracy. If individuals can’t decide for themselves what to like, who should do it? Is he proposing we all obey a Committee of Good Taste or something?

Besides, culture was suffering before the internet too. As far as I’m concerned, the death of the crappy sitcom, bad Hollywoood movie, overproduced major label schlock, etc. is just fine. And viva enthusiastic amateurs creating amazing stuff like this handmade Modest Mouse video.

That said, one area where I share his concerns: newspapers. Newspapers employ the people who actually cultivate leads and grind out stories. TV news blows and hardly any bloggers do any real reporting (commenting on the news is a lot different than discovering it). We all suffer when reporting disappears. And right now the future of the newspaper business ain’t looking too rosy.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/497-is-the-web-killing-our-culture