A single line of JavaScript is what powers a lot of blogging technologies these days. Widgets, sharing tools,
visitors tracking, advertisers. In many cases a single line of JavaScript is all that a blogger needs to
add a new technology to their blog. The problem is what happens when a lot of these single lines of JavaScript come together...
There is a well-known phenomenon in physics called non-linearity: When a lot of different things interact with each other, the outcome is hard to predict. Software is no different - when you put together a lot of components, you just do not know what you are going to get. This is because each component acts as if it is standalone, but they are literally fighting for real estate space and people's attention. The truth is that this war is hurting everyone - the readers, the bloggers and the services. Everyone is frustrated.
In this post we'll take a look at what is causing pages to hang from too many single lines of javascript; and what can be done about it.
Web Office suite provider ThinkFree has announced it has hit the 1 Million mark in number of hosted documents, up from 654,000 in late February when we last reported ThinkFree's usage. Their community uploads between 60,000 to 80,000 documents per month and currently ThinkFree has 335,000 users, up from the 250,000 in February.
ThinkFree also stated in their blog post that they are the number 2 Web Office suite provider, behind Google Apps. They wrote:
"GD&S is a great lightweight tool, but having the best MS Compatibility and the highest level of feature functionality of any online offie suite has propelled us into the second spot."
Six Apart has today announced the commercial release of Movable Type 4, just over two months since it was launched as a beta. MT4 is now the main product on the Movable Type homepage, replacing 3.x. Billed as "the largest release in the product’s history", MT4 has new community management features and a completely re-designed admin platform. It also incorporates many of the most popular and downloaded plugins. Boing Boing will be one of the first major blogs to use MT4 and Read/WriteWeb is also undergoing a re-design using MT4.
The Filter, a social music recommendation service backed by rock star Peter Gabriel, has released a new version of their software - featuring an improved user interface, a Facebook app and a partnership with Nokia. The Filter is a "playlist creation suite" for iTunes, iPod, iPhone and Apple TV. It works across Windows and Macintosh and it basically allows you to build playlists from the music stored on your PC, Mac, iPod or Nokia mobile phone.
The Filter's user base is reported to be growing at 25,000 a month. The engine can identify 5 million songs, 4.5m of which have clips (short samples). The Filter works by using Bayesian mathematics and it was developed by physicist Martin Hopkins.
A new study released today by the National School Boards Association shows that 96 percent of students with online access use social networking technologies - defined as as chatting, text messaging, blogging, and visiting online communities such as Facebook, MySpace, and Webkinz. 81 percent say they have visited a social networking Web site within the past three months and 71 percent say they use social networking tools at least weekly. The report also claims that one of the most common topics of conversation on the social networking scene is education. Nearly 60 percent of online students report discussing education-related topics such as college or college planning, learning outside of school, and careers. And 50 percent of online students say they talk specifically about schoolwork.
When eBay launched their popular overseas classifieds service Kijiji in the United States last month, it seemed sort of an odd move for the company that owns 25% of the leader in the US classifieds space, Craigslist. On a personal level, I wasn't too impressed.
Kijiji has a hard to pronounce/spell name, an uninviting splash page, and a month later major metros like New York and San Francisco (confusingly labeled as "Bay Area") have just a handful of listings. But today, eBay is bringing another of its popular international classifieds sites to the US.
If you looked at some of the digg comments left during our Yahoo! week, you would believe that Yahoo! has a real problem brewing with customer service.
"Yahoo is an extremely arrogant company that does not place the slightest bit of value on its customers." -- peganjr
"yahoo lacks customer support" -- noctu
"I'll never forgive yahoo for deleteing [sic] my email account of 8 years. Bastards." -- andrewcsayer
Some users appeared to have a such a strong dislike of Yahoo!'s customer support that they commented multiple times on nearly every one of our dugg stories that week. But the latest University of Michigan American Consumer Satisfaction Index data paints a much different picture.
Last week, when writing about Google's MyMaps product, I remarked that it was "odd that Google doesn't allow MyMaps creations to be embedded." Today, APC magazine reports that Google will begin offering maps that are embeddale into web pages within about a week.
"The embedded maps have the full functionality of Google Maps -- they provide satellite view, map view or hybrid view, and users can click and drag the maps around."
We've started a new links blog here at Read/WriteWeb, called Web Tech News. As the name suggests, this mini-blog will cover Web Technology news on a daily basis.
We're focusing specifically on Web news, because that is our niche here at R/WW. We think this will be a handy way for you to keep up-to-date with all the latest Web Tech news, as filtered by the Read/WriteWeb authors. We've got permalink pages for each story, because you may want to comment on them - and also we may integrate this into the main blog some more in the near future.
Here is the RSS feed for Web Tech News.
This week's Read/WriteWeb Files is about Online Music. And the whole R/WW family is contributing. Both AltSearchEngines and last100 have written posts on this theme.
AltSearchEngines has listed their Top 10 Music Search Engines. There were a few I'd never heard of before, so go check it out if you're a music fan. AltSearchEngines editor Charles Knight suggests you pick your favorite artist, or song, and see which music search engine you like the best. Then go back to ASE and leave a quick comment telling them which one you liked the most and why.
