One of the advantages of using Ajax to display updates on users' profile pages is that this could also allow for pushing real-time updates to your Twitter stream in the near future. Currently, you have to reload the pages manually.

As Kristen Nicole points out on SocialTimes, the increased (or at least perceived) competition from Facebook might be pushing Twitter to release new features on its own, instead of almost solely relying on third-party developers. While there are distinct differences between the cultures on Twitter and Facebook, Facebook's new API could open the way to more competition between the two services.

Also, while Twitter's strategy of opening up its API and encouraging innovation by third-party developers has made the service the success it is today, it has also made monetizing Twitter even harder. The standard Twitter profile home page is very basic, and anybody who wants more features has to use a third-party application. The most active Twitter users hardly ever visit the site, as the interface is too basic. Instead, they rely on tools like Tweetdeck or Twhirl to interact with the Twitter API.

Have you seen Twitter's new Ajax updates in action? If so, let us know in the comments.

The API Playground will also become Google's official way to show Javascript samples.

The Playground runs on top of Google's App Engine, which is quickly becoming Google's preferred way of developing and releasing new products.

Ben Lisbakken, a Developer Programs engineer at Google, developed the API Playground as a "20% project." Google also made the source code for the API Playground available under the Apache 2.0 license.

Great for Learning

For students (or anybody who is trying to get his/her head around the basic concepts of using Google's APIs), this could be a great way to get some coding experience with almost immediate feedback and without having to learn the complexities of an IDE.

With Ichabod, Adobe is hoping to fix that problem for Flash. Update: According to a comment from Adobe's John Dowdell, Ichabod only works on Flash, not AJAX as previously reported. Nonetheless, it's still a very important step forward.

Now, just in time for Halloween, Adobe has unveiled more information about the technology that may resolve the search-engine woes. Code-named Ichabod, it's an early prototype of a "headless Flash player."

The player - which has no user interface - is designed to help search engines index the content held within the confines of Flash by playing the content in a way that allows the search bots to index it.

According to InfoWorld, Ichabod might walk through an interaction so that a search engine bot could index the results:

"The search engine, for example, might find a button in an application; Ichabod will try to push the button and generate an event, which then might lead to an indexing of that content."

Only time will tell if Ichabod's headless Flash player can bring indexing to the sleepy hollows of Flash. But one thing is for sure: With the wealth of content contained within Flash movies throughout the Web it's in everyone's best interests to solve this issue.

For Adobe, it means eliminating one of the last barriers to the continued acceptance of its core Web technology. For Google, Yahoo!, and other search engines, the ability to effectively index Flash content means more relevant search results to which they can affix advertising.

Hopefully, tackling the search engine problem has Adobe's Ichabod meeting with results far more rewarding than those which befell its namesake.

Until now, only users with paid Yahoo Plus accounts had POP access to their email. Now, all Yahoo users will get offline access to their accounts through the Zimbra Desktop via the arguably superior IMAP protocol.

Yahoo bought the email and messaging company Zimbra for $350 million in September 2007, soon after Zimbra had launched its offline capabilities. The Zimbra Desktop runs on top of Prism, a Mozilla Labs product, which, just like Gears, is meant to allow users offline access to their web applications.

Besides working with Yahoo mail, Zimbra also supports all other IMAP and POP capable accounts, as well as, of course, accounts hosted on a Zimbra server. Zimbra has predefined settings for Gmail, AOL, and Yahoo accounts.

Still Beta

After one alpha and two beta releases under Yahoo, Zimbra is still calling this new version a beta, but given that fact that they are releasing it to all Yahoo users, the company must feel pretty good about the stability of the application. In our tests, we did not experience any crashes or other problems with the Windows and Linux client, though we did not test the Mac version.

The Zimbra Blog also lists a large number of other updates and new features to the application, including built-in notifications, minimize to tray on Windows, showing the number of new mails in the tray, and a few other minor updates.

Only Mail

One thing that is still sorely missing though (or at least we couldn't find it), is syncing calendars, tasks, files, contacts, etc. Yahoo is surely planning to do this in a future release, but right now, this does reduce the usefulness of the Zimbra Desktop quite a bit.

Why Zimbra Only?

The big news, however, is definitely that all Yahoo users now have offline access to their email accounts. Of course, cynics might point out that all Yahoo would have to do is flip one switch and all its users could just use any email client they wanted for offline access. Those same cynics might point out that Yahoo is mostly doing this to justify the $300 million investment in Zimbra. However, at least Yahoo's users now have one option to get offline access to their messages.

With TubeSpy, that homepage widget is now a web-based application. The app was built with jQuery, a JavaScript framework, the jQuery UI library for the tab controls, and the new YouTube API. So far, the app has been tested and works in IE7, IE7, and Firefox 2.

Using TubeSpy, you can view what videos others are watching as they stream by on the left-hand side of the page. You can pause this stream as desired if you want to stop and watch a video. Next to each video in the real-time stream is a "plus" sign, which lets you save the video to a "Recently Saved" list on the right. You can also click a blue arrow to just play the video directly from the stream itself.

TubeSpy

The video is launched on the same page you're viewing where you can easily interact with it, just as you could with any embedded videos on other web sites. To the right, you'll see "Related Videos," which are the same videos you would have seen had you watched the video on the YouTube site instead.

You can also change to the tab "Last 15," which shows the most recent 15 videos watched on YouTube, also in real time. (Apparently the 3-year old summarizing Star Wars is still pretty popular).

TubeSpy is definitely a cool app worth a look and an interesting use for the YouTube API.

"Time spent is the most important indicator of web 2.0," writes Nicolas. "It replaces page views, which became meaningless when pages are refreshed piece by piece (Ajax)." But time spent can be hard to measure. It is difficult to measure what a person is looking at, or interacting with on a page.

Nicolas' demo uses Google Web Toolkit to divide time spent between individual sections of a page. It tracks exactly what on a page a person is looking at and for how long by measuring the time each piece of a page is visible on the user's screen. This results in very detailed and useful data.

For example, using this method, marketers could see exactly how long a person looked at a specific product on a page, or how long banners were viewed -- imagine selling banner spots based not on how many ads are shown, but how long each ad is viewed by the average visitor. When combined with clickstream data, you can begin to imagine how useful the data could be for marketers.

Nicolas has banner exposure demo as well, demonstrating how his technology could be used to track the time banner ads are being seen by users.

This type of innovative audience measurement technology will become more useful as web publishers continue to embrace technologies like AJAX that make page loads irrelevant. Optimizing ad placement may be less about putting banners in the most visible spot, but rather putting banners in a post that will be viewed for the longest time (this type of audience measurement tool has similar implications for design and page layout optimization).