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Message posted by Maciej Stachowiak

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Message posted by Julian Reschke

Message posted by Jonas Sicking

OpenID provider JanRain has launched an interesting project called Demand OpenID, which lets users click a bookmarklet whenever they are on a website that they want to request OpenID support on. It's a handy, if a touch rude, way to demonstrate user demand for OpenID on popular websites.

Right now the most popular services for users to demand OpenID are Twitter, Flickr, Digg, Facebook, Amazon and Google.

JanRain's Brian Ellin says the project was inspired by blogger Aaron Hockley's recent oath to no longer comment on tech blogs that fail to offer OpenID login. Way to go Aaron!

Bumps in the Road

Unfortunately the service doesn't check to see if there's OpenID login already available on the site you're on - so my apologies to photo sharing site Zooomr, for example, if I made them feel at all defensive in testing.

It would also be nice if there was some way to know that the vendors were made aware of the demands. One way I can think of would be to publish a feed of each demand and ping the blogsearch engines with that feed. Then each demand would get picked up by company PR monitoring blogsearch feeds for mentions. I could set that up myself using a scraping service and FeedBurner, but that might not be so nice.

Early shortcomings aside, Demand OpenID is a great and simple idea.

Until now I've been twittering every time I get angry about the lack of OpenID somewhere. Now I'll use the bookmarklet. You should too, everyone should. Demand OpenID is built on the Google App Engine, so it can take the kind of click quantities that the lack of OpenID adoption around the web warrants.

Thanks to the Vidoop blog, a great place to unearth all kinds of OpenID related news like this.

Hi,

I took the RSS gadget sample, ([link]
docs/Tutorials/RssGadget/index .html) and I only changed the

var CONFIG_FEED_URL = '[link]

and put the following feed link:

[link]

and i keep getting this error:

Snackr is a new Adobe AIR app that lets you display items in your RSS feeds in a beautiful scrolling ticker on any edge of your screen. I am absolutely giddy about it after only a few minutes of use. Snackr is something you'd supplement your existing reader with, not a replacement. It is not for the faint of heart or information averse, either.

If you've ever fantasized about having the river of news flow straight into your brain, this is the closest I've seen yet. I've uploaded a small OPML file of my top priority feeds, limited Snackr to displaying items from within the last 5 days and am in heaven. Read on for screenshots and some critique.

Snackr was built by Narciso Jaramillo, a long time Adobe developer now working on the Flex product line.

Below is a screenshot of the live ticker, paused when an item is clicked. The scrolling is really smooth, story order is randomized. When you click on an item, the full text will appear if it's available in the feed. The link at the bottom of the pop-up will take you to the full post.

You can have Snackr running at the top, bottom, left or right margin of your screen. I clapped my hands and jumped up and down like a little school girl upon seeing each different view for the first time.

The idea is not to read every item here, but to give your eye some opportunity to catch items it might not otherwise. I love it.

Wishes

So far I've only got two requests for Snackr development. The site supports authenticated feeds (password protected, something Google Reader can't do) which is great. When I click on an item from a particular filter's RSS feed in my GMail account though, the popup window prompts but doesn't allow me to log-in. I wish that were different.

Second, once I uploaded an OPML file, I ended up with some feeds I wanted to unsubscribe from and had to do so one at a time. Bulk feed management would be nice. A javascript bookmarklet to add a feed to Snackr with a click, when I discover it around the web, would be great too. Media handling could be improved as well.

All in all though, I am very excited to discover the app. It was the first app I happened to look at on FreshAIR Apps today, an AIR site we reviewed earlier this week. I plan to spend a lot more time on that site, as AIR is a very exciting platform.

Six weeks ago, ReadWriteWeb published their definitive list of the top Twitter clients. The methodology for that list was watching the Twitter public feed and logging tweet sources. However, how does the list of clients people are using match up the list of the ones people are talking about? Using data from blog search engine Twingly, we decided to see which Twitter clients are getting the most buzz on blogs. The result is a list of the most popular 3rd-party Twitter-apps according to the blogosphere.

This is a guest post from Anton Johansson, a business developer at the Swedish startup Twingly.com, which developing a spam-free blog search engine focused on Europe.

Top 5 Overall

• Twhirl
• Mobypicture
• Twitterfeed
• Twitteriffic
• Terraminds micro search

ReadWriteWeb's public feed study in April also found Twhirl to be the most popular Twitter client. It was helped in the blogosphere by all the buzz created by its acqusition by Seesmic last month. [Incidentally, that also drove a lot of traffic to our Twitter clients list post as well. -- Ed.]

Top 5 Desktop Apps

• Twhirl
• Twitteriffic
• Snitter
• Tweetr
• Twitteroo

The top two desktop apps -- Twhirl and Twitterific -- are again the same ones ReadWriteWeb saw last month in their study. But after that, things deviate a bit. Snitter, Tweetr, and Twitteroo were all farther down the list in terms of usage, but are getting a disproportionate amount of coverage in the blogosphere.

Top 5 Web Apps

• Mobypicture
• Twitterfeed
• Terraminds
• Twistori
• Summize

Launched just a few weeks ago, Twistori (RWW coverage) has already garnered a lot of attention. Interestingly, Twistori actually uses data from Summize, one of the more popular Twitter search engines -- and clearly one of the most talked about, as well.

Top 5 Mobile Apps

• Hahlo
• Cetwit
• Twitter Answers
• Twapper
• Twittai

There have been far fewer blog posts written about mobile Twitter applications in relation to other categories. Hahlo, the first iPhone and iPod Touch client for Twitter takes first place in terms of buzz, followed by Cetwit, a popular app for Windows Mobile. Twittai is a Java-based Twitter cell phone application.

Notes and Methodology:

We used the the list of Twitter apps on the Twitter Fan Wiki as our source of applications to watch for. The list contains 209 Twitter apps, most of which have not been linked to from the blogosphere at all.

LoudTwitter, an app that publishes tweets to blogs, was excluded because most of its links came from link backs included when the service pushes tweets to blog posts. They didn't get many mentions in posts specifically about them, but their autolinks generated a ton of links within the blogosphere.

I hope the author of the third gadget (HendriXClock) reads this: You
need to set a name, description etc. for your gadget. You can do this
by modifying your en/strings.xml file using the gadget designer or the
notepad application.

Thanks,
Benjamin

On May 16, 7:00 pm, Google Desktop Team <labs

Allen Stern points out that RSS filtering service AideRSS has added Twitter to its PostRank algorithm. AideRSS works by measuring social media interaction with blog posts, and then comparing them to what's normal for that blog. The service then algorithmically applies a ranking to each post allowing users to filter out only the best posts based on the theory that people will only bother interacting with the most interesting or worthwhile content.

We're huge fans of AideRSS at ReadWriteWeb. Not only have we written about them a lot, we've also used AideRSS to filter aggregate feeds for the top content for a number of our toolkit posts. Adding Twitter support is an interesting move because it confirms Twitter's growing influence in the social media space, and lets blog owners see how their content is being spread across the microblog service.

Since we published our first look at AideRSS last July, their PostRank algorithm has changed a lot. At launch, PostRank included information from comments, Digg, del.icio.us, Technorati, IceRocket, and Bloglines -- now the latter three have been replaced with Twitter links and Google blog search conversations. Some of those changes likely had to do with API restrictions, some likely with just general tweaking to make the algorithm perform better.

Because AideRSS calculates PostRank against only that blog's past performance, the ranking is a fair representation of that blog's best work. For example, a PR 10 post on ReadWriteWeb would require different interaction metrics than a post on a small personal blog. PostRank would be easy to cheat -- you could comment a million times on your post, get your friends to Digg it, tweet it, add it it del.icio.us -- but since the service isn't measuring you against other blogs, there's really no incentive to cheat it.

AideRSS also announced support for OpenID.

[bcc: gadget developer(s)]
New gadgets have been submitted!
If you have feedback about these gadgets, please post it to the group by
replying to this message. Your feedback will help developers build better
gadgets.
DISCLAIMER: Google has not tested or verified the features or security of these
gadgets. Please direct all questions to the authors.

Travelwidgets.com presents the 2008 Olympics Travel Widget, using our popular Ultimate Travel widget format, you can book travel and purchase tickets to the Beijing China Olympics later this summer. Choose from the hotels tab with Beijing presets to Air tickets or package deals saving on Hotels and Air together. The back of the widget has links to local venue maps, showing all the event venues in the area, as well as links to free Wii-Fi spots and the local weather. Any Olympic traveller with a Mac will love this widget. Bookings search 28 sites for the best deals using World Choice Travel, a Travelocity partner.

In the past year, the EduTF has been quieter than previous years. We have gone through a few changes, though our mission remains the same.

The WaSP Education Task Force was created in 2005 to work directly with institutions of higher education to help raise awareness of Web standards and accessibility among instructors, administrators, and Web development teams.

Our mission is not a small one. Our work and message needs to reach beyond our reading audience and the Web standards community in order to get information, help, and resources to more people. EduTF is discussing and looking at a variety of ways in which we can help.

To help with our mission, EduTF has added new members, including: Aarron Walter, Gareth Rushgrove, Lars Gunther, Jeffrey Brown, Kathy Keller, Christopher Schmitt, and Virginia DeBolt. Each member has experience with education and a strong passion for improving education in the area of Web standards and technologies.

One task the EduTF has been working on is the publication of the EduTF Survey results. We are reviewing the final draft of the publication and hope to share this information very soon.

The survey results have been very helpful in highlighting key needs, challenges and issues within the educational community and these will be addressed by the EduTF and also through our Curriculum Project.

The Curriculum Project will be a resource that could be used by those in education, as well as, anyone needing to update knowledge on Web related technologies.

Aarron Walter is leading our Curriculum Project and has this informative report to share:

The quality of Web design and development education in our schools is perhaps the most significant barrier preventing the world-wide adoption of Web standards. The EduTF has been hard at work this year developing a curriculum to address this issue. Our goal is to create a curriculum that is modular allowing courses to be selectively integrated into existing programs that need updating, or adopted entirely to serve as the foundation for new Web design and development programs in colleges, universities, and high schools around the world.

This is a big project. We’ve sought guidance from talented educators already teaching standards, and top industry professionals who have helped us identify the tools and topics each course should include. The EduTF is teaming up with Chris Mills of Opera who is leading an initiative to create a broad series of detailed articles that teach basic principles of front end development. These articles will be integrated into a number of courses to provide educators and students with practical references and a solid foundation in Web standards.

The curriculum will be released in stages, the first of which will include a core set of courses that address foundation topics such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, accessibility, information architecture, usability, and the history of the Web. In subsequent releases, courses will be added that address more advanced topics, and specific tools popular in the industry.

Each course will contain a collection of tools for educators including:

• A course overview
• Recommended course dependencies indicating what students will need to know before beginning each course
• Learning competencies describing what students must master in order to receive a passing grade
• Assignment recommendations and test questions that allow educators to measure a student’s mastery of each competency
• Recommended readings from Chris Mills’ article series on Web standards and other reputable sources

We hope to release the curriculum in March of 2009 in an online format that will make it easy for educators to access and contribute back to the project. We view it as a living system which will be greatly enhanced by community contributions.

It’s a very big undertaking, but one that we believe could make a significant impact not only on the quality of Web design and development education offered in our schools, but also on the adoption rate of Web standards. If you’re an educator with pedagogical materials or ideas to share, please join the mailing list and our IRC channel to become part of the conversation. We welcome your support and inputs as we proceed with the development of the WaSP Web standards curriculum.

The music search engine and Internet jukebox, Songza, lets you seek out any song on the web and stream it immediately. In January of this year, we announced the site's partnerships with Seeqpod and Skreemr, which allowed them to grown their online library to 28 million songs. Now, Songza grows again with a launch of a new Facebook app and the arrival of a Songza API.

The Songza Facebook app lets friends see what each other are listening to on the Songza web site. Whenever a song is added to your playlist, that information is posted to your mini-feed and your profile page. Your friends can then click the link to the song to be taken to the Songza site to listen to it for themselves. In order to use the Facebook app, you have to first sign up for an account at Songza.com

Songza in the Mini-Feed

Along with the Facebook app, Songza is now also offering RSS feeds for the site's top-played songs, the featured songs list, and each user's playlist of newly added tunes, which is found on the user profile page. With that last one, the user playlist feed, you now have the ability to add Songza to a lifestreaming service such as FriendFeed, for example.

The last part of the Songza announcement involves the launch of their API. By using the API, developers can build custom widgets and applications based on Songza data. The API can be used to access the featured songs list, a user's playlist, and the last ten songs a user has added to their playlist. At the moment, Songza isn't imposing any limitations on the number of times requests can be made to the API, but they do remind developers that their feeds only update every 15 minutes, so there isn't much point to polling more often than that. 

Because Songza finds its music on the internet, it can be useful for locating more obscure artists or live performances. And since the service doesn't allow for downloads, only streaming, it's legit. They even pay artists based on how many times a song was streamed via licenses with the major performing-rights organizations (ASCAP, BMI, SESAC). However, the best thing about Songza is that you can listen to a song as many times as you want in its entirety, unlike Last.fm, whose on-demand service lets you play any particular song, too, but only in full three times before receiving a prompt to purchase it.

This widget, powered by Mortgage Marvel, displays the top rates from over 250 mortgage lenders. It displays interest rate, discount points, APR, closing fees, and monthly payment for each result. When you've found the perfect rate, you can apply online directly with the lender.

Last August we called Spongecell "the most intuitive of the online calendar apps," and picked it as one of our 10 Must Have Online Office Apps. Since then, though, a lot has changed. Spongecell is no longer just a personal calendar, but rather a full-scale event management platform aimed at businesses with complicated event calendars. Last week I caught up with Spongecell CEO Ben Kartzman and Chief Strategy Office Marc Guldimann to learn a little bit more about what the company is up to.

With Google Calendar now dominating the online personal calendar space, Spongecell decided to take a different approach to the market. Spongecell reworked their product and launched "Spongecell Promote" in March 2007, a full event-marketing platform provides publishing, messaging, and reporting tools to event organizers. After seeing that they were getting more traffic via embedded calendars than via the personal calendar service that had been their main product, Spongecell decide to shift gears completely and make Promote their core offering.

Above is a sample Spongecell calendar widget.

The service compares somewhat to Evite, but Kartzman stressed that Spongecell isn't focused on one-off events like birthday parties -- though the product could be used that way -- but rather hopes to help organizations or event managers who run a large number of gatherings to manage their entire calendar.

Spongecell's service has three main components:

• Publishing: Each event gets a web page that allows people to RSVP, comment, get directions, etc. Event pages can be syndicated to MySpace, Facebook, Eventful, Upcoming and elsewhere via widgets.
• Messaging: Spongecell lets users spread the word about their event via SMS and email. About 2 million emails are sent out each month via the service.
• Reporting: Event managers can use Spongecell's reporting features to track their email and SMS blasts and guest lists.

Spongecell's calendar widget has about 12,000 installs and serves 2 million pageviews each month, Kartzman told me. About 25% of those come through the app's RESTful API, which allows developers to create custom calendar applications. Parenting site lilaguide.com, for example, uses the API to power its event section and has customized it so that parents can add events to the site's calendar.

Conclusion

Spongecell has already landed some pretty big clients for their platform, including CNN, but plans to expand into new markets over the coming year as part of an ambitious plan to become the event marketing management platform for any industry.

Spongecell may no longer be a must have office application -- if you're looking for a simple calendar, try Google -- but it is now a very well made and versatile platform for running an online event calendar on any web site. Deciding not to compete with Google was probably a smart move for the company, which now has a much better chance of cornering their intended market.

Ever wanted to create your own isometric pixel picture, but didn’t know what the word isometric meant? Well, now you can fulfil your wildest dreams with Cubescape!

That is the headline for Cubescape, a site that released a new jQuery based front end that lets you drop the cubes!

Perfect for a Friday, go ahead and get dropping on this very clean interface.

Just when you thought that datepickers had been played out, along comes Filament Group and puts a whole new spin on it. Working from Mark Grabanski’s jQuery UI DatePicker control, the team substantially enhanced the UI with a host of new features including:

• shortcut links to preset date ranges, for example, “Past 30 days” or “Current YTD,”
• links to “All dates before…” and “All dates after…” to simplify selecting a range of values where the data set is very large or the high or low end value is an unknown, and
• only showing the number of calendars needed for choosing a particular range (i.e., you only need one calendar to choose “All dates before…”, but you’ll need two to select a custom range).
• Use of progressive enhancement for graceful degradation /li>

Check out the demo here.

About VicoSoft Widget This widget you will like, since Heart of the Manchá brings to your Mac the last new developments of the Blog.

Spring Web Flow 2.0 has been released which includes a new Spring JavaScript module.

Here is an example of an onclick wrapper calling an Ajax event:

I got to sit down with Keith Donald and Jeremy Grelle from SpringSource and talk to them about the going-ons on the Web tier. There are a couple of moving parts, from the core Web framework (Spring MVC), to the Spring Webflow controller engine, to the new Spring JS module.

Spring JS abstracts on top of other JavaScript libraries (this release supports Dojo, but more can come), and aims to make certain tasks very easy to do. Jeremy talks about some of the use cases, such as form validation. The library could be used stand alone, but of course there is nice integration with the server side Spring frameworks too. This allows you to annotate in Java, and get nice Ajax behaviour on the client.

There are already ways to show different media in the same player or Slideshow. like the recent new Google Docs Embeddable Presentations and the Wixi File Player. but they are not meant for certain tasks or cannot offer the sophistication of 5min Life Videopedia  SmartPlayer.

5min is a site dedicated for less than 5 minutes instructional videos like lessons, a study presentation, a tutorial or make a screencasted method way better.

That is because, Smartplayer can allow you some advanced action in the video like zooming, full screen mode with all its media controls, slowing down the video, change the brightness in the video, etc. but also add other files as complementary plus to your instructional video. be them photos, text or links. so if you post a tutorial or a method in your blog and have done a instructional video out of it. it not only can carry along your post inside the video. but it also can link back to the original post in your blog from where the tutorial or method comes from.

In resume: a high end embeddable Flash Video Player with a RIA edge.

The SmartPlayer also got a landing page just like a youtube page around its community and sports High Spread Sharing by Gigya while the Smartplayer gives you only the generic embed code.

Don´t take my word for it. here is a 5min Video about the Smartplayer running in a Smartplayer.

5min

via 5min Blog

While i had talked briefly about  MyBlogLog Blog Verification. i never got around to do it. i just forgot..

So this post serves two purposes:

1.-Verifying  Widgets Lab in MyBlogLog 

So it can get the verified sign to show in the profile of the Widgets Lab MyBlogLog community.

To verify your site at MyBlogLog you can either  post a meta tag to your template or do a “verifying” blog post like me. in that post you only need to add the code indicated in your MBL Blog Community verify settings:

That will look as a simple link in your post like this:

Undergoing MyBlogLog Verification

Once you have done that, you only need to return to your MBL verify settings and press the Authenticate Button if it is not already showing as finished.

(the second choice is better because you get the chance to serve the very two purposes i list here)

Once you have done all this, you will get the verified sign:

This sign will spread to your Blog Showcase in your MBL user Profile and in your Blog Community page:

Why it is a good idea to  verify your Blog in MyBlogLog?.

• *It Gives your more visibility
• *Instant perceived trust
• *Why not?

2.-Remind you to join Widgets Lab MyBlogLog Community

That now it is closer to be 500 members. you can also alternatively Add me and Derek as MBL contacts if you know us, are already a member of the Widgets Lab Community or want to know more about us.

Widgets Lab MBL Community

Derek

Avatar

So, if you are part of MyBlogLog and visit this site. why not join its community or add us to your contacts?.

And if you are still not using MBL, you may want to know they have just updated the service lately, so it may be good to check it out again if you havent come back to it for a while.

Now the only thing i have to ask Ian Kennedy is where are my  MyBlogLog Verified Badges and  Verified indicators in the all the Widgets?.

Seriously.

MyBlogLog

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Mark Pilgrim announced a new Google Code project yesterday on the Google Code Blog:

Google has built its business here, on the open web, and we want to help you build here too. To that end, we are happy to announce the formation of an encyclopedia for web developers, by web developers: Google Doctype.

Full of wikified goodness and entirely downloadable by SVN checkout, Google Doctype stands to become a fantastic resource for Web developers, provided a solid core community embraces it. So head on over, check it out, and maybe even contribute something.

I'm happy to announce that I've just rounded out the conference with some more excellent speakers. I'll be doing a full speaker roundup over the next few days - for the moment, here's Jonathan Mendez - his blog is well worth a read.

Jonathan Mendez's Blog

I’m very excited that I was just asked to speak at the WidgetWebExpo. I’ll be sharing some of RAMP Digital’s recent work on Adplications, discussing how the Intelligent Web and the use of APIs and Semantics is going to redefine display advertising and showing the first ever Google Gadget Ad that RAMP has been working with Dapper and Google on.

Posted by Chris Schalk, Google Developer Advocate

At yesterday's OpenSocial Summit, imeem (www.imeem.com) announced that it has launched as a new OpenSocial container. imeem is the 3rd largest and one of the fastest growing social networks in the U.S., with over 24 million unique user visits per month. The site enables users to discover, interact and express themselves with all types of online media. Through the Media Platform, imeem now provides OpenSocial developers access to its extensive library of music, videos, and photos for their applications, which can be accessed using imeem's extension of OpenSocial.

We are happy to welcome imeem and its community to the OpenSocial application development platform. For more information, please visit imeem's OpenSocial developer site.

Hello,

Currently, you cannot run a Desktop gadget inside a webpage except
within iGoogle.

Cheers!
James

Hello,

You should be able to set the color in DrawText:

graphics.DrawText(x, y, width, height, 'the text', '#FF0000',
gddTextFlagCenter, gddFontNormal);

This will draw red (#FF0000) text.

Cheers!
James

The Olympics Countdown Gadget is really nice but it looks like the
gadget file contains a lot more than is needed (.svn folders, large
and small screenshots) which would make the filesize of the gadget
much smaller.

On May 15, 7:00 pm, Google Desktop Team <labs

Ready for the EURO 2008 you can play the soccer game penalty kick live on your homepage or blog. Kick the ball into the goal or catch it as the keeper. Who is the better soccer player? Try it out!

Steve Souders has another insightful post where he discusses splitting the initial payload for the JavaScript in your page / application.

Steve first outlines how JavaScript can affect how the browser renders a page:

The growing adoption of Ajax and DHTML means today’s web pages have more JavaScript than ever before. The average top ten U.S. web site[1] contains 252K of JavaScript. JavaScript slows pages down. When the browser starts downloading or executing JavaScript it won’t start any other parallel downloads. Also, anything below an external script is not rendered until the script is completely downloaded and executed. Even in the case where external scripts are cached the execution time can still slow down the user experience and thwart progressive rendering.

He then took the Alexa top ten websites and tracked how much of the code was executed before the onload event, based on functions called. The results are below:

Now, it is easy to understand why this is the case. There are factors such as the simplicity in putting the code in one file, and feeling like the cache effects will make the point moot (which Steve argues against). Steve gets this:

The task of finding where to split a large set of JavaScript code is not trivial. Doloto, a project from Microsoft Research, attempts to automate this work. Doloto is not publicly available, but the paper provides a good description of their system. (You can here the creators talk about Doloto at the upcoming Velocity conference.) The approach taken by Doloto uses stub functions that download additional JavaScript on demand. This might result in users having to wait when they trigger an action that requires additional functionality. Downloading the additional JavaScript immediately after the page has rendered might result in an even faster page.

As developers, you’re probably curious about the recent initiatives we and other companies in the industry have taken to help you build applications that let users take their information around the web. We wanted to give you a little more information on how we’re thinking about these projects and get your feedback in the forum.

At Facebook, we always look out for the privacy of our users. That’s a key reason users feel safe sharing their information on our site.

We also strive for openness, releasing the first Facebook API for external websites in August 2006, and then opening up the Facebook website itself with the most recent launch of Facebook Platform in May 2007. Last week, we announced Facebook Connect, which enables users to connect their identity, friends, and privacy across the web.

Privacy and openness go hand-in-hand – as we open up, we have to make sure that users always have control of their information, and understand how and where it’s being used. We’ve maintained that trusted environment while opening up Facebook Platform and the social graph to external developers by requiring third-party application developers to treat user information with the same respect we do. All Facebook Platform developers agree to the Developer Terms of Service, which strictly limit the collection, use, and redistribution of user information. We have technology and a team to ensure applications abide by those policies.

We’re excited that our industry partners are taking greater steps toward openness and enabling users to share their information around the web. We hope, though, that we can collectively find a model that allows users to share data while protecting the privacy of our users’ data and ensuring that the user is always in control.

In the past, when we found applications passing user data to another party (for instance, to ad networks for the purpose of targeting), we suspended those applications and worked with those developers to ensure they respect user privacy. Now that Google has launched Friend Connect, we’ve had a chance to evaluate the technology. We’ve found that it redistributes user information from Facebook to other developers without users’ knowledge, which doesn’t respect the privacy standards our users have come to expect and is a violation of our Terms of Service. Just as we’ve been forced to do for other applications that redistribute data in a way users might not expect or understand, we’ve had to suspend Friend Connect’s access to Facebook user information until it comes into compliance. We’ve reached out to Google several times about this issue, and hope to work with them to enable users to share their data exactly when and where they choose.

We think MySpace’s Data Availability, Google Friend Connect, and Facebook Connect can be part of a great movement in the industry to give users a better and safer experience online, while respecting user privacy. We look forward to working with our developer community and everyone else in the industry to help all of our users take their information, and their privacy, with them wherever they go.

Eric Miraglia has posted a great tutorial on how to build your first YUI application. He runs you through the steps of creating a simple application that leverages YUI's AutoComplete Control to create a site-search form powered by the Yahoo!'s Search web service.

The tutorial is a great walkthrough of both how to build the application and also leverage YUI's extensive documentation. It also touches on some great points such as:

• How to configure a YUI implementation and put YUI on the page
• How to set up the markup for a progressively-enhanced YUI widget
• How to instantiate and configure a YUI widget
• How to subscribe to and make use of the "custom evens" provided by a YUI widget
• And how to override default behavior to get a bespoke implementation that maps to our requirements.

Doctype is an exciting beast, and for many reasons. Having a place to collect this data is key, and as I said yesterday, I can't wait to see it grow as an open resource.

The other cool part of Doctype is that there are tests to backup claims. This seems like a "no brainer" as some of my 'sherman' friends would put it, as it is the corner stone of science.

The tests are shown through the corpus itself, but you can also go directly to the tests as they live in the Google Code project.

Take a peak at say the document tests and you will start to see how much work Mark has put into this, to give us a solid base to go on from.

You will also see that the tests use a goog.* set of JavaScript libraries that are interesting in their own right.

Simon Willison has already found some interesting things such as:

The Goog library includes code to detect the user’s installed version of iPhoto, based on reverse engineering the Mac.com Gallery RSS feeds.

There is a lot of great code in there, so do some archeology if you have a spare cycle or two. And, let us know what you find!

Flash online game. Fireballs are rolling down the screen, there's a group of ants that need to be saved; to do so, you need to put them on a protective bubble.

Following movie news is easy on Netvibes. To help you get started, here's a selection of items to check or install on your page, without any moderation!

Cannes festival has opened its doors, and we've been thinking about you! Every year there is a lot of stars, glitters and suspense....To keep informed of what's going on during this event, take a tour on the Cahiers du cinema's public page (there's an english version). You will find press releases about the festival, videos and other useful tools.

To check out the latest news from the Cannes festival organization comittee, you can install its widget on your page, so you won't miss any exciting events. Or if you want to keep up to date with new movie releases, you can install the Jaman Trailershow widget or the Spill movie review widget. You'll be able to watch new movie trailers all year long!

If, after all that, you haven't found what you're looking for, just browse our widget directory. You will find other interesting widgets like Starpulse Vortex, to know all the gossips about your favorite celebrities, Film.com to find out more about the actual movie scene, or Flixster for some fun quizzes!

About ECal widget Stands for eBay + Calendar (or eBay + iCal) With this widget you have the possibility to create iCal events for all the eBay auctions you do not want to miss. It works for most of the international eBay sites and moreover is localized for English, German and Italian. It allows to choose the destination calendar and the local eBay site which is needed to correctly interpret the ending dates of the auctions. I was inspired by Baywatch, which is a program doing the same thing but then stopped working when Leopard arrived. The advantage of having this functionality in a widget is obvious: you just hit F12 and the widget’s button and you’re done!

About Macworld News This handy widget for the Macworld fan provides fast RSS feed retrieval, as well as an easy-to-use and elegant interface.

Get the Cooking search gadget with kitchenware and houseware items. Offers thousands of products from every major kitchen brand and hard to find items in cookware, cutlery, bakeware and small appliances as well as smaller items that every kitchen needs such as peelers, graters and strainers.

Displays news feeds from the Indianapolis, IN WRTV-TV 6 TV station's website.

Part of startup life is that a different part of the company gets the focus at different times. For a few months Dan has had the Monkey riding around on his back while we scale the Lijit infrastructure to deliver the service everybody is signing up for (faster then we imagined). Last week we released our new software platform on our new hardware (200 servers) in our new data center (12 racks) and everything is running Sweeeeet!

 

Just this morning the monkey left Dan’s office, grabbed a banana in the kitchen and started sending emails from Micah’s desk. He seems to be trying to “help” Micah fill up all that infrastructure with even more publishers !