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Ajax
Ajax or Asynchronous Javascript and XML as it was first termed, is shorthand for Javascript UI development, particularly Javascript development that uses the XMLHttpRequest object. XMLHttpRequest and other techniques used to communicate to the server from Javascript prompted the invention of the word, using these techniques Web UIs driven by Javascript may be made more interactive with server data and more responsive, as small fragments of data may be exchanged efficiently between server and client.
Ajax driven applications differ from other rich UI technology driven applications such as Flash or Java by utilizing the other components of Web application development, namely HTML for document delivery and CSS for document styling, as well as sometimes even embedding other components such as Flash widgets.
A simple Ajax library that just implements a cross platform abstraction of XMLHttpRequest is the open source XHConn.
History of Ajax
Ajax, in the sense of communication with the server without a complete reload of the page, dates back to 1996/7, with the inclusion of the IFrame feature in Netscape and IE3. Other early techniques include using image loading to communicate with the server from Javascript.
These early attempts eventually evolved into a formal IE4 feature created by Microsoft to be used in their Outlook Web Access project, which developed a rich UI that was similar to using the native Outlook by communicating with the server directly from Javascript and using other Javascript functionality extensively.
Years later, Google’s web mail project GMail used Ajax techniques to provide a similarly rich experience for email through a web browser. The public, free and cross browser application attracted the attention of web developers by highlighting what could be done with Javascript and Ajax techniques to provide an interactive application over the web.
In the glow of this renewed attention to Javascript and Ajax techniques, the Adaptive Path web consultant Jesse James Garrett coined the term “Ajax” to describe A New Approach to Web Applications
The article and the term caught on, becoming a catchword for rich Javascript driven web UI.
Ajax server communication
Ajax may have been initially defined as Asynchronous Javascript and XML, however Ajax techniques are commonly not XML, and sometimes not Asynchronous.
The formats used most frequently in Ajax applications for exchanging data between the client and the server are plain text, HTML, and JSON/Javascript variables. Plain text and HTML are quite commonly used as they are simple and small, and can be directly injected into the document quickly. JSON/Javascript variables are common for more in depth data manipulation by the client script, and are simple to parse, requiring only an eval evocation.
XML use is directly supported in the XMLHttpRequest object (as implied by the name), however due to the parsing costs, both in development time and client CPU time, it is rarely used.
Problems with Ajax
While Ajax has enjoyed extreme popularity as a buzzword and catchphrase, and has been implemented to great effect in impressive applications beyond GMail, it has also attracted criticism, and applications using Ajax techniques have attracted criticism as well.
Ajax suffers from common complaints directed at Javascript driven applications. Some of these include problems with expected user behavior of the browser’s ‘back button’, accessibility problems from the perspective of users and search bots, and various cues generated by the browser such as the loading throbber that must be emulated directly by Ajax developers.
More on this topic can be found in the Ajax Mistakes article.
Another issue is cross browser coding, although Ajax techniques are available for virtually every web browser, support for various methods are almost never uniform, especially in the case of XMLHttpRequest, which has a few different implementations that must be coded for.
IE6 requires ActiveX be enabled for XMLHttpRequest to function, although IE7 will include it as a native object.
More on Ajax development issues can be found in Ajax-Development-Gotchas.
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Chinese Photo Site Tuyuan May Do Facial Recognition. Or It May Just Put Boxes Around People’s Heads
I can’t really say much about Tuyuan yet since it’s in Chinese and there isn’t much information (translated page here), but it certainly looks like they’re trying to tackle the facial recognition problem that has destroyed many a startup.
We’ve seen Riya (now focused on ecommerce via Like.com), Ookles (never launched), and Polar Rose (in private beta for nearly a year), among others. Most recently Tagcow came on the scene, but it turns out it uses humans to tag photos, which tends to produce bad data.
Will Tuyuan be any different? We have no idea yet. But we’re contacting them to find out. More soon. Thanks for the tip, Orli.
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Image Recognition Problem Finally Solved: Let’s Pay People To Tag Photos
Most people have thousands of digital photos sitting on their hard drive. And the vast majority of those photos aren’t tagged or searchable. Want to find the 300 pictures of your youngest son amongst 10,000 others? It’s not going to happen. Unless you’ve been diligently tagging and categorizing those photos over the years, and who does that?
The problem is obvious. The solution, not so much. A trail of failed startups have tried to tackle the problem with a fairly serious application of technology, including: Riya (now focused on ecommerce via Like.com), Ookles (never launched), and Polar Rose (in private beta for nearly a year), among others.
And now suddenly TagCow appears, which allows users to upload photos and have them tagged within a few minutes. The technology appears to be “magic,” meaning there’s no explanation of it.
If there’s a mountain in the photo, it’s tagged. A dog? yep. A yellow cup? Absolutely. It does people, too. Upload an image of a person and say who it is, and all other images you upload will be tagged with that person, too. The service also integrates with Flickr and will auto tag the photos you have on the service.
Thomas Hawk, the CEO of photo site Zooomr, tried the service and declared it “really, really cool,” although he wonders how it works.
The answer is, humans do it. I note that the TagCow site is careful not to say anything about the tagging process, and never use the word “automated” or anything else that would suggests computers are doing the work. Munjal Shah, the founder of Riya/Like, agreed, noting that it recognized a witch in Thomas’ photo - he says this just isn’t something a computer can do today.
I haven’t confirmed this yet. I’ve emailed the company for a description of how the service works but have yet to hear back. Until we do, I’m betting that humans are the taggers. Note that Google has effectively thrown in the towel and uses humans for this kind of work, too.
TagCow appears to be offering the service for free, so the cost side of the business may be a problem for them down the road. And the business is definitely a little sketchy. Worried about the privacy of your data? Just don’t click on their Privacy Policy or Terms of Use: “Privacy policy is TBD.” and “Legal stuff TBD.” Not exactly a way to build confidence.
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Fred Wilson - Hypocritical, Wrong and Conflicted
Fred Wilson lit a fire today suggesting that certain bloggers need to step it up a notch to improve quality and be more like mainstream journalists.
A fair point if spoken generally, although I’d argue that the quality of reporting done by many bloggers today, at least in the tech space, is equal to or better than most mainstream journalism. I think this is particularly true when we’re talking about breaking, non-embargoed news, where contacts and inside sources matter more than having all the time in the world to think about, research, write and edit an article. His point, therefore, should have been that all news writers need to step it up a notch and aim for better quality, which is sort of like saying nothing at all.
Normally I wouldn’t take issue with the statement, except that it was partially aimed at us. Wilson specifically called out our Erick Schonfeld for his post on social gaming platforms, as well as Matt Marshall at VentureBeat for a post he wrote about Like.
Wilson’s first gripe is that Matt, in his post about Like, didn’t give enough credit to competitor ThisNext. His second - that Erick, in his post on Zynga and SGN, suggested that the “two companies are neck and neck like Hillary and Obama,” when “Zynga is almost an order of magnitude bigger.”
Wilson fully discloses his conflicts of interest in the post - that he is a friend to the founder of ThisNext and an investor in Zynga. At that point, of course, a lot of the credibility behind his opinions comes into question. The two bloggers he is attacking have no conflicts with these startups.
He fails to realize that both Matt (San Jose Mercury News) and Erick (Fortune, Business 2.0) are seasoned mainstream journalists who’ve made the crossover to blogging. So his whole argument about blogging v. mainstream media loses yet more steam.
In reading the articles, it seems to me that Matt did an excellent job of highlighting a recent surge by Like while still noting relevant competitors. Erick’s post, which I am more familiar with, is in my opinion above reproach. Erick notes the strengths and weaknesses of both platforms and suggests that developers will ultimately make a decision as to which, or both, they will join. Erick also interviewed Wilson for the post and quoted him in it.
So what this really comes down to is this. Wilson didn’t like the coverage. But instead of simply disagreeing with and rebutting the points made in the posts, he went after the reputation of the writers themselves. That would be inappropriate even if he was right. But the fact that he was both conflicted and wrong makes it inexcusable.
Wilson failed to uphold the very standards of integrity that he demands from others. He failed to contact Erick or Matt before writing, and didn’t seem to have the facts to back up his argument. In a twitter exchange between us on this issue, he defended his sloppiness on the fact that he’s a blogger, saying “if you are a blogger you can say what you think, once you become a journalist, you have a different standard.”
Now, frankly, I’m confused. Bloggers can say what they think, but journalists can’t? I think what he’s trying to say is that Erick and Matt are no longer bloggers and now need to hold themselves to a higher standard - one that Wilson explicitly doesn’t hold himself to. That sounds like hypocrisy 101 to me.
Also, in a comment to his original post, he says “Erick didn’t get it wrong…but i think he missed the opportunity to get it right.”
How can you be both wrong and right at the same time?
Wilson partially retracted his post in a follow up, saying that he was sorry for singling out Erick and Matt, and saying that he “didn’t mean to take a shot at either of them.” But he then goes on to say that the whole exercise was a good one, since it started this great conversation on the issue.
That’s no apology, Fred. An apology would include you admitting that both posts were well researched and well written pieces. And that it was wrong to attack the reputation of these writers just because the conclusions reached by them were different than your own.
One last note. In the comments Fred says it isn’t even debatable that SGN is not a real company. From what we hear on the street, some very high profile venture capitalists are willing to bet some serious money that he’s wrong.
Update: Mathew Ingram says I went a little too hard at Fred here. I don’t necessarily disagree. Fred tends to come at people pretty hard, so I went hard back. But some readers won’t know that, so it’s worth pointing out.
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Making Ruby Look Like Smalltalk Haskell Erlang Ruby
Flickrrr: Heave to and prepare to be boarded.
Choose “Arrrr!” from the language options in the page footer.
Hacks Make Their Way Into Yahoo Products
Yahoo Hack days are a lot of fun, and some pretty interesting stuff comes out of them. But a persistent question is whether or not they are much more than fun - and if any of these hacks ever make their way into actual products.
The answer, apparently, is yes. Tonight Yahoo is announcing two product feature launches that were originally created at Yahoo Hack Days. - Shop By Color and MapMixer.
MapMixer
MapMixer is a tool that lets users “pin up” their own image over Yahoo Maps. The two images are melded to create a hybrid version that can be saved and viewed privately or made public - users can also adjust opacity and perform other tweaks to make it look just right. The ideal use is to add a very detailed map to the existing, less detailed Yahoo map. The melded map can also be embedded in a non-Yahoo website. See images to right and below for examples.
Google Maps allows various types of annotations, but nothing exactly like this.
Shop By Color
Shop by Color is a new Yahoo Shopping feature that lets users search or narrow results by selecting one of 56 different color hues instead of typing the color in manually.
Like.com, which we’ve covered recently, also allows image searching with non-text as the input. What Yahoo is launching is a lot different, but it is exciting to see image search moving beyond purely descriptive text as the input. Images can be queried directly, whereas previously just the metadata around an image could be queried.
Both were developed at Yahoo!’s Q1 2007 internal hack day on March 23rd. Hayro Kolukisaoglu and Sundeep Tirumalareddy created Shop by Color, and Nimit Maru created MapMixer.
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