Google AJAX Search API

Google has released a AJAX Search API which allows you to embed a search control that displays the results inside of the page using AJAX requests. You can sign up here

Snap : New Search Engine

Snap is something which google might become in near future, as everything is getting AJAX’ed nowadays ;). As the title suggests, It’s indeed a marvelous way of searching. With some of the top programmers behind the project, there is no wonder it does so well. Most of the menu and search features are AJAX enabled and is interesting to use and has shortcut keys feature.
Snap’s another great feature is Snap widgets

• Snap Coupon Widget : Snap automatically coupons / special offers relavant to the search result.
• Snap Navigation/Company Widget : Snap’s first result on a company or navigation search will be a 360° view.
• Snap Map Widget : Typing the Zip code of a city returns a map.
• Snap Weather Widget : Typing the Zip code of a city with keyword “weather” gets you the weather report.

Yahoo! Widget 3.1 is Now Available

Yahoo! Widget Engine includes these Widgets, and more:
• Picture Frame • Yahoo! Weather Widget • Yahoo! Notepad Widget • Day Planner • Yahoo! Search Widget • Yahoo! Maps Widget • Yahoo! Stock Ticker • Yahoo! Mail Checker • Yahoo! Contacts Widget and more..

ScanR : Make your phone acess PC !

MobileCrunch profiles this interesting company ScanR, a new free service that allows you to take a camera phone picture (or any digital picture) and turn it into a searchable PDF file.
ScanR supports 3 applications, scanning, copying and faxing of documents via your mobile device. Using ScanR is simple. Just take a photo of the document and send it to doc@scanr.com or wb@scanr.com. The quality of the images and services is impressive.

scanR is a powerful service that automatically:

• cleans photos of whiteboards and documents
• tags documents with extracted keywords
• delivers the results as PDF files or faxes

Record a web-browsing session using neato AJAX-powered “web recorder”

This is an application which feels like it must surely have a useful purpose. I’m not totally sure what that use would be though. Perhaps recording a demo or walk-through of a website.

From the site:

TAPEFAILURE is a “history recording tool.” What this means is that anyone can record a browsing session using TAPEFAILURE’s recorder, then save it, and share it with others. Each recorded session can be played back virtually perfectly through our playback tool; as long as you know the tape ID or have a link, you can view your recorded session over and over again.

Overall, the site is attractively designed, very simple to get started, and seems like it could be really useful. They should include a couple of example recordings with usage scenarios — the kind of thing that marketing people love to put all over the place, and probably the programmers think is totally obvious.
We did have a problem trying to record something on Ajax Blog — (got a “Precondition Failed” message from our web server).
Some issues I noticed:

• No way to Preview or Play the recording before you Save it.
• Loading Digg didn’t work correctly when recording (kept on reloading the home page)
• Sometimes it felt a little bit slow

Overall, really neat concept, nicely executed, feels like a toy until we figure out the business model.

Oh yeah, and the AJAX functionality is pretty slick — the application does what it promises smoothly, without any downloads or additional steps needed by the user. It would be neat to see what the database info looks like to do the replays.

Check it out: TAPEFAILURE

(Via Digg)
What would you use it for?

How much attention have you paid lately to securing your AJAX application?

A good introductory 2600-style article warning about possible security vulnerabilities that using AJAX may lead to. Never trust user input, especially if it is coming via AJAX and you are not authenticating every request.

One good suggestion in the article is using sequential authentication tokens to make sure each request is legitimate. This adds more overhead to the overall AJAX experience, but consider the potential problems you could encounter if you allow actions to happen on your server that you are not properly sanitizing.

Some popular applications I checked are hardened in such a way that they use some form of random sequence numbering: the server tells it, encoded, what the application should use as a sequence number when sending the next command. This is mostly obscured by Javascript and a pain in the ass to dissect — but not impossible.And as you may have already noted: if there is improper authentication on the location called by the XmlHttpRequest-object, this would leave a possibility for malicious purpose. This is exactly where we can expect weaknesses and holes to arise.There should be proper authentication in place. At all times.

Read the entire article: AJAX: Is your application secure enough?

(Via Slashdot, where there are some good comments on the article as well.)

NetJaxer

NetJaxer is a free and easy
way to integrate a users favorite Web 2.0 apps like Gmail, TadaList, Digg, Writely, Kiko, iOutliner, Meebo, financial sites, and other Ajax based web
programs right into Windows. They can create desktop, tray, and quick launch
icons. These applications can easily be used with our custom browser.

NetJaxer is a free program for use with Windows 98/ME/2000/XP. You can listen to the audio interview by clicking on the Podcast options in box in the upper right hand corner of our press release.

CrazzyEgg : Clicks Monitoring

Crazzyegg, is one of the most interesting Web 2.0 applications I have ever seen. To say, it is a simply a click stats monitoring service but an inteligent one. The good folks at crazzyegg let me have an account for their (Beta) service.
Unlike other stats monitoring service, Crazzyegg gives an clear idea of the most sensitive part of a monitored page per session. Each session can be of upto 1,00,000 clicks and 13 days. When we open a specific session the monitored page is shown with few crazzyegg tools and options.
I very much like the Heatmap view of a page, It is like looking at a geographical map of our webpage .

• The heatmap shows area of total clicks, the higher the click are is more red. Apart from the Heatmap view the dashboard has the overlay and list view.
• Over lay is shown shows coloured blocks, the colours of the boxes changes per increase in clicks. This is the dashboard view of the actual page, Sreejith.NET .
• In List view, a simple list of total clicks is shown.

Through our simple tool, content providers have access to user input, and can use this information to tweak aspects of a web page, test the results, and then tweak again based on the user information they continually receive from Crazy Egg.

Using this ongoing optimization process, combined with A/B testing of similar pages, the insight provided by the Crazy Egg tool is the key component to helping you improve how your site works for you and your visitors.

MyToday : AJAX & Mobile RSS aggregator

MyToday is a public RSS aggregator providing the latest news, views and content on a topic-based collection of feeds, called Dailies. Now it may seem like yet another RSS aggregator but one of the things it features is WML/WAP version of the page (ofcourse its not AJAXed )

MyToday.com is a public RSS aggregator providing the latest news, views and content on a topic-based collection of feeds, called Dailies. It is simultaneously available on the web through an Ajax client and on the mobile phone in WML.

Personal aggregators like bloglines.com, my.yahoo.com, live.com etc. give the users an empty plate which needs to be filled with feeds which the user knows about. This approach ignores the fact that users in general are interested in a subject but not necessarily aware about quality feeds and sources in that area. A public aggregator like MyToday.com depends on editorial expertise to choose and pick the best sources in a subject. This way, the reader can get going without any sweat.

The Authors/Creators, have posted a nice long list of how it is better than other popular readers and aggregators compared to MyToday. But I do have a feeling that the design could have been a bit more better.

Rollyo: Roll your own search

Rollyo is an amazing search utility which offers searches direct from the sources they need. Create a Search roll, with upto 25 URL’s and search a word you want to search. Tools include Firefox search plugin, Rollyo Searchbox on your websites and mailing of created search rolls. The webmasters do like Firefox a lot ;), the search is Powered by YAHOO! SEARCH.

Rollyo is the fast, easy way to create personal search engines using only the sources you trust.

WHY ROLLYO?

Rollyo puts the power of Yahoo! Search in your hands, by giving you the tools to create your own personal search engines - with no programming required. All you have to do is pick the sites you want to search, and we’ll create a custom search engine for you.

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