Charts.fm – fun with mashups…

few weeks ago I’ve been building this charts-based mashup together with a friend of mine.  since we now even managed to get some decent frontend-graphics from blackjune, I tought I might as well pitch it here before christmas…  

Charts.fm is based on playlists & user-votings of more than 2600 radio-stations (mostly US, although there’s [...]

Feedback Army – usability testing for the rest of us

just discovered Feedback Army, a service offering dirt-cheap website-usability-testing based on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. how does it work? you post the URL of the site tested alongside several open questions (f.e. “Describe in your own words: what’s the main purpose/functionality of the website?”, “Are there any browser-related issues, like f.e. slow responses?”) – Feedback Army automagically [...]

The Big Switch – switched off

one of my current reads is The Big Switch by Nicholas Carr (whose blog roughtype is a recommended read – and the place where I sponged off a advance reading-copy – thanks!). the book is all about utility-computing, drawing parallels between the surge of the electric grid in the early 1900’s and the rise of [...]

more iPhone webapps: Amazon.com

Amazon’s the latest iPhonized webapp I accidentally ran into… there are some flaws though…f.e. while you can certainly buy products while on-the-go, it’s not possible to maintain your wishlist for future consideration. deep-links to products on the amazon-mainpage aren’t redirected to the mobile version, which I think they should.
interesting that – though the iPhone does [...]

roundup: Future of Web Apps 2007 / Digg to support OpenID

fowa2007 – day #1
11.40 – Simon Wardley on commoditizing of IT: “there’s no sense whatsoever in setting up your own IT-infrastructure. maintaining your own web- or database-servers is what we call yak-shaving“. Zimki offers “pre-shaved yaks”, meaning a fully hosted, server-side javascript environment for rapid application development (not to forget Amazon S3 & EC2, which [...]

roundup for 2007-01-08 … SecondLife / Yahoo! Go

endless.com – Amazon’s speciality shopping site for handbags and shoes is the eCommerce giant’s answer to niche-site like.com – though it lacks adavanced features like visual search.
two years ago, Technorati was one of the first sites to introduce the concept of tagging (aka ‘folksonomy’, a term relating to taxonomy). a good time for an update [...]

Amazon Unbox

while Apple is almost certainly quite likely going to announce feature-movie downloads for the iTunes Music Store on next tuesdays special event, Amazon is first off the mark by having launched their movie download-service Unbox.com tonight. Unbox offers TV-episodes for $2 USD and movies in the range from $8 to 20$ for download, movies are [...]

Amazon EC2 – (expensive) servers ondemand

Amazon broke todays biggest news (via TechCrunch) by announcing EC2 (‘Elastic Comute Cloud’) – a hosting service allowing customers to instantly add virtual servers on-demand.
using a locally executed java-tool, system-administrators can configure individual server-images (nicked ‘AMI’, Amazon Machine Image) or customize default-templates. currently there is no definite info on which operating systems will be supported, [...]