ajb{log}

Bubbleshare, my first online photo sharing site is closing its doors on November 15, 2009. I think Bubbleshare was one of the first online photo sharing site that utilized AJAX and did it really well. Founded by Albert Lai, it’s his 2nd startup. The 1st one was MyDesktopNetwork which was sold in 1999. Bubbleshare was acquired by Kaboose Inc for US$ 2.3M in 2007.

Here’s Bubbleshare’s announcement today:

Dear Bubbleshare member –

As of November 15, 2009, Bubbleshare.com will no longer be available and all links to all albums and photos will cease to function (including existing links within emails, blogs, etc). To access your photos in the future you will need to download your photos prior to November 15, 2009.

To save your images to your desktop, simply click the "Download Album" link next to your albums and double click on original photos. Your photos will then be saved to your desktop.

Again, all photos and albums must be removed prior to November 15, 2009. Effective immediately, you will no longer be able to upload any new photos or albums.

We apologize for the inconvenience. It was our pleasure to assist you with your photo sharing needs.
Thank you.

Sincerely,
The Bubbleshare Team

Good luck to the Bubbleshare team. It was really fun using the free online photo sharing site.

Adobe BrowserLab is a new cool web service that helps you test your web pages across a different web browsers and operating systems.

Adobe BrowserLab currently supports Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari on both Mac and Windows XP. Just enter the website’s URL and it will take screenshots of your web page on different browsers and platforms. It displays the result using 1-up (on its own screenshot), 2-up (side by side comparison) and my favorite Onion Skin View (as shown below) where you can quickly pinpoint differences.

One awesome feature of the Onion Skin View is you can use the a slider to fade in/out of each browser screenshot. Pretty cool!

Hopefully Adobe will support more browsers and operating systems in the future.

Google Wave Developer Preview presentation at the Day 2 Keynote of Google I/O. To learn more visit http://wave.google.com

I just logged in the new interface of Google Adwords. The look and feel of the new AdWords is now very much like Google Analytics.

First screenshots of the new Google AdWords interface.

Do you like how it looks like? To fuel the fire, I’m using Google AdWords everyday and I can definitely say that this is a huge improvement. The new ajaxy interface gives it a desktop-app-like feel. I’ve tried loading it in Google Chrome and was blazing fast. The old interface for me was very clunky and slow. So any improvement from that is a jump ahead.

Kudos to the Google AdWords team for making this improvement. It’s really cool!

Yes you are reading that right, Facebook is bigger than Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Turkey combined in terms of population. Facebook has a staggering count of 150 million users according to Mark Zuckerberg (Founder, Facebook).

Country population breakdown:

Turkey – 71,892,808
Canada – 33,515,000
Australia – 21,468,700
New Zealand – 4,280,000
———————-
Total 131,246,508*

That, my friend, is really impressive! It makes you wonder how they keep their systems running smoothly, how they scale up rapidly.

Facebook has more than 10,000 servers and leverages mostly open-source software across a distributed architecture, with thousands of MySQL instances. “It’s almost a new challenge every day,”

Jonathan Heiliger (Vice President of Technical Operations, Facebook)
CNET interview

That’s not the only thing, Facebook has more than 10 billion photos! Some additional stats:

• 2-3 Terabytes of photos are being uploaded to the site daily
• Over one petabyte of photo storage
• Serving over 15 billion photo images per day
• Photo traffic peaks at over 300,000 images served per second

Truth is, impressive is an understatement.

*Source: Wikipedia

People I find interesting

Mona N.

Stupid Blogger (aka Tina)

Cee Bee

Mark Wilson

Paul Buchheit

Lindsey in Love

Zee.

Duncan Riley

Kol Tregaskes

Live4Soccer

People who finds me interesting

Morton Fox

Stupid Blogger (aka Tina)

Lindsey in Love

Yolanda

(jeff)isageek

Carmen

April Buchheit

Cee Bee

Rahsheen ™

Steven Perez

There are tons of interesting people at FriendFeed. But these are the ones I highly recommend. They all have high-quality content on their feed.

The latest stable release of WordPress (Version 2.7) is now available for download! It sports a new interface and it just got a lot more intuitive.

Grab it now here.

At last, Google’s Gmail released a new lab feature today – Tasks. This cool feature directly competes with favorite to-do list services such as Remember The Milk (RTM) and Tada-List. Here’s a quick screenshot of the new feature below:

By the way, I love how unobtrusive it is and how it integrates well with your email. I’m definitely going to start using this over Tada-list which have been my list manager for a long time now. The only advantages (that I know) of tada-list right now are 1) It is stand-alone. No need to login/load your email. 2) It is easily shareable and 3) It is lightweight and it has a better/intuitive interface.

Meanwhile, Remember the Milk has been pushing cool features here and there. Thing is, I’ve never been accustomed to using it everyday, unlike Tada-list. But I’m sure a lot of people use it everyday.

To enable Gmail’s “Tasks”, go to Settings, click the Labs tab. Select “Enable” next to “Tasks” and then click “Save Changes” at the bottom. Then, after Gmail refreshes, on the left under the “Contacts” link, you’ll see a “Tasks” link.

A quick shortcut to your “Tasks” list is G+K (assuming you have keyboard shortcuts enabled) when you are logged in to Gmail.

Google just launched 30 new themes to Gmail.

Some people don’t see it yet. So, try to logout and re-login to see the new Themes at the Settings.

Really cool Gmail team!

BlogRush, a free service that was created to help bloggers get more readers for their blog just decided to shut down.

This is the email from John Reese:

After careful consideration, we have decided to shutdown the BlogRush service.  If you have the widget code on your blog you will need to remove it.

When BlogRush launched in late-2007 it spread like wildfire all over the Web.  Thousands of bloggers were talking about it and the service exploded to become one of the fastest growing free services in the history of the Web.  During the first year of the service it successfully served 3.4 Billion blog post headlines and the BlogRush widget could be found on blogs all over the world; even up until the moment we closed down the service.

BlogRush didn’t grow without its fair share of problems — from security issues to abusive users trying to ‘game’ the system to much lower click-rates than expected.  We also had some problems with trying to fairly control the quality of the network, and in the process made many mistakes in deciding what blogs should stay or go.  All of these issues, ultimately, limited the service’s full potential.

Our team worked very hard to try and build a service that would truly help bloggers of all sizes get free traffic to their blogs.  This was our primary focus.  Not once did we ever try to monetize the service with ads or anything else.  BlogRush never made a single penny in revenue.  We wanted to be able to help our users FIRST and then worry about monetizing the service later.  Unfortunately, the service didn’t work out like we had hoped.  (It happens.)

I want to say “Thank You” to all of the great bloggers that at least gave BlogRush a test to see if it would work for them.  We sincerely appreciate you giving the service a try.

We have received several offers & inquiries about acquiring BlogRush, but we are choosing not to go that route.  While many might think this is crazy, we truly feel it’s the ‘right’ thing to do for our users.  Believe it or not, it’s not always about the money.  In fact, BlogRush will have lost a small fortune when it’s all said and done, and it was by choice.  There were many things we could have done to monetize the service but we wanted to make sure it was going to benefit our users first.

Last but not least I want to say that I hope the failure of this service doesn’t in any way discourage other entrepreneurs from coming up with crazy ideas at 4AM (like I did with this one) and from “going for it” to just try and see if something will work.  Without trying there can be no success.  And as we all know, ideas are worthless without action.  The Web wouldn’t be what it is today without entrepreneurs trying all sorts of crazy ideas.

On behalf of the entire BlogRush team, we wish the best of luck to everyone with their own blogs, ideas, and crazy ventures.

Sincerely,

John Reese

I’ve used BlogRush once but never found it helpful to my blog. It was a cool service though. However, even the coolest service these days cannot survive without a bullet-proof business model.

It’s just sad to see another free service go to the dead pool.

Good luck to John and the rest of the BlogRush team.