ajb{log}: learn something new each day

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.

Gmail just pushed an update to their rich-text editor adding a bunch of emoticons.

Pretty cool!

–aj

Friendfeed launched today a cool beta feature, Friendfeed Real-time. Here’s a quick tip on how to load Friendfeed Real-time on your Firefox sidebar:

1) Add this to your bookmark http://friendfeed.com/realtime?embed=1

2) Right-click the bookmark

3) Properties

4) Tick the “Load this bookmark in the sidebar”

5) You’re done!

It should look like the screenshot below

Now you get the best of both worlds in FriendFeed. The standard view and real-time view at the same time.

Enjoy!

I love Last.fm but Favtape is really one cool alternative. Favtape can play your “loved” songs at Last.fm in sequence! A feature that is not yet offered at Last.fm free.

So what is Favtape anyway? Favtape is a music sharing and discovery service. You can mix tapes, browse and buy music in a very simple but slick interface. If you’ve been a long time Last.fm user with lots of “loved” songs, Favtape is the best service for you.

Favtape can also search for your bookmarked songs at Pandora (US only).

Here’s my DJ Tiesto mix tape.

Enjoy and have a great weekend!

Here are some options for minor improvements for the Cleaner FriendFeed Beta stylish style.

Here they are:

Extends the left sidebar’s width to fit your rooms:

#sidebar
{
width:160px !important;
}

Make changes to the font size of your rooms, friend grouping links to your preference:

#sidebar a:link, #sidebar a:visited
{
font-size: 12px !important;
}

Highlights the likes background to light pink

.likes
{
background-color: #FFEFE8 !important;
}

A screenshot of how a post item should look like after the update:

* Highlights likes with light yellow
* Highlights friends comments with light yellow
* Highlights your comments with powder blue
* Regular font color (gray) on comments from non-friends

jQuery.com pulled the Javascript Rockstar graphic responding quickly to user feedback.

The jQuery team left an Easter egg on the website as a token of appreciation. Just enter the famous Konami code to view it.

Hint, it’s really cool!

Personally, I say it looks good. Not great, but good. Some jQuery users however don’t like the redesign. Get the scoop on jQuery’s blog.

Bret Taylor, Paul Buchheit and the FriendFeed team broke the two month silence today launching the newly redesigned FriendFeed. VentureBeat spotted and reported this four days ago.

New features includes:

Friend List
Friend lists enable you to organize your friends into groups, get updates from your family separately from your coworkers, or you can add an acquaintance to a list and remove them from your home feed.

Best of day and Best of week Summaries
A “best of” page for a friend lists shows you the most popular entries among people in the list for the day/week.

Enhanced Photo Posting
You can now upload photos with your posts. The photo uploader lets you select and upload multiple files at once with no additional downloads required.

New sidebar link, favorite friends, groups, rooms and a lot more.

Head to http://beta.friendfeed.com and see the cool new FriendFeed!

Related articles:

• Spotted: FriendFeed Beta - coming soon
• FriendFeed summaries coming soon

I just got my free Adobe Flex 3 Book courtesy of Adobe. This is going to be another addition to my knowledge as a newbie in Flex.

What I got was a pocket guide, really small but packed with newbie information to get you started and most of all get you up to speed on Adobe Flex 3.

You can also grab a free book here and expect 3 weeks for shipping. Mine came 2.5 weeks via FedEx.

Thanks Adobe!