There are good uses of AJAX and bad uses. The Snap Preview Anywhere widget is what I would consider a bad use. I cringe every time I go to TechCrunch now and actually wan’t to visit one of the sites they mention. It’s distracting and unexpected (I hover over a link wanting to click on it and all of a sudden this damn window pops up). Even if I wanted a preview of the site, the thumbnail isn’t big enough to provide anything of value other than a cursory look at the page’s design. I think it’s on its way to becoming the blink tag of the blog world.

Local company Jive Software is readying what appears to be an extremely compelling team collaboration suite called Clearspace. I’ve seen a lot of job postings for Jive in the pdxMindShare newsletter, but never really looked into what they were building. Nino pointed out the the cNet review which has some nice screenshots.

Clearspace looks to be bringing together blogs, wikis, forums, and document sharing into a single product, perfect for teams. Clearspace reminds me a lot of SharePoint, but who likes using SharePoint? I’d love an alternative and this looks like a good one. Sharing information on teams is often a pain. I know my current team at work has come back to email again (yuck) as the primary means of cummunication, even after installing SharePoint. Email is horrible for team communication as messages are easily lost and ignored, and they are often disruptive to workflow. We occasionally use the SharePoint forums, but most of the time people have to send an email pointing to the discussion because it’s just not part of the natural communication flow yet (not entirely SharePoint’s fault).

I’ve long thought Belkin was the home of crappy/cheap electronic accessories that fell apart easily or never worked quite right. This mainly comes from buying a few things in college, when the funds were low and you generally look for the cheapest version of whatever you’re buying. You get what you pay for right? Well, I thought they were improving with their current generation of products including their iPod accessories. I just bought a Nano as a present for my wife’s birthday and needed to get a car adapter for it. We stopped at Target on our way out of town this past week and I quickly grabbed the Auto Kit for $30, it said “Power and Play your iPod in your car,” that was all I needed right? Plus, it had a nice design and was a much better deal than the $70 Monster iCarPlay.

Dare has a good summary of the recent events surrounding web APIs, namely the Google and Del.icio.us moves away from server-side APIs to more Widget based functionality.

We talked about APIs back at the September PDX Web Innovators meeting, and much of that was focused around building mashups off of these services. I think it will be a real bummer if this trend continues, and less mashup-friendly services are offered. I agree with Dare that a site would be stupid to restrict ways to add stuff to your site. But it also strikes me that controlling the data extraction type of API would be a first step towards limiting a site’s viral uptake (though I’m sure Google’s not too concerned with that at this point in their existence).

If you’ve been waiting to try out Firebug for any reason, wait no longer. Skip right past the current release and install the the new 1.0 Beta.

I can describe this new version in one word: Amazing. Firebug will make debugging your web app a joy. No matter if the problem is in the markup, script, CSS, or HTTP request/response, Firebug will help you find it. You’ll actually want to have bugs just so you can use it. Great to see it’s going to stay open source too.

Need to run both IE 6 and 7 in order to test your sites? For that matter, you’ll probably want Firefox 1.5 and at the same time as well. Well, the IE blog announces the release of an Virtual PC hard drive with an authorized Windows XP image and IE 6 installed. They also provide the previously announced free VPC install.

There is a catch, it only lasts 4 months (treating us to a wonderful April fools). But at least it saves me from creating my own VPC hard drive and sitting through a windows install until then.

Interesting to see that at one point, the SmartFilter URL filtering software blocked 3 key Yahoo and JavaScript related blogs (with reason in parens):

Simon Willison (malicious content)

YUI blog (spam urls)

Jack Slocum (spam urls)

I asked for Willison’s and Slocum’s to be whitelisted and the YUI blog started working this week without a request, so maybe Secure Computing updated the blacklist. Is this some conspiracy to suppress the adoption of the Yahoo User Interface Library? (only kidding)

If I had to pick only one application to have installed on my pc, it would be Firefox. I live in it for a good chunk of the day, and am extremely hesitant to install anything else (with the exception of development servers and some programming tools). That’s the power of the web, you can do almost anything in a browser now days.

So, it was with great excitement that I updated to the new Firefox release a couple weeks ago. There are definitely some great features, first and foremost is the spell-checker (getting close to saying goodbye to Word forever) and second , improved tabbing. But there was one subtle change that is a rather large blow to pop-up windows. I don’t mean pop-ups in the bad way, when used for ads. I mean when purposely used for an application, such as the one I’m currently developing where the pop-up allows the user to monitor information while still using the main application. IMO, it would be very awkward to use a div-window within the main document. So, the change?

So, Wesabe launched today. I’ve been waiting for this since I first saw Marc’s post on the Radar. As you may know I run a personal finance site, NetworthIQ, so I’m always on the lookout for related ideas and competition. I’m also happy to discover other people thinking about how to improve the way we manage our money.

Wesabe is a compelling product that I myself will try out. Features such as tips and goals are nice community features that are also slated for NetworthIQ one of these years (though my vision of these is a bit different). I need to still explore the account uploaders, but this could be the best part of Wesabe These uploading features give Wesabe the potential to be a Quicken/Money killer.

By far my most popular post here was the Tracking Web 2.0 recap of all of the various blogs and listing sites. I went back and cleaned it up a bit creating two separate lists. Also, because I’m starting to have fun creating different subscription lists, I created an opml file to kickstart anybody wanting to start following the Web 2.0 world.

• Top Web 2.0 Blogs (opml file)

If you don’t want to worry about adding subscriptions, a great resource for keeping up on Web 2.0 is the Original Signal singlegator site.