And – may be you bear with a german reader who is hardly missing something like TC over here in Germany. There is a big lack of information. And perhaps a disinterest in general if I compare TC with the wannabe TC called deutsche-startups.de – 624k readers to 2906 readers. And thats the biggest one here.

Please write some real articles. Everyone who reads these blog entries are smart enough to think beyond such junior-ish site issues.

AJAX is old hat. That Facebook is using slightly more means nothing. Everyone knows about the effects on pageviews, and everyone knows it does not matter and can only improve user experience and overall satisfaction.

Some blogger did a poll of their readers recently (Problogger?) asking “what are the main reasons you would delete a feed from your feed reader”? The main one was “Too many articles”. I think what they meant was, “too many uninteresting articles.” Obviously, you wouldn’t complain about too many interesting articles. TechCrunch used to have many mostly interesting articles.

Is the bubble really over? Did you run out of new at least half-good startups to talk about?

Actually, it would be really interesting if you could keep a tally of how many startup pitches you receive every day. I think that would be a really interesting look at the growth of new media.

You use gmail right? Can you have someone go back and look at that? I’d love to see this data.

Always improve your product/service to your true customers: your loyal users.

“Will Pageviews Suffer?”
“Will Batman Escape The Penguin’s Death Trap?”
“Will TechCrunch Stop Writing About Stupid Facebook Enhancements?”

Tune in next week to find out. Oh Boy!…

that ’stop writing so much about fb’ really gets on my nerves. There is so much to learn and participate even from an article of ’small intereest’.

So don’t stop writing about fb – take every bit you might think it’s interesting.

For all of you who aren’t interested in such articles – hint, hint – there is a scrollbar on the right hand of your browser.

I would rather read about half-bad new startup with any kind of potential to grow then about ‘look: mamoth x has brand new light bulb on front porch – 5% less energy used!’

I can compare feeling I have reading this with feeling I have reading new Mac OS X Tiger reviews on some other blogs: ‘Oh, they have mirror effect on the screen bottom now!’, ‘Quick file preview too!’. Just to be clear, worked on XP for many years, love how OS X looks, switched to Linux, but quick preview is something simply too common for any other OS making me shocked that they did not have it earlier.

I do have my own company in silent alpha mode, in next two months we will go beta and it is very important for us to get review on TC but if happens that we submit our startup to TC in the same time when facebook changes it’s dark blue header color to lighter one I can’t imagine what will happen.

So, TC guys, do you promisse to spend at least 5 minutes thinking about my startup and if to review it? Even if facebook has 0.005 seconds blackout time on all servers on the same day? Thanks

But ya, I agree. AJAX is more or less a term that defines things happening based on user interaction, rather than the boring technical definition I just spit out.

Agreed it may unfairly hurt their CPM revenues in the near term the more they AJAXify, however we all know FB is looking forward. Again they prove a solid user experience trumps near-term revenue.

Facebook 1. Erick Schonfeld 0

“AJAX”
I understand where you’re coming from. At the last startup where I was, the CEO kept pushing the programmers to “AJAXify” the site more and more. The site ended up looking comically sad.

As a term in a domain language, I think AJAX is useful. It’s more specific than “dynamic” or “javascript.” It’s much shorter than “”they write out ALL of the images in a photo album in the html, and store it inside of a JSON object. When you click next, instead of asking the server for the next picture, with it’s comments etc., it can pull that info directly from the code that has already been loaded in the user’s browser. “”

It’s not actually AJAX. There are no XHR object requests going through from your browser to the server (or the other direction).

If you look at their source, it’s pretty interesting; they write out ALL of the images in a photo album in the html, and store it inside of a JSON object.
When you click next, instead of asking the server for the next picture, with it’s comments etc., it can pull that info directly from the code that has already been loaded in the user’s browser. It’s alot faster this way, since even AJAX calls can take sometime to load.

Additionally, as you’ll notice that it doesn’t take the images any time to load, this is because when you’re browser first loads, it starts loading them all into your browsers memory.

This is all technical crap, but just thought it was worth mentioning. I hate the word AJAX.

The other day, I think you blogged about Facebook removing the word “is” in status messages. That’s not major on any level. That day, I removed TechCrunch from my feed reader. (I got here through a friend mocking TC)

Facebook opening up apps to third-parties: BIG. Facebook using more AJAX on one of their pages: SMALL.

You seem to try to tie this in to a paradigm shifting experiment in a new form of advertising. It’s not. It would be trivial to make the Ad change on every new AJAX load along with the pictures, making it functionally equivalent to a new page (except that it uses much less bandwidth).

So please, I beg of you, for your silent readers and for ex-readers who once enjoyed learning about innovative companies, please stop using Facebook and telling us about it.

Pageviews, while antiquated, are a measure of a site’s ad inventory. Just like ClearChannel’s billboards, they need to know how many display opportunities they can offer to advertisers. But, just like with Billboards, some are in high value locations (times square) and others are not (like 7 Mile and Livernois in Detroit). So Facebook’s move seems more like an admission that much of their inventory such as in its picture viewing is of low value (and costs a lot due to the server loads).

This is a significant movement only because it shows that Facebook is really struggling to attract high-value, premium advertisers to their site (think about it – have you seen a Sprint, GM, or Netflix ad on FB? they’re all top advertisers).

I suspect we’ll begin to see more of this along with more aggressive ad locations (in the newsfeed).

Given Beacon’s difficulty, this is a necessity they’ll have to adapt to.

Let’s face it. If Facebook can’t generate multiple billions in revenue, then it spells doom for the consumer internet space.

For example:
Page 1 – 12:10
Page 2 – 12:12
Page 3 – 12:15
Exit

Time on site would be 5:00 (the session times out after 30 minutes and the last time stamp is not counted).

With Ajax, page views start becoming (even more) irrelevant. Thus, any metric based on them becomes irrelevant. What’s more, tabbed browsing severely curtails the importance of this metric.

If Nielsen is using some other measure, perhaps Ajax won’t present the problem of timestamps, but all of the other issues with time on site still hold true.

It’s probably better to watch:
– Member growth rate
– Member abandonment rate
– Member Satisfaction (as calculated by non-web analytics primary research such as ForeSee or OpinionLabs)
– Visits/Unique Visitor (as a crude measure of share of member)

And no. The answer is not what comscore calls engagement and others call attention.
Like page views, measuring how much time a user spend on a page is not always the right thing. For example, today I spent a few minutes in one of the pages in Delta.com but it wasn’t because it was very interesting. It was because it was organized so bad that I couldn’t find the function I was looking for.

It’s also not the number of uniques. Advertisers are starting to learn that it’s better to get the right 100 users to click on their ad than the wrong 1000.

What we need is a new metric that really shows us how much users are engaged with the site content and brand. How much their interacting with it (aka views, comments, posting, rating, etc).
It’s the sum of all their actions that makes up this new metric.

(for full disclosure, my startup is working just on this kind of stuff. But that’s just shows that I truly believe that this is the way we need to go)