A time-line of acquisitions by Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft

Very interesting time-line of all acquisitions by Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft in the past few years. Quite evidently the pace has picked up in the last couple of years. It would have been interesting to see the size of the acquisition as well, maybe each of the bubbles could vary in size based on the $s paid for it... None the less, this is quite interesting in itself...

User proofing AJAX

Nice article on A List Apart about handling errors in AJAX applications. From the article:

Ajax is handy because it avoids needless browser behavior such as page reloads, but it can also be dangerous because it avoids useful browser behavior like error handling. Gone are the “Server not found” error messages and that familiar escape hatch, the Back button. When Ajax circumvents useful behavior, we have to make sure we replace it as well as we can.

Don't play around with simple, says Jeremy...

"I'm tired of AJAX being used as a replacement for quality design." This seems to be the message that is coming out of the disastrous re-design exercise of Yahoo!TV. New Yahoo! designs seems to be forsaking usability for the sake of visual design and AJAX coolness. Somehow I feel we are going to see more such user outbreaks in the coming months...