The Next Web

Regator, the super popular blog directory and feed reader, is launching a pro version of their iPhone app.

Australian co-founders, Scott Lockhart and Kimberley Turner, say the app is currently in the Apple approval process but ” is expected to be approved any day”.

The new Regator Pro will be priced at $2.99 (USD) with a five-day launch sale price of $1.99.

It includes all the features of the free version (see below) but also gives users the ability to personalize their experience by saving their favourite blogs, topics, and posts for fast, easy access. In addition, this premium version supports in-app video viewing and adds popular Regator.com features such as Blog Monitor and Related Posts.

Both the light and premium versions allow users to:

• Browse posts from more than 500 topics as diverse as beekeeping, geology, indie music, pop culture, job hunting, or basketball.
• Search Regator’s archive of over four million high-quality posts.
• See real-time trends to get an up-to-the-minute, spam-free look at exactly what bloggers in any niche are writing about right now.
• View the most popular blog posts on your favourite topic.
• Keep up with the newest blog posts, updated every few seconds.
• Read the full text of posts on the original source blog.
• Share posts via email, Facebook, or Twitter

It’s great to see a blog aggregating startup trying to monetise through adding value rather than plonking advertising between content. It’s also great to see them so heavily focused on ensuring the original content providers get as much traffic returned to them as possible

No doubt these are just two reasons why Regator has been, and will continue to be, so successful.

Almost all of today’s so called Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) heavily make use of a technology named Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript plus XML.)

Essentially Ajax provides a mechanism to exchange data with remote servers and place incoming bits into a page without the need to refresh the page.

This helped making web pages look and feel much more like desktop applications.

It dramatically expanded the web as an application platform and is a cornerstone of many service we’ve gotten so used to. (Imagine for a minute how Facebook would feel if it would reload the entire page on each click you make!)

Technically Ajax leverages a programing interface of modern web browsers exposed through an internal object named XMLHttpRequest.

Taking into account how much we take Ajax-enabled web sites for granted these days, and how much we value the importance of standards for its evolution, it’s quite intriguing that the XMLHttpRequest details have never been an official W3C standard, yet.

This might change soon: On November 19th, the W3C officially changed the status for the XMLHttpRequest specification to “Last Call”.

According to the W3C guidelines final comments will now be accepted up to December 16th, 2009 before the document will likely become an official W3C Recommendation.

We’ll keep you posted!

With only 33 days left till Christmas, don’t you wish you could send a greeting card or maybe a gift to your favourite twitterers? Well, now you can, thanks to SendSocial.com that launched today!

SendSocial allows you to send parcels to your friends on Twitter, without ever knowing their address. You can also use the service to send gifts even if the only info you’ve got is their e-mail address. The service notifies the intended recipient that someone wants to send them something via a tweet or email. The recipient chooses whether they want to accept the parcel, and in case they do they fill in their delivery address. This piece of information is stored encrypted on SendSocial. All the sender gets is a barcode address, which he prints and attaches to the parcel. Afterwards the sender notifies the couriers that are working with SendSocial (right now their only courier partner is myHermes) and they collect and deliver the package.

So do you have a “naughty” and a “good” list on your Twitter? It’s time to make use of them!