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.

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.

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.

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.

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.