I have recently added a comics & photography page on the website in the iLike section. Do visit and let me know how you find it. The photographs are coming from my flickr stream. Let me know if I deserve to buy a dSLR. tsk tsk...
In addition to this, I have also started another blog on tumblr, which you can visit here. After about a month or so on tumblr, I like it a lot and find it very easy to share videos, quotes and pictures from it. Its like twitter on steroids for me. Check it out.
With its massive growth (50 million tweets a day) and adoption, twitter is becoming a part of our lives. More and more people and companies are flocking to the bird website, chirping about what's happening in there world.
Twitter has adopted a lot of ideas that worked for Google and made its service easy to use for all kinds of users. The very concept of tweeting (and retweeting), simple user interface, mobile & SMS integration, the API and the geo-location features make Twitter an attractive offering to users. Add to this the tens of thousands of developers writing desktop, web and mobile applications around twitter, make it more and more ubiquitous in our lives.
Over the past year or so, a lot has been said about the real time search problem and how twitter provides a perfect solution to this. Millions of twitter users are generating sweet 140 characters of content at a time. Content that is both fresh and spammy. The latter can be corrected, but its the former which makes twitter chirp and valuable.
Google's ranking algorithms can't take this real time information into consideration so quickly and efficiently. The very algorithm that took Google to the pinnacle of search engines is now becoming a hindrance in providing real time search results. The factors that Google considers before throwing out results for a particular user query, cannot effectively categorize and manage the burst of information that twitter users provide every day. Google's launch of the Google Buzz and including tweets into its search results is an attempt to recover some lost ground in this area.
All that remains to be seen is how twitter as a business can survive and grow. Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. Its revenue comes from showing advertisements when this information is displayed.
Maybe search & ads can be an answer to Twitters search for revenues as well. But will this googling result in a chirping bird or a fail whale for twitter remains to be seen...
How do we define success? Ben tells us that the definition of success is not about wealth, fame or fortune. Its about the shining eyes.
Find below an amazing talk given by Benjamin Zander. It taught me a lot in a mere 20 minutes than all I have learned till date from my education, my books, music and you.
It teaches us about passion, leadership & motivation.
It talks about contributions and conversations.
About thinking big. About loss and dreams.
And, most important thing he tells us is to make somebody's eyes shine today. The true measure of your effect on this world and everybody around you is the shine in there eyes, and nothing else!
"Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes."
- Oscar Wilde
"My doctor gave me two weeks to live. I hope they're in August."
- Ronnie Shakes
"The conception of two people living together for twenty-five years without having a cross word suggests a lack of spirit only to be admired in sheep."
- Alan Patrick Herbert
"Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first."
- Mark Twain
"Ask your child what he wants for dinner only if he's buying."
The draw to the FIFA Football World Cup 2010 South Africa was recently announced. The football world cup is the biggest sporting event in the world and is happening on the african continent for the first time. For a complete coverage, check out the links below :-
After the draw many football experts have thrown there hat in the ring and predicted the outcome, based solely on perception & the draw. Here are my predictions for the world cup :-
Not exactly the bundle created by Thomas Friedman or Arianna Huffington for Google Reader, but here is a list of blogs and websites I follow/visit on a regular basis.
The list of successful products on the web is huge, but what will be the next big thing?
Given above is the table of Top 10 sites for the month of October 2009 in terms of unique visitors (Source : compete.com). Lets see if we can get some pointers from this table.
Google, Yahoo, MSN, Live, Wikipedia provide answers to questions, give information, provide relevance and authenticity and are a generic starting point for our online endeavors.
Facebook is our online network of friends. Youtube solves the need of video in our lives. Amazon is a bookstore and ebay is an auction house, only bigger, better and far more democratic.
And of course, Microsoft had a bigger hand than most in making all of this possible.
You can go on and map most of the items on the first list with what we do, or used to do in our daily lives before it became digital, networked, interconnected and mobile.
However, books still remain in a cocoon. You can get them delivered to your door step, read or write one online, but for the most part, books still remain analog and disconnected from the rest of what we are up to.
The wealth of information and the strong foothold books have in our lives cannot be ignored.
eBook readers, especially Kindle and Nook as well as things like Google Books, are steps in the right direction. For example, the need to have books in the traditional medium of paper is going to go away soon. The barrier to entry (actually holding a book or having access to it) is going to dissolve.
Information already available in existing books will become more and more accessible. Contents from books will start showing up in our searches. Authority on subjects and topics will become referenced. But most important of all, the true potential of this traditional and age old habit of human beings will be brought to the forefront, just like search, music, entertainment and news.
This place is only going to become hotter, more competitive and digitally networked as we move ahead.
But what about Newspapers & TV? Lets discuss next time...
The mobile/cell phone is the hot thing right now as far as software and hardware is concerned. The recent spate of high profile launches by Google (G1 and Android), Apple (iPhone & SDK), Palm (Pre & WebOS), Blackberry (Storm) and Nokia (X6) tells the action is in this market. With the success of the App Store and the launching of similar channels by Nokia, Palm, Blackberry and Google, this has also become the hottest platform for application developers and service providers right now. And we all know that the success of a device or a platform is almost entirely dependent on the number of third party developers/partners it has. One more thing that makes it attractive is the ease of development and deployment.
Many of the current computer accessories and gadgets that are increasingly being found in our houses do not stand a chance to survive if the hardware manufacturers and perhaps the network operators can handle this growth properly and provide proper service.
Some gadgets the cell phone can replace (or has done that already):-
0. Your landline or wired phone
1. GPS devices
2. Digital Cameras
3. Video Cameras and Webcams
4. Netbooks
5. iPods and other music players
6. Kindle and other eBook readers
7. USB Drives
8. Wireless routers and hotspots
9. Remote control, smart keys and your wallet
(Left anything from this list? Let me know through comments below)
One issue with the cell phone is that connectivity to your computer depends on proprietary hardware and varies by the manufacturer. Also while the battery life on these gadgets is improving day by day, carrying around a charger is still an issue. Hopefully we will see a standardization on the USB as wired and Bluetooth/WiFi as the wireless means of communication between the phone and the computer. And charging by USB will be icing on the cake.
Like many of you, I carry a smartphone (Nokia 5800) in my pocket. Whether you have a Nokia, a Blackberry, an iPhone or any other smartphone in your pocket, you will find these applications useful :
[I have purposefully left out games and social networking related apps here.]
Google provides three of the five applications in my list, but Microsoft's Mail for Exchange simply rocks. Another interesting fact is that although Opera has very little share in the regular browser market, it has created a following in the mobile browser segment.
Some gripes though:
1. Would really like a Google Reader application, better still if it is integrated in the Gmail application. Also, the Gmail team should really provide a proper resolution icon, as currently it is the worst icon on my Nokia 5800 menu screen.
2. Opera should provide seperate applications for touchscreen and regular smartphones as I find the buttons too small for fast and accurate use on my touchscreen Nokia 5800.
3. Maps loading and routing can be improved a thousand times.
4. Mail for Exchange rocks, but when will we have the capability to read HTML emails properly? And folders support? Maybe RSS can be added here as well, like in Outlook 2007.
