On the 8^th of May, I was drawn to chatter about a new hangout for Indian tweeters: #indiatwits at irc.freenode.org. I decided to give it a shot and see what the fuss was all about. Things just snowballed from there (get the whole time line over at the wiki), and I spent a whole week with minimal Twitter activity; like one-to-two tweets a day minimal. In that time, I learnt a few things which interested me.

My view vs. Their view

When I asked that question out on Twitter, the reply I got was “for lifestreaming”. At first I thought that I used it for the same purpose, but as it turned out, I don’t. My usage of Twitter is to “think out loud”, to put it in the simplest terms. Whenever a thought strikes me that makes me think about how others perceive the same thing, I tweet it. May that be a news article, or a service feature. I (usually) get replies from people which either reinforces the thought, or gives me new angles to understand it better. Either way, it’s a positive interaction.

People use Twitter as an IM service (which is what the IRC channel was initially supposed to cut out), and even more use it as a tracker of their daily activity (“I’m going to bed”). Very few use it to actually enhance their ideas and thoughts. Twitter is perceived as the 2.0 version of IRC, a room full of people who are always listening and one return key away from a conversation. Hence, the moment we (about 7-8 regulars) switched to #indiatwits, our Twitter activity went down because we had our outlet — it didn’t matter it wasn’t Twitter, because that’s what Twitter is for us. Unconventional uses of services always make the creators happy, because it’s being used in ways they never thought it would. But this is one case where I think the founders will hope people use it only for conventional means. The heavy use is what cripples their servers. The service architecture was built to be used in a certain way, and is unfortunately a little too rigid to cushion itself against quakes.

Twitter isn’t new

Like I said, Twitter is the Web 2.0 version of IRC. Internet Relay Chat was the geekfest of the early Internet. I still can’t put a finger on the “why”, but the whole scriptable nature of the protocol left the creative opportunities limitless. The first thing I did after joining the channel was write a bot to handle administration. The geek/programmer in me immediately took over.

The same is how I see Twitter: A platform for endless creativity. It is amazing how much you can do with 140 character messages¹, and how much scope it opens up in front of you. You just have to allow yourself to see it. You can write “bots” to perform special functions based on what you tweet, or integrate other services controlled by tweets (or direct messages if it’s private). Do you see where I’m going with this?

I hailed Twitter as the “new way to communicate” and stay in touch. Obviously I was wrong (with memory of my IRC days long gone), and seeing it in this new light again opens up a lot of avenues that I’d like to check out. But that’s only for a programmer. The normal person will still use Twitter for conversation, lifestreaming, or whatever they’ve been using it for all this time. It’s amazing how something that’s so old, can still change the way you look at the web and its possibilities.

I’ll start with the punch-line: Decentralisation is not the solution to scale a service like Twitter. Those who suggest it are not getting the bigger issue. Twitter is not about the service, but the experience. Its ability to initiate conversation between people is amazing. It’s been defined in many ways. Some call it micro-blogging, while others call it life-streaming. In fact, Those who call it a social “network” are not that far off. Twitter leads the services supported by the lifestreaming aggregators, which shows that socially, it’s the most used on the web.

Twitter, the evolution

I see Twitter as a natural successor to weblogs. One that cuts out the noise and actually focuses on the point at hand. You don’t need to specifically go to a person’s blog to see their updates, because those updates come to you. You don’t need to read through long posts of 400+ words to understand what they are trying to say - they come to you in 140 characters or less. You don’t need to fill out forms to give your comment on what they said - an @reply is all it takes. It is moderately analogous to social networks because your Twitter page acts like a normal “profile” on sites such as Facebook. The only difference being that your profile changes with every update, and because these updates are spontaneous people always get the “correct” view of you. No pretence, no put-ons to get more people to connect and show off your network of “friends”. Here, followers follow you if they want to (similar to feed subscribers) but don’t get in your way unless you follow them back. People can see who you follow and judge your interests from that list as well. Twitter truly brings the human factor back into digital social networks today.

Decentralising such a simple yet effective concept will not only reduce it’s value, it will effectively kill it. People might argue that with Twitter’s scaling issues it will actually be a welcome change from the downtimes and freedom from dependence on fragile servers. As has been noted, there is no relation between a solution to Twitter’s scaling issue and decentralisation. Social networks in general might even if broken apart and spread throughout the Internet, but Twitter won’t.

One main reason is that, like I said, Twitter is the natural successor to weblogs. It is so because it brings all the conversation together, instead of having people jump from page to page, link to link to keep up with the discussion. If Twitter were to get decentralised, we would be going back to that same model. It would take one party - like a Friendfeed or Socialthing - to aggregate the different conversation feeds and make sense of it all. Or the individual person would need to subscribe to the feed of each person he wants to follow (which is what we do with blogs today). My point is, a decentralised Twitter is what we left behind 2 years ago. Decentralised Twitter is what Tumblogs (kinda) are¹.

Being a part of Twitter is like being in a room always filled with people you want to listen to and talk to. If someone shouts at you from the other corner, you can still hear it, because you’re in the same room. Decentralising it will be the equivalent of putting each person in their own room, and having the people you want to talk to on conference on your phone. It’ll make it easier to be in your room, but harder to follow conversations.

Laissez faire

Twitter needs optimisations to scale properly, which are constantly being done in the background. The system is so large, that by the time one problem is solved, a couple of more pop-up. You’d think getting acquired and being boosted by servers like Google’s and Yahoo’s would be the answer to their problems, but I hope they don’t get bought.

Twitter is perfect the way it is, downtimes and all. Use their APIs to pull your data out or push them in if you’re are worried about losing out when they bonk. It’s an awesome service the way it is. I’d say just leave them alone and let them do their thing.

As our Internet devices get smaller and more powerful with time, the natural course of action would be to leverage their mobility and handy-ness to become more socially aware. The services we have (like Twitter and Pownce) at present rely on manual updates from people regarding their activities. What we need is a smart system which understands your presence, and uses it to leverage your social networking. The one who gets there first, will definitely benefit. Techcrunch gives the example of Fon11, which is currently in alpha. Screenshots look promising, and it seems to be going in the correct direction.

We already know that iPhone-ers are the majority of the mobile Internet users, so developers don’t need to worry about a new service of this kind being used. What they should worry about is adding the basic features that might help people share their presence with others. This could include GPS tracking, or wi-fi goodness.

Social networks have to break out of the box here. It’s ironical how a “social” network today involves people sitting in front of their computers, away from the same people that they’re checking up on. There is only so much market for a one that connects people “on-line”. People today are much more inclined to meet others in person, rather than post messages and carry on conversations on their wall. Sure, it makes sense when the two people stay far apart, but for friends in the same locality or city (like most college students), it seems almost absurd. Just like one uses the phone to call up the person living a few houses away and not IM them, it’s the next evolutionary step for networks to show more presence information to friends in the neighbourhood — on their mobile devices.

Privacy and compatibility issues

With great features (and powers!), comes great responsibilities. The privacy and security features of such networks will have to be spot-on, and ever-unfailing. One glitch, and a user might end up revealing their presence to people they didn’t want to let know. This will also be Christmas for stalkers and the likes. Hence, everybody needs to be very careful when using devices and services in such a way. A white-list approach rather than a black-list one will definitely help.

The second biggest concern is that of compatibility. The iPhone comes with GPS tracking cellular triangulation (thanks Deepak), and I gather that Blackberry does too (triangulation/GPS, not sure). There will have to be a standard established (or maybe just a common pipe through Google Maps for everyone) so that the services work seamlessly on all devices, regardless of their make, model or software. It’ll be sad to see a IE vs. Firefox vs. Safari vs. Opera in the mobile market, because it’s the people who ultimately suffer.

The providers’ concern would be a way to generate revenue using their mobile network. Phone screens aren’t really adequate for displaying advertisement alongside content, which means that they will have to come with new and innovative ways of displaying non-intrusive advertisement. That is, if they plan to keep things free. I don’t want to think of paying to be part of a social network.

This seems to be the ultimate foray market for the existing players. With news of people burning out on social networks¹, this is probably what it will take to get them connecting again. This is a whole different way of integrating social networks into our lives — putting the “social” back into social-network.

Writing quality content and democratic diversion of web traffic towards that content are two different things. When the average informed netizen goes to look for ‘good’ content to read, stay up-to-date, there are very limited places they go to. Digg, Reddit and Techmeme are just some of those places. The alternative is their feed readers, but we’ll come to that later. The problem with the names above are that they’re pretty much always populated with content from the same blogs and journalism sites — like Techcrunch, Valleywag, Gizmodo — the ‘big’ names. It’s like small start-ups competing against the Microsoft’s and Google’s of the information world, only without the resources and funding.

If you’re thinking that it just takes time and good content for a small-time blog to hit it big, then name me 15-20 which have. Out of the number of blogs there are, 15-20 isn’t a big number. If you can, I don’t want to start to imagine the amount of time and the kind of promotion they would have taken to reach where they have. The whole point of the people power and interactive movement of the web (or Web 2.0 as we call it) was to make it easier for a person to form his/her identity — be it through social networks, blogs, or any other way. Unfortunately, the people who got there first are the ones who’ve benefited the maximum. Fits the analogy with Microsoft, doesn’t it?

Brilliant idea, pathetic execution

We saw this first with MSN Spaces and Messenger. The ‘gleam’ when someone updated their Space, prompting their friends to click through and hence, effortless promotion. In perfect Microsoft fashion, things were kept locked to in-house services. Cut to the present, and we see an almost similar thing with Google Reader. The only difference is you’re not limited to Blogger, and there were a million shouts of privacy complaints when it was launched. But the feature/concept itself is probably what we need to get the ball rolling.

Susceptible to abuse, the feature is the best way to promote your blog. Google Reader is one of the top three most used (online) feed readers, and hence, the best place to reach out to the people. If they like what they see, they can automatically subscribe (permalinks point to your feed when the feed is un-subscribed) to your feed, adding to the count. But there’s a catch here too … not every self-promoted blog has good content.

I think what we need is a social-news aggregation service, which consciously blocks submissions from blogs which rank in the top 10 of blog-ranking lists, to give the smaller ones a chance. Littl’uns is (was?) an awesome attempt, but suffering from lack of promotion (chicken and the egg, anyone?) and a submission/rating system. Attempts like bVibes however, show how anything not started by an already big player in this field is bound to disappoint.

No short-term solution

There is nothing that will immediately open the doors for the less popular blogs to reach more people. Quality control and self-promotion aside, the most you can do is participate as much as you can in other blogs, and build credibility — but that’s not anything you don’t know. We also need a boost from the established players. Maybe a Digg category, change in algorithm, or a separate service altogether — anything will do. I think it’s about time we differentiated between popularity and quality, regardless of the amount of time.

The last month has seen a couple of big privacy related issues being raised by the people against two of the biggest companies on the Internet today—Facebook, and Google. Facebook’s beacon program, which aims to bring updates on people from around the web to their profiles (while raking in revenue for Facebook for promoting these services), couldn’t have had a worse start to it’s lifespan. Facebook made the mistake of making the service an opt-out, instead of opt-in. The fact that Facebook receives your actions even if you opt-out out of the feature didn’t sit well with consumers as well as advertisers alike. Digging deeper, people found yet more reasons to be worried about.

Facebook responded to all this (though not as quickly as people had hoped) by making it an opt-in feature, and allowing people to quickly opt-out of all the advertisers. Combined with an apologetic Zuckerberg, things seem to have reached a decent balance.

Google on the other hand, didn’t face so much of a ‘crisis’, as a privacy annoyance. Google Reader started sharing your ‘shared’ items with all the people (who use Google Reader) in your GTalk contact list. There is no opt-in, opt-out, or limiting options. So you’re in, and you stay in. Google offered a rather political reply to all the complains, and that was it. That’s much worse than what Facebook did, but since ‘feeds’ are not something many users are aware of, forget about subscribing to them in a reader, it didn’t cause so much of a stir.

What, me worry?

Even though so much has happened, it’s all nice and calm now. Bloggers are no longer writing flame posts, analysts aren’t predicting their demise from popularity, and I’m writing about it. Anyone who thinks that moves and decisions like these are the reason companies fall, needs to get their pants the right way around. These are big companies, with millions of users. No move ever sits well with all of them. Remember when mini-feed came out? That died down too, and Facebook rose in our social-network rankings. Everyday people complain of bloat, but it’s remained where it was — at the top. Google Reader through all the issues, remains the most used feed reader¹, and this is just a minor setback.

It’s a simple case of causality, and people eventually get used to it. Sure, measures must be taken to fix things so that the adaptation comes in quicker than it would have otherwise, but the result is the same. You’ll never see a feature discontinued, or cancelled. What you will see is what I call a ‘calm-down’ period. There will be a fairly decent amount of time gap between two ‘big’ updates. This might be due to complexity of developing the feature, or (in my cynical mind) a time period to allow the last feature to have settled and balanced with the users. Too many changes too soon is never good. But these people have also understood the one thing that people ought to understand by now: no matter what happens, they’re not losing their user-base once it’s established, and in the case of these two companies the user-base is far from established—they’re hooked!

Justin Rosenstein had this to say when he was leaving Google for Facebook (June 8th, 2007)

A couple of months ago, after three years as a Google product manager, I decided to leave for Facebook. I am writing this note to spread Good News to all the friends I haven’t already overwhelmed with my enthusiasm: Facebook really is That company.

Which company? That one. That company that shows up once in a very long while – the Google of yesterday, the Microsoft of long ago. That company where large numbers of stunningly-brilliant people congregate and feed off each other’s genius. That company that’s doing with 60 engineers what teams of 600 can’t pull off. That company that’s on the cusp of Changing The World, that’s still small enough where each employee has a huge impact on the organization, where you think about working now and again, and where you know you’ll kick yourself in three years if you don’t jump on the bandwagon now, even after someone had told you that it was rolling toward the promised land. That company where everyone seems to be having the time of their life.

I’m serious. I have drunk from the kool-aid, and it is delicious. Facebook is hiring ambitiously across the organization. If you’re an engineer, UI designer, product manager, statistician, bizdev god, general entrepreneurial badass, whatever, and you would even consider considering Facebook as your new place for hat-hanging, please send me a Facebook message. We can have lunch, or I can give you a tour, or we can go kick it with Mark Zuckerberg – whatever it takes.

It wasn’t very long back that Google was voted the best place to work for, and I wouldn’t argue with that. Google has been coming up with innovative new ideas, products and things that us geeks will be able to appreciate. Their stock prices have been rising (valued at $750+ at last check), and according to this video, it’s a “really” nice place! Putting all those things together, it’s not really rocket science to see how amazing it would be work for the company.

Or would it?

Techcrunch reports that Google employees are switching over to Facebook at ‘an alarming rate’. Gideon Yu and Benjamin Ling already switched, and Justin Rosenstein is the latest. It seems there is something that is pulling these people away from the ‘dream job’ they once had, working for Google. It really does seem that Facebook is the new Google, and Google; they’re calling it the new Microsoft. I don’t know how true that is, but it does seem really harsh. Facebook rather, seems to be the young and fresh entry, which seems to have high ambitions, great energy and the ‘want’ to do something. Those are qualities every engineer and developer wants in the team he works. Justin’s e-mail shows that as fact too. What I wonder is, how much is hype and how much is true.

But by the by, I won’t mind a job at Facebook or Google ;)

Sometime between yesterday and today, Sabeer Bhatia (creator of Hotmail) released Live Documents; a service exclusively for Microsoft Office, which allows you to do all the things you can with Google’s and Zoho’s applications, but now with Office. Personally, I feel like this is the tagging thing all over again!

We already have enough players in the ‘office on the web’ market, and very frankly, I don’t think the user count of the existing one’s is good enough for one more to popup. I know people prefer to stick to the desktop versions, simply because they’ve grown used to it, and most of the time they’re on the move and hence not connected. People who use office applications at a high frequency are mostly executives. I’ve yet to meet an executive who lives outside of Outlook, and by default, Microsoft Office. If you’re on a Mac, it has to be iWorkOr by the looks of it, Office 2008 for the Mac. In both cases, you’re offline because it’s faster and you have many more features than a web counterpart.

But most importantly, there is nothing new that these services have to offer, except for the technology they use, which only increases their speed and to a very small degree, what they can do. Google brought in AJAX, and Live Documents is bringing in Flex.

Same goes with Google Documents. I was happy when Writely was Writely. Ever since the change to Google Documents, it just looks and feels so bland. It’s useful for finishing English assignments because friends can get together and collaborate, but I honestly don’t see real world uses of these features. I haven’t even touched Zoho …

It’d do us all good if we got more consumable services which have scope to grow. But as of now, I’m not even bothering applying for an invitation. Let’s see if I’m wrong on this ….

The past few days have been rather amazing. If you’re not a ‘geek’, then you probably won’t know of all the things happening, but if you are, then I hope you share the same excitement as me! After a rather considerable lean stint in the blogosphere, the general development sphere, things are back to kicking into top gear. I’ll just list out a couple of things that have got me excited and busy the past few days:

Facebook Platform

The biggest and the best announcement :D They opened up their API completely (it existed, but not with so much power) to developers to sit and make applications that interact with Facebook directly, and it’s different components (alerts, groups, etc.). The great thing is that, as a developer, you get to tap into the the best resource which you might need. People!

Facebook’s insanely large user–base opens up to every developer, and all his applications that moment they hit the Application DirectoryI’m glad they screen the applications that are added to this directory, and are avoiding another Firefox extension–type fiasco!.

This afternoon I finished developing my first application for it. It was meant as more of a test than a full fledged commando application like ‘iLike’ or ‘Photos’. You can check it out here, and if you’re on Facebook (why haven’t you added me yet?), add the application and take it on a quick beta spin :) I want to understand the API and all it’s crannies properly before I actually get down to serious app–ing!

Google Gears!

This happened just today, but I think it’s a very good step. From my end, it seems more like a reflex action to all the hype towards making applications for the desktops and frameworks being released to help developers do so. Whatever it is, it is good! The ability for Google services to go offline with you, and then re–sync when you come back online is something that people will appreciate the more that they use, and realise how much they needed this only once they get used to it. Ofcourse, they have a long way to go with this.

What I am thinking about now is that how is this move going to affect Mozilla’s plans to add ‘Offline Web App’ integration and functionalities into Firefox. If Google directly allows people to take things offline, an added functionality in Firefox seems like overkill, and will add to the ‘bloat’ that many people (and in a tiny voice, me) are complaining of everyday.

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There are other great things out there now, sure. But these are the one’s that are of immediate ‘Wow’ to me, being a coder and a developer :P Somethings that you might find interesting are things like the new Microsoft Surface, Microsoft’s Live suite (kind of) in Beta, and others doing the rounds!

Great times :)

I’ve been looking at various sites the past few days. Sites that keep people like Arrington and Om Malik busy. Sites that keep PostBubble up and running. Sites that we hear about all the time, and just go around to have a look because of all the hype created. There have been quite a lot of these since the ‘startup’ times, but how many do you see still being counted among the ‘big guys’? I think the reason can’t be bottled down to sustainability measures…

Stick to your basics

This whole topic came to mind as I was reading about Facebook’s rise up the ladder these past few years. Out of all the network’s, Facebook is the one which has really caught on. There were networks before Facebook, and there have been attempts after it, but you don’t see mention of them as regularly, do you?

I think one of the reasons for this is that unlike other networks, Facebook is always looking to grow. Not just in it’s user base, or number of page views/hits. They want to grow technologically as well. They want to enter forays others haven’t. For example, the whole concept of a mini–feed is something “extremely” new, and it’s worked so well. Of course, it didn’t start off initially the way it was supposed to, but after a few refinements, it’s something that almost defines Facebook.

An API! When was the last time you saw a social network allow piping out of the data from your account? It’s like the perfect way to build applications that works with the greatest resource — people, based on an established platform which does the hard work of getting you the data. Keeping people together was the only thing Facebook started with, and went on building around that, implementing whatever they thought sounded good. And look at where they are now.

In all facets of development

Whenever you create and develop a project, you always have “something” in mind. It’s that something which you shouldn’t lose focus of no matter what stage of development you are at. Everything you add, implement, should have a purpose, a reason. That purpose or reason should complement your initial “something”. Wonton features won’t help your application, or your time, because just like you, people expect features related to the core reasoning of an application.

So, keeping all those things in mind, next time you come up with a game plan, or are asked to join in the development of the “killer–new–app”, look for one word that probably doesn’t get as much attention as it should — focus!

It just so happens to be our favourite browser. With more and more vulnerabilities showing up in IE7, it’s pretty much a no brainer selection. Coders love it, designers love it even more! With such a strong past backing them up, Mozilla plans to make some serious headway with Firefox 3.0, and in a way, redefine browsing ‘again’!

InforWorld reports that there are hosts of new features planned for Firefox 3.0. You can read the whole list on the article there, but I want to take up just two of the features which sound extremely promising, and as these things go, open up a whole new door of possibilities for geeks! :)

Databases and offline web app-ing

The article says that Fx 3.0 will likely contain a feature which makes working with web applications offline, possible. Scratching your head? Ok, I’ll take the example from the article, since it’s something people can relate to. Imagine having GMail functionality, offline. You can write a mail, and save it. When you next go online, Fx 3.0 and GMail will work together to automatically send that mail. Pretty much what your desktop e–mail client does at the moment. Now isn’t that cool!

What this effectively does is take away an active Internet connection as the restriction to a lot of things. Maybe Blogger will work with this as well, with you being able to store posts offline while on the move, and transfer them to your blog (published/drafts) the moment Firefox discovers an active connection. This feature is almost an answer from Firefox to features like the in–built e–mail client in Opera, the blogging and photo–uploading tools in Flock and any other feature which integrates a web service application natively into a browser. Personally, I think Mozilla has been freagin’ brilliant at coming up with this! It sure makes me want to add sexy to the browser’s name ;)

The next feature, will appeal mostly to people who know how to use it. That, for the record, does not include me for the most part. They plan to integrate SQL Lite into the browser, albeit in a rather small form. It is going to be used to query content from the browser’s content cache. The immediate use Mozilla sees for this is a vastly improved ‘history’ and bookmarking system. However, there is a good chance this might ‘not’ make it into 3.0. That is not really a problem. Just the fact that such a feature is being developed, is pretty much enough at this point. I can see a lot of load–from–cache and history–extend extensions coming up to use and beat this feature black and blue. This also moves Firefox closer to what Mozilla ultimately plans for the browser, to turn it into an information broker. Maybe they could change the way existing variables are handled in Firefox, allowing Greasemonkey scripts to become a little more robust and share data between scripts? (Hey! Just saying!)

Looking good indeed!

The next version is slated for a ‘07 second half release. Ideas and features such as this make the next release one of the bigger ones yet. I didn’t see anything about the much spoken about Places, and am guessing they are going to chuck that idea, and make everything searchable (the latest toy of the application world) using the embedded SQL database. It’ll surely much more user–friendly, since the first attempt at using Places didn’t go so well, and people still complain whenever they have to use it.

So the next thing to do is keep fiddling through their nightly builds and see which one of them show hints of these features. Or else, wait and watch how the news unfolds. Something tells me this is going to create a wave as big as the lull we see at the moment! :)

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for the concept, and the implementation as well. I am not one of those who is predicting the death of Digg as the behemoth that drives traffic throughout the Internet. I think for what it’s worth, Digg is doing a rather good job. But, it’s the people who need to realise and understand what ‘news’ actually is. Short of riddling this post with screenshots of the various Digg front pages at the time of writing this, all I can say is that the stories hitting those pages are not impressive.

I actually find a few articles to read from Google News, but none from Digg. None to hold my attention for more than the description atleast. Digg has repeatedly said that they “love their algorithm”. It is what drives Digg and keeps spam away. I guess they need human intervention now to make things work properly, a la Slashdot.

Quality, ‘and’ quantity

A site like Digg doesn’t have problem coming up with the numbers, and quantity of posts. They have goodness–knows how many hits in a day, out of which I’m sure 20% are new articles being submitted. I wonder how many people actually check the ‘upcoming’ section. I rarely do, relying on other people’s sense of judgement in pushing a story to the first three pages. However, seeing the stories hitting those pages, I’ve started going through the upcoming section as well, just to be sure than it’s not me and Digg is actually losing it.

People will Digg just about anything. The Digg darlings are stories about Apple and Linux. However, anything out of the ordinary will also begin to attract diggs. This results in rather strange stories showing, and hence, pushing out the ones which really deserve some attention. For example, this story, and this oneThis story actually spun me off to this story, so it wasn’t a complete waste! :P and finally this one. What a big waste of time those stories are, I cannot even begin to explain. And yet, they’ve all been front pagers. I’m not ‘not’ impressed for no reason…

Digg started off as a Technology news site. I believe they were the best thing at the time. The whole concept of democratizing the web to allow the people to decide where to drive traffic, was actually amazing. But, Digg deciding to open their doors to various other topics was asking for trouble. Thankfully, the voting system keeps maximum stories off the front page, but even then, the ones that make it surely don’t seem to live up to Digg’s reputation.

Conspiracy theory

In the very recent past, there have been many stories about how Digg’s credibility is more compromised than is immediately apparent, and article defending that. But at the heart of it, we all know how and which way things will turn unless some pro–active measures are taken to fix things. Digg removed their top digger’s list, but brought it back—although rather silently—because the motivation of making it into that list was the reason a lot of people would Digg quality stories. With the list gone, there wasn’t anymore reason to really digg articles. This was all amidst the story of companies paying the users in that list to digg their stories so that they’d make the front page.

Ofcourse, there have been premeditated and intentional steps taken by rival companies to dethrone Digg, which have forced Digg to take decisions and steps which haven’t really worked for their popularity. But at the end of the day, Digg still stands as the one source which drives traffic to news and new happenings around the Internet, even if weird stories don’t impress me. It won’t be easy to take them out of that spot, but just because they’re nice and snuggly, doesn’t mean that the quality of their news will go down.

I again call for human intervensionI’m sure a few out of the 10+ board members can put in jury duty, if the result is Digg again churning top quality stuff. I’m sure it’s worth the effort, because there is nothing like having a human decide what to show others. Any other means will also be welcome. But things surely have to change. It’ll be interesting to see the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ :)

I have been doing my share of the ‘good work’ by introducing people to Firefox, and the world of extensions, themes and more convenient browsing. It’s not ‘as’ exciting as getting people to switch to an Apple :P, but it feels good to see a fellow person give up Internet Explorer forever, and you hope that this is another chain of switches you startedYou know how these things with non–savvy people go. You tell one, and they find it really cool. Then next day it becomes a small talk topic (sometimes to just show them as being more cool than the others :P).

I looked in at MarketShare today at the browser trends, and Firefox’s share has grown to 14% from February last year. This is really good considering how many peopleBy people, throughout this post, I mean non techies. there are. Also, Firefox is a change–over browser, not a default one. Taking all those into consideration, 14% is a very positive number. Firefox 3.0 is not far away either, with features filled up to the brim (always a darling with new adopters). Mozilla and extension–ers make our job easier everyday! :)

Another reason why the share of IE is high is because mods like Avant and Maxthon build on the shell, and add a lot of features that Firefox and Opera have. This removes the incentive of ‘new’ features to make the switch. I wish there was a way to see what share of IE users actually use the bare naked IE. That would sure wipe the smile off a lot Microsoft faces.

My most recent experience of getting someone to switch was a few weeks back. Though it was initially a resounding ‘No!’ to start with, the mention of the words ‘better security’ and ‘no spyware’ opened a door. I then went ahead to show little features like search suggests, search by name (I skipped the part that it exists in IE as well) and finally threw in the kahuna of extensions and themes. It sold rather well :P This was my second or third time handling a non–techie actually, and I learnt a few things on how to make the ‘sale’.

I guess IE really has become extremely familiar to people. But atleast we’ve progressed away from calling IE the Internet. But Firefox’s clean and simple initial interface (compared to IE’s row full of buttons) does land in a good impression. IE sits well also because people don’t want to go to the hassle of having more than one application to do the same thing. They use the ‘why use Photoshop when we have Paint’ logic. It takes someone to ‘show’ them that Firefox is better. I don’t think there are many people who switch all by themselves. Also, once switched, they aren’t many who go looking for features. They use the brute force ways from IE on the new browser, until you show them that there is a better way to do it.

I know from my statistics that majority of my viewers use Firefox (even Apple viewers). That may have something to do with the fact that IE refuses to load up my search box, and stops midway. In the past I used to worry about that, and try to fix my templates to at least render (somehow) in IE. I guess it would increase my readership, but I doubt it’ll be a significant rise. My feed readership is 3 times my daily page views. So as long as the feed reader renders properly in IE, my posts will reach everyone :)

There is of course not a shadow of a doubt that IE can never be better than Firefox, or any other alternative browser. The underlying code, and it being closed to any kind of extensibility (easily codeable by people) will see to that. That is also the reason Opera is sitting at less than 1%. Closed doesn’t work that well, especially if you’re closed to suggestions as well.

If you have looked around my blog lately, you’d have noticed the ‘Aditya is…’ widget that I added to the right. I recently took it out, because I gave the updates a new purpose, but no points for guessing that it was powered by the latest fad on the Internet and what is being termed as ‘micro–blogging’ – Twitter. Twitter tries to answer the basic question … or actually, let’s ‘you’ answer the basic question, ‘What are you doing right now?’. But of course, used creatively, Twitter can be an amazing service which is accessible from something you carry around all the time. Your cell phone!

Staying connected

This is probably the best way to stay connected with a lot of people at the same time since mobile phones and IM. A single update to your Twitter, will fire off multiple messages to all those who follow you (on Twitter) with that update. I admit to not using Twitter to it’s ultimate potential. But that’s only because I cannot use it with my cell phone since the number to send a text message to is an international number for me (Twitter is based in UK). Regardless of this, I have tried to get my phone activated, but it hasn’t workedA mail to Twitter support also has reached to no particular end. This is something bad, since customer support should be the best thing about a site which has so many users..

But I have seen people updating from their phones, and I can imagine what a convenience it would be. The concept of constantly updating statuses was first introduced (to me) by Facebook. It has a nice module at the top right of the home page, which you can use to change your status. It gets reflected on all your friends’ mini–feeds. People have been using Twitter to keep friends and family updated on their latest trips and travels. The top bloggers (with the likes of names ending with Arrington and Malik on the bandwagon) used Twitter to keep their readers constantly updated throughout their run of SXSW ‘07.

Twitter isn’t a new thing however. There have been others like it, like Dodgeball. But for some reason, Twitter has really caught on like a wildfire on the Internet. With widgets and extensions getting into the play as well, staying connected was never so simple (and addictive!) :)

Bye bye to privacy

One thing that Twitter doesn’t have an option for is to remove people from your follower’s list. This can give a whole new meaning to the word ‘stalking’. That’s why, and this applies mostly to non–adults using this service, one should be careful when posting updates, and should use discretion while revealing current location, or what they’re doing. We’ve had enough of MySpace news about all this.

So, while this is an amazing service, it still has flaws. The lack of good customer support is one of them. Now, I want to see how far this actually goes to begin bringing people closer together, and trying to answer the basic question that you try to answer about your friends and family, ‘What are you doing right now?’!

Add me to your friends, and see what I’m upto the whole day :P
Happy twittering :)

Further

RIP Twitter (2007-2007)
Why is Twitter so slow
The post–its of blogging
Three innovative ways to use Twitter

Ning had been out for quite a while the whole of today (26th evening for my eastern readers). Readers in that time would have seen my blog going all whack, because all my scripts are stored externally using Steve’s excellent Jscripts repository. Nonetheless, Ning is back up now, and ain’t I glad it is! Developers at Ning had taken the giant down to upgrade it, and add new features. And by the looks of it, they’ve changed the terminology as well as made a few changes to how they define themselves.

Well, that’s what ‘they’ say. They’ve gone away from calling them apps, and now call them ‘networks’. So that would be the Jscripts ‘network’ now :P I don’t know why they chose to go this way, and label themselves as a free ‘network’ host. I had written about how we need more Nings, because it provides a perfect place for people to start making web applications, and share them with the world. Usually, doing something like that requires you to have your own server and hosting, but Ning solves that problem. It’s a great place to start out, or have basic applications to work with.

Although, in the past it has been seriously underutilised, with extremely useless applications hogging up their servers. This changed in the past year as more and more people realised and understood what Ning was actually about, and began to use the resources given to them properly. It still needed a good knowledge of programming languages like PHP (Ning’s backend is solid PHP), so the quality apps only came from hardcore programmers and geeks. I guess Ning felt they had much more to offer than what people saw. Hence, their new approach is probably justified.

Ning CEO Gina Bianchini says growth has been strong and steady. Nearly 30,000 applications have been created to date, up from less than 5,000 a year ago. Page views have been spiking, reaching 20 million per month, 20x traffic a year ago. Unique visitors have reached nearly 5 million per month as well, 10x a year ago.

Well, they’re a swell resource to exploit! :)

Ning now

Ning now boasts a completely refurbished interface, that drives just one point home. Ning is a ‘quick social network creation tool’. As simple as that. Modules litter the place waiting to be drag-dropped into your new application, which seems to be the new formula of making applications for complete newbies succesffulyPipes does this with grace, allowing a similar approach. It’s rather hard to hit a balance in design and functionality between making it for alpha geeks, or complete newbies. This seems to find that balance quite well..

This should give them the numbers - whether in terms of page views, or page use - they want. However, I really wish they wouldn’t go down this path, and keep things the way were before. Tapping the coder’s market was something extremely new. What Ning ‘did’ was extremely well thought idea, which is why caught it on slowly at first, but then the jump. Opening it to newbies like this will give rise to useless content which will unnecessarily clog their servers. The take-down for the upgrade was the first long time downtime Ning suffered in the last few months, after struggling with many downtimes early on. Just shows that they’ve become a stable deployed system, and can be trusted with important data now.

Nevertheless, it is a solid updgrade, with servings being faster now (they sure feel fast). I am going to continue working on/with Ning to develop a few apps. If you haven’t tried it, I’d recommend you start now! Let’s see what the new Ning can ‘really’ do! ;)

Further Reading

A Demo of the new Ning - The Ning Blog
Ning In Full - TechCrunch
Ning: let ‘000 Social Nets Bloom - Om Malik on broadband

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Update: Stephen and I noticed something interesting. As of writing this update, the Ning app.. err..network view is down, but it is still generating outputs. If this is a feature of the update, then it’s amazing! This means that when Ning goes down for maintenance, the networks will provide the output we depend on. I hope this is true! :)

The Web 2.0 boom was something that stirred everybody and everything that had a remote connection with the Internet. Startups, mashups, networks … you name it! Everything began to appear everywhere you looked. We called it ‘opening the Internet to the people’. But was it really that? Thinking back at everything that has happened, everything we call and label ‘Web 2.0’, I realised that it can be put together with a better definition than what we’ve come to call it.

Web 2.0!!

Web 2.0, or the second generation Internet, served the purpose of defining the Internet as an application platform. Very simply put, it opened up the minds of (many more) people to the possibility of creating applications (or apps, as we call them) and developing them for the Internet. Adding functionalities, features and throwing it out to people for use, all pretty much free of cost and with minimum production glitches, well, at least for most. It makes sense! :D

Every social network or startup that you’ve seen since the boom offers some kind of a service which boosts inter-connectivity or exchange of data between people and applications. They became interfaces, becoming the middlemen between people and data. Offering choices as to how the user would like his data, it ‘opened’ up the Internet’ to the ‘people’ to the data and technology that already existed. If you’d have noticed, close to nothing new was created during the entire time Web 2.0 was so heavy in our lives. Concepts were mixed and matched to organise the data better, and then present them to a user.

Feeds¹ was one of the few creations and genius of this time, with many services depending on it. Bookmarking / Tagging was another, which served to just organise the data and make it shareable amongst people. Social Networks had existed before, but got more exposure thanks to the ‘Connecting people’ approach.

If you’re thinking about the Web 2.0 ‘look’ and other peripherals, then all I’ll say it was just things that piggybacked on the success of the buzzword doing the rounds. The look was a simple, fresh, eye-catching and functional design, and the reason it was labelled Web 2.0-ish was because it did visually what applications did with data. It provided a simple interface between people and content/data.

So now what?

Well, nothing! The boom is now receding, and slowly fading. The madness is over, but good services will continue to rise and show up since the trend has been started. It was high time people saw the Internet as a platform for data, not just as a medium/media. Now, those with enough creativity can go ahead and develop new applications and services for this new (but old) Internet and continue to improve it for all of us!

Maybe my point of view has changed yours? :)

I know one thing that publishers love to do everyday. Check their subscriber count! I take it to an almost feverish level where one tab stays open to the ‘Live hits’ page of FeedBurner, with an auto refresh of about one and a half hours, another tab open to the dashboard of ‘Site stats’, with another auto refresh. I just have to stay up to date (and time?) on these two things, and then of course comes the big kahuna - the number of subscribers - for the previous day. It has been on a rise the past couple of days since Google released their side of the numbers, so imagine my disappointment when I was faced with this:

After peaking in at 224 yesterday, it went dead at 0? Obviously something has gone wrong there. I checked up my FeedMedic log, but it said everything was perfect! I went looking for anything on their blog too, and found nothing there. I then went to see stats for all my feeds, and strangely again, found this:

The FeedCount chicklet is still showing the previous number (224) for me however, and for the other blogs that have them. However, calls to the FeedBurner API for the actual updated numbers returns a 0 for them too. Even TechCrunch! So it is a problem at FeedBurner’s end. You can try it too. Append the name of the URI (lastword for my feed, for example) at the end of this line:

http://learningphp.ning.com/feedburner_stat.php?uri=

The output is a feed with the subscriber number. This is quite strange and unexpected. Nonetheless, I’ll keep a watch on their space and other blogs for updates on this, so keep a tab on this post.

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8:23 PM IST: Ok, this has been fixed! My latest numbers are up! You can read the reason in the comments (FeedBurner guys dropped by :P ).

Going through GigOm, I bumped into the article which states that BSNL will be launching a 2Mbps broadband connection in the country this year. If that claim itself isn’t ridiculous, they say that that the price will be Rs. 250. That’s roughly $5.62, which is dirt cheap even for a government funded company. What’s going on here?

Well, the catch is that one has a (terrible, I must say) download limit of 1GB a month, and use above that limit will be chargeable at 90p ($0.02) per MB. As the article at Sify rightly states:

A K Sinha, Chairman and Managing Director, BSNL added that the limit for corporate customers would be enhanced to 4GB. In other words, you can check your emails at a blazing pace considering that’s what you can do to stay within the offered download limit of 1 GB – 4 GB.

Telecom’s own boom

India saw a telecom boom in the past two years, with a meteoric rise of Bharti A private company which initially launched the landline service ‘Touchtel’, and later moved to acquire the mobile-phone solutions company ‘Airtel’. It now offers both services under the brand name of ‘Airtel’., and introduction of big time players such as Reliance and Tata into the info/telecom market. Offering competitive prices for quality service, these companies quickly ran over the existing estabilished company VSNL Virtually the sole Internet provider to the country for a long time. Even now, the major companies pay a share to VSNL to use their servers to gain access to the Internet, so technically, VSNL remains the biggest Internet provider in India. completely. Now, the preferred company is Airtel for residence as well as corporate Internet solutions. I use Airtel myself, and am very happy with them. The rates and speeds are very good, with speedy complaint clearance. I have never tried Reliance, but I haven’t heard good things about them either, so can’t say much there. Whoever the provider however, the speed fluctuations prevent any proper productive use of the Internet Things like gaming, video-conferencing, downloading genuinly huge files. My speed is 128 Kbps, and a 600 Mb movie takes a whole night. You can imagine the rest. I’d sure love to be able to connect to a gaming server in the US to kick some butt, (I’m a CounterStrike buff! :P) but that seems a far cry at the moment.

BSNL itself has had quite a bad run uptil now. People have rushed in to take their relatively cheap plans and have come out cursing the after sales service and server downtimes. It is pretty much expected from a government company, hence this move now seems extremely ambitious.

Predictions galore

Sify predicts the year 2007 as the year of the broadband in India. I’d love to agree with them. At the moment, broadband is classified by the TRAI as any ‘always-on’ connected above the speed of 128 Kbps. I believe the international definition starts at 512Kbps. The scene is pretty dismal, but our lack of infrastructure, and preference being given to spread technology first to the rural areas and then to the urban parts seems to slow down the progress that we could have made. But we’re slowly getting there with attempts such as this.

If nothing, this will actually push the other players to improve their services to challenge BSNL’s user base. This is ofcourse, only good news for everyone (including me)! :) I’d love to see my speeds hit 512+ Kbps :D The existing monopoly lies with Airtel, so the first change will definitely come from them. An upgrade in the connection speeds will see a lot of more participation in gaming, start-ups and other Internet related stuff that the international market has gotten used to, coming from India. We don’t lack the ability, just the infrastructure. Maybe even an upgrade to our technology to go for WiMAX, and make it simpler to provide fast Internet connections to remote places? WiMAX has high initial costs, but in the long run it will benefit. It also seems to be the more practical thing to go for at the moment.

Good times? Let’s wait and watch, ‘the year of the broadband’ just got started! ;)

With the launch of Wikiseek, a formidable new player in the field of search engines has shown itself. Wikiseek is probably the best ‘specific’ information search engine we have today, or it atleast has the potential to be soon.

Though it is considered basically a replacement of the in-built search for Wikipedia, it is definitely much more than that. By offering on the fly suggestions via. tag clouds, top matches for your search from Wikipedia, and links to external pages linked in the article pages, Wikiseek presents itself as a great place to start your searches for information on specific topics.

It is not, however, a place to search for news or opinions or applications or just random things. That is Google’s playground. Think of Wikiseek as your search through a library and all it’s information, with handy links to external sources which people have found usefully related to the result articles. This works to remove spam and bogus SEO’ed links that plague our top search engines today. An all round win win solution for people :)

It will be formally announced today, but you can ofcourse go ahead and give it a trial run. There is an extension that enables a Wikiseek search inside the normal Wikipedia search toolbox. A visit to the Wikiseek page will put the blue glow in your Firefox search box, to which you can add Wikiseek by clicking on the down arrow and selecting the ‘Add Wikiseek’ option. It’s creator ‘Searchme’ has said that they’ll offer more search engines in the future. Now I don’t know if they plan to make an integrated search environment, but they sure seem to be on the right track. Revenue from the searches will go to the Wikimedia foundation, which will really help their cause in keeping quality information free!

This will also help bring much wanted attention to a great repository of information, Wikipedia, in a big way. Wikiseek will ofcourse improve over time, but this sure does promise a lot for a brand new product. If you’ve always wanted proper and formal information and articles on topics the way encyclopedia’s present them, or if you’re just looking for content for a project or a research, this is a great place to start your search.

Reading through my feeds, an article about how Microformats might be integrated into the next release of Firefox caught my eye today. If you remember, Microformats is present in the current latest stable release of Firefox, as a means of getting ‘dynamic’ bookmark titles. But that is all there is to it as far as Firefox 2.0 is concerned. Reading a little deeper into this new concept, I discovered a whole new way of creating relational data content, by following simple and standard semantics. What’s even better is how easy it is to start creating Microformat content. It takes nothing more than giving standard values to a few attributes in your HTML markup! But first, a little more about Microformats.

The term Microformat was given to semantic mark-up by Tantek Çelik and Kevin Marks during a presentation (or sometime after) on ‘real world semantics’ at EtCon 2004. It is just a standard format to present data so that services, applications, bots etc. can detect them, understand them, and do whatever they’re programmed to do with the values they find. For example, the following is a sample block of code for an hCalendar microformat.

Going back home for vacations
13th January ‘07 (12:15 AM)
(January 13- February 10)
Gurgaon, Haryana
I’ll be going back home after my end semester examinations. I’ve been missing home for quite some time, and want to get away from this hectic college schedule quickly.

And here is the code for it:

<div class='vevent'>
<span class='summary'>Going back home for vacations</span>
<span class='dtstamp' title='20070113T1215+0530'>13th January '07 (12:15 AM)</span>
(<span class='dtstart' title='2007-01-13'>January 13</span> -
<span class='dtend' title='2007-02-10'>February 10</span>)
<span class='location'>Gurgaon, Haryana</span>
<span class='description'>I'll be going back home after my end semester examinations. I've been missing home for quite some time, and want to get away from this hectic college schedule quickly.</span>
</div>

If you have any of the microformat recognition extensions installed (I’ve listed two that I know towards the end of the post), you’ll see a calendar event popup listing out that event. If you use one which offers you actions to perform on the recognised content, you can do so, which in this case will be adding to ‘your’ calendar this event to be reminded of later. The same can be used for different types of data such as contact details (called hCard), or reviews (hReview), social network (XFN) and Lists/Outlines (XOXO). The complete list can be found here.

Ofcourse, any type of data can be turned into a microformat, as long as it is recognised as a standard, and everyone is not cooking up ‘their’ version of it. It is there to help us maintain a standard, so that building applications to work with the data held by these formats becomes simpler. It’d be as simple as finding a block of code with the specified attributes, and getting the values of the other attributes as well as the contained text. It can be seamlessly integrated to look like a part of your page, while the hidden microformat properties is only for those who want it. The information can be anything from stock prices to package tracking. The point is to allow easy access to content. As Alex Faaborg puts it:

The general model is the user travels to a particular site, and then proceeds to enter data (classified add, review, list of friends) for a particular purpose. Your information is scattered all over the Web, and you have to pick which sites you want to use.

The combination of blogging and microformats is now reversing this model. Now, your information remains in your blog, and the Web sites come to you. For instance, if you want to sell something, you can blog about it using an hListing, and a site like Edgeio will find it when it aggregates classified advertisements across the Web.

I’ve been looking at the prospect of having a microformat for blog posts over the internet. Stephen has already stated pretty strongly about how the XOXO format is great for creating templates, which can make working with them (and the data they hold) much simpler. I will top that and ask for a standard outline to hold all post data in. That way, whenever we look for post details, it will be the same for a Blogger blog or a Wordpress blog (and many other blogging platforms out there). The sharing of data becomes tons easier! I realised this while developing my way of loading creating expandable posts asynchronously. Default Blogger templates already follow a pseudo-microformat (I don’t know if it was intentional or not), and hence, if you’ve not modified your template too much, or followed the standard naming of classes, your blog is already following a microformat for your posts. Any information now can be scraped right off the page as and when it might be required! There has been a proposal for any kind of listing to be presentated in a microformat called hListing however, so one’s interested might have a look into that.

Currently, as I said earlier, Firefox is the only browser which handles microformats natively, and that too only for dynamic titles for bookmarks. However, a couple of extensions are there which detect and present actions based on microformats found on a page. The one I use and recommend is Operator by Michael Kaply. This is a very useful extension if you wish to completely integrate Firefox with the current known microformat standards. It detects the data, and then presents you with ways of using that data. For example, on this page, you should see two microformats. One is my label, and the other is the calendar event written above. Operator will give you options to search Flickr, Del.icio.us and Technorati for this tag, to find related content, or add the calendar event to Google Calendar. Makes my job that much easier! :) The second extension, called Tails Export by Robert De Bruin, does pretty much the same thing, without the integration with other applications. It works by ‘exporting’ your microformats to known file types which can be used in other applications.

The functions of these extensions will eventually be integrated into the browser natively, and hence make it something of an ‘information broker’ as some people out there are calling it. The web browser, in general will look do all the information collecting ‘for’ you, so that all you have to do is click and collect.

This graphic from Mozilla sums up their plan for integrating this new standard very well:

Since microformat are such an invisible, yet solid way of presenting little bits of shareable data, I think it has the potential to reach where feeds have today, since they technically present the same thing; a simple way of sharing data amongst applications. Practically any data can be turned into a microformat, as long as there is wide generation of it. With some touting the new year as one for Microformats, I am somewhat agreeing with them. It ‘could’ be the next big thing! I am going to begin to use it in places where I think they’re necessary. My little contribution in building a smarter, more semantic web! Seems fun and useful! :P Install one of those extensions, and discover a new way to work with information for yourself!

A couple of weeks back, I read an article Cybernet News about a search engine which offers the user the choice of searching ‘with another person’! Now, as expected, this got me a little apprehensive. It’s not like we are searching amateurs, because we have been searching without help since we can remember! But not to come up with judgements before I checked it out, I went ahead and asked for a ‘guide’ (as they call ‘em) while searching for a Psychology paper due in a couple of days. The results, honestly did surprise me! :)

But first a little background. ChaCha (Yea! That’s the name…) was started by two entrepreneurs, Scott Jones and Brad Bostic. It is actually a ‘deep web’ A part of the web filled with databases and document/files which normal search engines do not look into. There are many other engines which search the deep web, like Complete Planet and Incy Wincy. search engine, although the guide I was with couldn’t confirm this. Guides mostly use ChaCha’s own engine to come up with the results for a user, and if they aren’t satisfactory, use other engines (Google seems to be the first choice).

The guides themselves work from home, and are paid on the basis of how the user rates their ‘performance’ after the session is over. ChaCha monitors the search records as well, so it’s pretty hard to rate unfairly. The guides are given, well, guides from ChaCha to help them search more effectively. These aren’t the normal guidelines you’re used to finding on the net. I’m guessing they’re optimised for the ChaCha engine, and tells them how to get the ‘best’ out of it. They have their own community too! :) ChaCha, as an engine without the guide seems to be pretty evenly matched in the field of deep web search engines today, so nothing earth shattering there. Now, my experience with ChaCha.

Mission: search with guide

You make the choice of searching with a guide from the front page, which is an interface made all too popular by Google! :P You enter your term, and instead of hitting the normal search button, you click ‘Search with guide’. You are taken to a page with three columns, the left most being a chat box which you use to communicate with your guide. The middle is for the results that your guide finds for you. The right most is for ads. Now, I began using it with Firefox 2.0, and for some reason the results being sent by the guide weren’t reaching me. I switched to IE7 and it began working.

The guide took some time, because she was getting the generic results of Universities offering Psychology courses. It was certainly different this time around since I didn’t have to see those results. The guide didn’t post them to me, so in a way, the guide is an effective ‘filter’ for irrelevant results. That definition got stronger as the session continued, and the guide admitted to not getting proper results. She posted links to online libraries and databases I had never received in my searches however, and hence I discovered some new sources of content next time when I’m looking for things. We, however, reached the verge of giving up and ending the session, that she sent me a link to a paper submitted by a Professor which was probably the best reference I could have gotten off the Internet. I was quite happy with the end result, with the session being much more of a success than I had hoped for. I am more inclined to believe that I got lucky and landed up with a good guide, because subsequent guides haven’t been that accurate as the first one! :|

The Last Word

ChaCha is definitely a novel approach, which believes in simplifying solutions. Where Google and other biggies crank out research on killer algorithms If you remember, Google recently bought an algorithm to improve their searches by displaying the exact data that matches the search query, and a few more things (Article)., ChaCha puts people in because the smartest processor out there, at the end of the day, is the human mind! Although this does make the experience slow (I had to wait for half an hour to get that one accurate link), and hence shouldn’t be used for mission critical tasks, or when you’re on a short time leash. But then again, if you are on a short time leash, you won’t be searching anyway.

Not forget that ChaCha is very young, and it will only grow and become better from now on. With the engine as well as the guides gaining experience, it can only improve. Although, they’ll need a ‘lot’ of people serving out to people if this method of searching catches on. Eventually they will have to have algorithms to help guides search faster and easier. Plus, with pioneers of tried and tested methods like Google on the stage already, I don’t know how much the prospect of a novelty can drive users to it. After all, Google ‘is’ now synonymous with search, followed by constantly improving and well funded players like Microsoft and Yahoo! (even if they are bad!). It’ll be a fight for ChaCha definitely, but it’s service like nothing else in the field!

Go ahead! Give it a try, and tell me how it went! ;)

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Update: This is not as unique as I thought. Qunu seems to offer the same thing, but offers ‘experts’ to help you out. I have yet to try out the service, but it does ‘look’ more modern with it’s shiny graphics and nice pictures :) I bumped into it while looking for good skinnable Jabber clients, of which it gave me a nice list. Note that I didn’t search for it on Qunu, but Google. This means that they probably store consolidated ‘answers’ pages of past queries. Cool!