Google Chrome has me floored …

When I got this link in a forward, I was like please-please-not-another-browser-please as well as huh-yet-another-beta-tool-from-google. However, the presentation of the browser details not as a boring-as-hell writeup but as a comic caught my attention. As I read through the comic I realized that Google had taken the concept of browser apart and assembled it back again keeping the stuff that we really need and improving on areas that current browsers fall behind. Or so they said.

Having now used the browser for one work day (it is still not my default), I can only say good things about it. It is fast, slick and totally minimalistic – just the way I like it. Yes, I miss my army of plugins that I use in Firefox but I am guessing that it won’t be too long before I get something similar on Chrome at least for the very essential tasks.

A more detailed review is here. But IMO this is something new in the browser space after Firefox came out.

And now we have targetted spamming …

This is just so weird that I have to abandon my blogging stupor and write about this. Today, I saw three comments on this blog; a number beyond my imagination.

But all of them turned to be on one post: the rather spare review I had written sometime back of the His Dark Materials trilogy by Phillip Pullman. Given the content of the books I am not surprised that there is a campaign against them by the established church. And with a well publicized movie in the wings (and I heard of the books from the trailers shown before Spiderman III) a larger number of people are going to be exposed to it. Hence, the ongoing war to the movies and the books has shifted to the internet.

All that aside, clearly the comments on my post were spam. They all sounded the same, lacked a single coherently strung thought and were posted on the same day at very similar times. But the wondrous thing was narrowness of the spam attack or that the excellent Akismet spam catcher failed to catch it. To the casual reader, they might even look like genuine comments so pertinent are they to the theme of the post.

And suddenly, I shudder at the thought of a future where with considerable amount of my personal information on public domain I will be subjected these inane but outwardly pertinent messages.

Social networking – still a lot to be done …

           

I use Orkut. And some amount of LinkedIn. And I am satisfied with neither. Being in India neither MySpace nor Facebook are very popular and hence I have explored only the surface of those. Hence it is possible that some of my comments/critiques are invalid just because I am unaware of what already exists. But still I believe the domain of social networking has to deliver a lot more value than it currently does to customers to become a solid business proposition.

Let’s start with what current social networking sites achieve. They put people who I know, but haven’t been in touch with (either because I moved out or they moved out or both moved out from wherever the common place we first met was), back in communication. For some people (not for me) they also allow people, who have never met but have similar leanings to find, interact and know each other. So once the initial set of people that I know or I-once-knew-and-now-found-again is exhausted my primary motivation to visit the site back would primarily be for two reasons: communicate with these friends and find some more new friends.

On the first count – of communication – social networking sites run into a whole bunch of competition. From the emails to telephone, junta today has a myriad ways to converse with each other. Is there a clear advantage of using the social networking mode of communication? I would say anyone wishing for a public asynchronous mode of communication would find the “social networking” way unique. By public, I mean everyone sees your conversations allowing people to be viewers without actually participating. Being asynchronous, you have the freedom to reply at your leisure without the fear of the thread getting broken.

These traits however limit the content and participants of the resulting conversations. If you think, an email thread with five people is a nightmare think of an Orkut conversation amongst three people. Any thread of thought that involves ten replies back & forth becomes a pain to continue since both the content and context tend to get lost – first due to message traffic and second due to time. In email, at least the thread retains the content to recreate the context. Lastly, anything remotely private is strictly taboo. All of this together succeeds in driving away a lot of communication traffic away from SN sites. Being a platform for sharing media (audio, photos, video) and publishing (blogs) also adds to the host of communication services but the inherent challenges remain. If a social network is to become an online hangout spot for a group of people, the richness of communication allowed will factor in it big time.

Second is the issue of finding new people. That people can meet online and become friends or even accomplices in some crime sounds a far-fetched notion to me. But I will grant that it is possible. But do any SN sites aid such discovery? Before that do these sites even aid discovery of people I might know? LinkedIn does to an extent (showing you people from your earlier organizations whom you might know) but even they are not too great at it. For example, a person whom five of my current connections are directly connected to and who shared an organization with me in a similar timeframe has greater chance of being a future connection than one whom none of my friends are connected to but who is currently in my ex-workplace. Simple distinctions such as these do not exist today in LinkedIn. Friend recommendations just don’t exist in Orkut.

Coming back to discovering new people; the only way it seems possible to me is to supply a platform to form communities and start conversations in those communities. Orkut again does something very similar and people do end up meeting some likeminded people. But my experience tells me that those experiences peter out very fast; the conversations just don’t stick. I would remember someone from a one hour flight discussion on merits (or otherwise) of Indian cricket but not someone from Orkut with whom I discussed Kirkgaard over a month. When one is dealing with people this stickiness counts and SNs have to try much harder to generate it.

My final rant is slightly more technical. I hate multiple personality disorder – especially when it comes to managing them simultaneously. I am perfectly alright, if my friend wants to play online social games and joins xyz.com; but I don’t see a reason why to converse with him I too have to join the same. I am more than happy with my current set. Identity management is one thing that is troubling all the major service providers on the net today and is the driving force behind a few of the M&A deals but it is something that SN sites have to figure out faster than others. Because seriously with the service they are currently providing its just not worth remembering one more login/pass combination.

Technorati Tags: socialnetworking, internet

Online gaming – it’s not just about games any more

The recent technology survey by Economist has a article that points to the development of common standards in the world of online gaming that would lead to the creation of a platform. This would enable developers to create applications with all the advantages of a virtual 3-D world without worrying about the underlying mechanics of the platform.

The freeing of the applications from the platform will allow this platform to be used for more than just the next innovative video game. A recent Business Week article says IBM is using games like these as training platforms for management under various scenarios. In today’s world where the ability to get into a situation fast is a skill paramount for any aspiring manager such games will provide a easy way to build up their skills virtually without actually waiting to get a chance in the real world. And this is just the tip of the iceberg, if the platform for online 3-D rendering engines become standardized we would see a burst of creativity that would dwarf anything we have seen so far – including the browser.

Living on Google Apps

Michael Calore, a Wired news editor, recounts his month long sojourn into the world of web applications away from the world of traditional desktop applications. Makes for interesting reading and allows one to gauge to an extent if web apps are ready for prime time.

While his overall experience sounds great, he does raise a couple of very valid points about the viability (and areas of improvement) of web applications in general and Goggle Apps in general.

1. Interoperability: Ideally we should be moving into a world where open standard would make this word a redundant issue. However considering the length of time we have stuck to our closed boxes (read desktop applications) this is going to be a major pain in the a*#. Web applications being new would need to integrate into the historical apps rather than them adhering to standards. This would become important in large organizations and groups.

2. Security: Michale talks about the fears people have regarding the security of their data. Sadly, it seems to me that Google is playing down those fears as being invalid. Yes, we do not understand how the current desktop applications work. And yes, they do have security loop holes. But the scepter of all my data lying around in the data center open to anyone with admin access on the Google data center in scary. And then I really do not know what Google is doing with my data. And since it has all my data it becomes much easier to target me. I am not saying they are valid fears, but they are genuine fears that consumers have and Google and others like Zoho attempting to wean away people from desktop applications have to understand and ameliorate.

3. User Experience Paradigm: Again, I see here Google trying to play down the nature of the problem. If web application suites are to make money by themselves (for Google this might very well not be the case), they better take this into account. The people deciding things in an organization will be the ones tied to the desktop metaphor and they will be loath to change their styles and the young turks entering might find it better to adapt to the desktop metaphor rather than fight for the validity of the using the web application style of doing things. They would have, I am sure, other important battles to fight.

However, Michael’s experiment has demonstrated that Web Apps do present a viable alternative to small groups and organizations where everyone is committed to using the same platform. Personally, I have almost shifted to the web for email and chat. The office suite however remains solidly in place.

Some rants on usability

My laptop has these nice buttons that help me control my music player (Winamp, in case you are curious) physically rather than alt-tab to the application. The volume controls are also in the same physical panel. I am very happy with it, since it causes me the least distraction from my work and allows me to be more lazy. Now Opera, which is my preferred browser when I am, well, browsing (since now I also read RSS feeds, write blogs, upload photos to Flickr and stumble around the web using the browser), for some weird reason deactivates these controls making me very very unhappy. Opera is an awesome browser, with probably the fastest rendering engine in business but simple things like these will make customers turn away from them.

On a complete different level, and related more to privacy and security issues rather than usability is Google’s use of the cookies to remember your identity once you have logged in from a certain machine. John Batalle here, links to a story which describes in detail how someone using a computer, you logged into months ago could potentially be privy to your most recent searches. As far as I know, the same model holds for Gmail also though I have not tested it yet. However, for Orkut the model is different. Clearly, technology is not the problem here. Is the drive to garner personalized data on the user so focal to Google’s strategy that it has pushed these issues under the carpet. And some will argue that since Google is a free service, if you don’t like them, you can ditch them. This would be completely opposite to what Google actually intends; since these customers coming to the main site by millions in a day fuel its ever growing ad revenues.

Paul Grahm on startups …

Techcrunch recently put up this interview with Paul Graham (the one who thinks painters and hackers are alike). Some comments that I found interesting …

“it’s an interesting data point that a company with $88,000 in funding can even compete against one with $2.8 million. That could not have happened before the web.”

“experience so far suggests that figuring out how to make money from something popular is a lot easier than making something popular.”

“We print it on T-Shirts: “Make something people want.” If you had to reduce the recipe for a successful startup to four words, those would probably be the four.”

“Most of the great startups seem to have begun with something the founders wanted: Google, Yahoo, Apple, even Microsoft.”

In general he speaks about the uselessness of having a business model without a good idea, how google is beatable, and how doing something that you like to do is more important than what you think the market might want you do.

Blogged with Flock

Just testing the Flock blogging tool …

Installed Flock 0.7 (beta) version in my attempts to find the perfect browser for my tastes.

The wysiwyg editor for blogging definitely looks cooler than the performancing plugin on firefox, and the flickr toolbar on top is nice. The news reader is good; a funkier version of Sage perhaps. But so far the bookmarking tools have left a lot to be desired.

Overall the beta release is a much more polished version than the numerous developer previews that I installed earlier.

Will prolly post a detailed review after using this for some more time.

update 1: I really disappointed with the application’s ability to work with exisiting posts. Does not allow me to edit posts that I had created earlier . Also everytime I edit a post it takes a long time to retrieve it from my blog. Wonder why they do not hold a local cached copy of the blog in the HDD. If wordpress could import my entire blogspot blog this should not be too difficult.

update 2: The snippet bar in the bottom of the page is sheer brilliance. Something that I was hoping someone would do for a long time. You can drag photos and text snippets both into it, save them and reuse them in blog posts and other places. Amazing!!! Though I have not used this feature extensively, I am hoping that there is some kind ordering/tagging mechanism in place because these snippet holders soon become too cluttered to do any proper work with.

update 3: The flickr uploader is also slick though has not yet offered anything out of the ordinary from the numerous uploaders existing all over the web.

Blogged with Flock

On PI …

Here is a good read on my ex-employer Pi Corporation; while the article says much is under the shadows as it is PI delivers a platform circumventing not only the problem of personal data limited to a machine as in standalone Windows desktop as Paul Maritz says in the article but it also smartly manages to overcome the privacy concerns that people have in uploading sensitive information onto central servers as is the wont of Google and Yahoo.

When Google launched Gmail with the adsense program, the backlash it faced brought into question their entire existence; it seemed for a time that it was well in the way of becoming the next Big Brother. Though that storm has died down, it emphasized once again how important the concern of privacy of data is. The essential difference in the way that Google (and Yahoo to some extent) are trying to solve the problem is to appropriate the user data by uploading it to a central server. To be visible to the entire web you have to be on the web. And being on the web raises privacy concerns. Sort of a catch-22 situation. But PI, I believe has managed to go solve this situation in a very unique manner by putting together a set of solutions for seemingly unrelated problems.

Though not a part of the team any longer, I am still rooting for them. Can they become the next big thing? That would depend on many other issues other than just the technology demonstration and we would have to wait and watch.

WordPress is improved :)

I can finally justify the shifting of my blog from blogger to wordpress – mainly for two major improvements in the wordpress offering.

One, the siderbar widgets allow me very easy customization of my blog. Though it is not anywhere close to full control, for majority of the bloggers it will be good enough. Also some new themes (including the one on my blog) have been added. Each theme seems to carry its own baggage of customization. Maybe the wordpress guys can look into some standardized way of publishing the data on the sidebar so that all theme creators can use them and create their themes.

The last and the truely awesome feature was import; basically allowing me to import the content from my older blog into wordpress. The service took care of importing all the posts and comments from the blogger account. From what I could glean, the import is basically HTML scraping from one’s older blog; convert the blog into a standard format, take information for each post out and then go to each post’s page and get the data alongwith the comments. The only thing missing here, seemed to be some kind of a bulk categorization tool for the newly imported posts. Also such an activity clearly shows the limitations of RSS as a publishing standard for huge content.

So now one can find whatever I have written or attempted to write in the last 2 years in this blog itself.

Technorati Tags: software, internet

When will the ONE come …

I generally stick to the software I get used to. For me the difficulty is the initial choice and not the fending off the claims of other products (free or otherwise) once a choice is made. I still use notepad as my primary text editing tool and shifted from IE to Firefox or Outlook to Thunderbird only when I started working on multiple environments after shifting to PI. Though the working on multiple environments did not continue too long I had become besotted with both. However tragically for me I have just spent an hour installing yet another feed reader for reading my feed subscriptions, shifting from the RSS reader which comes with Thunderbird to Omea Reader. Ironically I was in the meanwhile listening to the Talkcrunch’s latest episode on the battle of online feed readers.

I have a some requirements from any such application:

1. Speed. Once I click on a post item I really do not want to wait till it loads. Any feed reader is given enough idle time by me to use for downloading updates. Thunderbird failed on this count, it took like ages to get feeds and worst of it all it got it all in real time. Almost all online feed readers fail on this count as well. Plus opening a web page and login in is too much work to read a feed. Regardless of what they claim they do not really give a good enough user experience to overcome this inertia.
2. Priority of posts. I want to priotize feeds so that updates to those appear at the top of the list if unread. None of the feed readers I have used has this yet. Does not look like a great deal to develop. Also over a period of time, my feed reader seems to acculumate a list of quasi interesting feeds that i have stupidly added. Adding some minimal intelligence to these readers to identify what I would be interested in currently is needed.
3. Auto cleaning of posts. I really do not want to keep Slashdot posts of last week, while I do want to keep the Techcrunch posts or Paul Grahm essays for future reference.
4. Good HTML rendering. The guys who publish the blogs really put in some effort towards making their posts more readable for the users. The feed reader has no business of taking away this luxury from me.
5. Low CPU usage. I hated my first reader SharpReader for this reason. It used loads of CPU in the days when computing power for me was at a premium. And I hate freewheelers.
6. Ability to search and label important posts. Search through the existing posts in the reader as well as allow me to label (or tag) a particular post as being important or as pertaining to a certain topic. This information should not be lost even if the original post is deleted for reason.

With Vista coming in with an inbuilt framework for syndication with RSS and Atom, I believe that these demands are not unreasonable. But how long will the wait continue?

Technorati Tags: computers, feed readers

Finally Riya …

Couple of days back, I finally recieved my long awaited invitation to try out Riya. And after the long wait, I had to get two invitations; one from the official Riya team and another from a friend who has just joined their team here in Bangalore (in case you were wondering, having friends in right places still helps ). So today evening I started the uploader install and immediately afterwards started uploading my photos.

The first experience with Riya, I have to admit was not great. On what was not great I will go into detail a little later but there were moments when I was literally laughing my guts out. Especially when Riya grouped together a friends’ face with that of Aishwarya Rai’s from a poster present in another photograph.

My entire collection would be like 900 pictures or so and each person would on an average feature 5-6 times. I am mentioning this because I am not sure how large a training set is needed for Riya to function optimally and hence the comments following these lines would have to be taken in this context.

Uploader

• Very slow install. Is it a web install like the MSN and Yahoo messengers? By comparision to these also, it takes a lot of time. And what does Riya take 30 MB for? Not the uploader only, for sure?
• No choice on where to install the uploader. I know people in Riya do not have evil designs on my poor laptop but I remain a e-hypochondriac.
• I stopped and restarted the upload a couple of times. Both the times the existing state of the upload before my stopping it was lost; not on the server but on the uploader UI itself. After a couple of such timeouts (mainly for compiling my work) I lost track of how many pictures were done or how many were left.
• The upload process itself was pretty fast considering they do the detection of faces and text at the same time.
• Sometimes the face recognized the picture as shown in the uploader UI is an extraneous face not present in the picture. I am pretty sure of this having encountered it more than a couple of times.
• A suggestion: Can I tag my pictures from the uploader itself??
• Another one: Can it scan my HDD and take all my pics? After all they are private to me only, right?

Face/Text Detection

• I would say Riya does a really good job in face detection. In 900 odd pictures I had < 10 instances of marking a recognized entity as “Not a Face”.
• I did not have too much of text in my photographs, so can’t really comment on this feature but any text I had in some was not recognized.

Face Recognition, Tagging and General workflow

• When can start tagging and playing with my pictures? My guess was as soon as the first one gets into the Riya server; but I have a hunch now that it might be better to allow the uploading to finish before starting on the play. Apart from it taking time and CPU resources, does the suggestion of letting the uploading happen overnight obliquely avoid this problem also?? [Too bad I am an owl]
• After spending around a dozen rounds of manual training (single and bulk), I am not sure if I could not have tagged my pictures with the necessary meta data for effective searching later, in any other application. In short, recognition did not work too well for me. I can understand cases where I have only 5 or 6 cases of the face, but even with say 15 instances it asks me again to identify the, not too distinct, next one. And worse I am pretty sure I tagged some faces more than once.
• Auto complete for tagging is too buggy. Sometimes a dropdown appeared and sometimes it did not.
• When I see only one picture and tag one of the faces there, Riya immediately informs the user on the size of the training set. Somehow for most pictures the training set size was shown as one to me; though I am pretty sure of having tagged more than one picture with the tag in question. Is a training set any different from the faces one has manually tagged?
• I lost the tags created in one manual training session once; which was again not a very great experience.
• The search in “My Photos” did not work for most of the tags that I had created. Very irritating since Riya is all about search.
• The RSS feed of the search looks like either a RSS 1.0 feed or the RDF standard. Why not RSS 2.0 or Atom??

I have not had the time to yet experiment with their sharing and the public search feature but will do that soon.

Building a software product is a gargantuan task but people in Riya are trying to build something for which there is no precursor and hence their task is doubly hard. Not only does this product involve leaps in technology but also new UX models. The welcome email as well as the site says very clearly that the intelligence Riya has now is akin to a two year, and that we should not over expect. I can realize now, why the caveat is there. I just hope that Riya does not fall into what Joel’s Marimba phenomenon.

Technorati Tags: riyasobetaithurts

Google calendar and Writely rumours

TechCrunch published yesterday screenshots of the upcoming Google’s Ajax calendar application, CL2, here. Rumours have been around long that Google is developing such an application and from the screenshots it looks that the smoke was not without any fire. And today Om Malik has published rumours heard in the corridors of money that Google is set to acquire Writely. With CL2, Gmail and Writely, Google office on the web might be a reality sooner than many expected.

Apart from its tight integration with GMail, the ability of CL2 to discover new events is an indication of the differentiating features of this application vis-a-vis the numerous other such calendar applications. And this seems to be the first time Google has jumped into the sharing space, a move that I believe has far greater ramifications than just being a killer calendar feature. Apart from the capability to search and discover events and to deliver notifications via a gamut of media (mail, SMS) will really set this product apart.

The slides at the Google’s analyst day discussing GDrive coupled with the Writely rumours gives me a feeling that the ePIc video predicting a Google/Amazon grid around 2014 is well on its course to reality. Today Google seems to be the only player capable of delivering on this vision; by leveraging and upgrading the massively parrallel system they have built. While the applications themselves can be copied easily, delivering the scalability and reliability of Google will take considerable time to achieve; though many including Microsoft have their hopes.

What does this bode for the numerous Web 2.0 startup each tackling at varying levels, the problem of delivering user content and services on the Web.?They will either be bought over or will die, one can assume. By ensuring interoperability of data between its various applications (Gmail, CL2, Google Base, GDrive) Google and other big players will have an advantage that cannot be replicated very easily. The only hope for the smaller players lies in the adoption of global standards in terms of how content is published and delivered so that their applications achieve smooth interoperability with others. However even with global standards the tricky problem of how data is modelled by each of these applications will probably still remain limiting how useful synergies between small independent players can be.

The prospect of a Google grid is at once frightening and exhilarating. That we are on the path of freedom from desktops seems evident now. The question remains on what exactly is the utopian/dystopian end of this path? Are we seeing the rise of the biggest brother of them all?

On browsers …

An excellent article on InternetWeek comparing four of the most popular browsers; IE 7, Firefox, Opera and Maxthon is here.

Having used all of these and some more, I personally stick to Firefox because it allows me to work with my information from various sources, Flickr, del.icio.us, WordPress in a seamless manner.

IE 7 preview

Some time back Microsoft allowed users to download and use IE 7 beta preview. Though Microsoft has clearly indicated that the product is still in the development phase, it still does not IMO qualify to be a beta release candidate. It might suffer from what Joel terms as the Marimba phenomenon.

The problem is not the browser itself (though it crashes and sometimes leaves zombie processes running on your machine); the fact that MS tightly couples IE with other other applications is what is causing the majority of the problem. For example, my local installation of MSDN has stopped working after IE 7 installation. I did not also, neither see nor hear about what kind of APIs are exposed for developing plugins to this browser. The reason I use Firefox now is not only tabbed browsing. Foxylicious, Performancing, Stumble are the main reasons. Unless MS allows 3rd party developers to build plugins easily it will remain as my backup browser. Lastly, I do not think the IE team has made any significant improvements in the rendering of data. IE 7 still renders entire pages at once. This remains a big problem for AJAX applications running on IE or pages with a huge content.

However, IE 7 apart from introducing tabbed browsing has rehashed the browser UI completely; and in the right direction I believe. Space is much better utilized with the less used buttons not taking up as much real estate as they used to. Coupled with the inbuilt support for RSS feeds, it is most signifcant improvement in browser UI I have seen in some time. Also IE 7 has an inbuilt anti-phishing filter and an ad-blocker; another of Firefox’s biggest strengths.

Overall the beta preview of IE 7 leaves me with a feeling that MS is still not ready to bet completely on the browser as a platform. It’s UI improvements can be easily copied into Firefox by just writing a new theme so in the long run it will not be a differentiator in the market. I have a hunch that IE 7 will lack the extensibility that Firefox provides or its ability to be a platform; but by copying the most noticed features of Firefox it is an attempt by MS to stop the rot of users switching over to Firefox.

Ruby is awesome …

A couple of days back, I picked up Ruby as a programming language. And to say I was blown away would be an understatement. I am a huge fan of Python – for its ease of use, agility in development and most importantly its object oriented nature. Ruby provides all these and adds to it a few killer features.

Some of the things I founds really interesting:

1. Code blocks – If you have actually used function pointers in C/C++ and realised how big a pain it is, then this is one really satisfying feature.

Eg:
def callback(name)
if(name == “sriyansa”)
yield(name)
yield(name)
else
yield(name)
end
end

When this function invoked as follows with a code block, each yield in the above snippet executes the code in the block.

callback(“pappu”) { |name| puts “Hello World …#{name}” }

Imagine how easy it would be to implemet a co-routine library with this feature and the things possible with recursive code blocks.

2. Mixing of classes – Somebody has implemented a cool module. And you want to use the implementation. Just mix these with your class definitions.

Eg:
class MyClass
include Comparable
def <=>(ext)
int.var <=> ext.var
end
end

The above implementation mixes the operators [<, <=, ==, >= and >] to your class implementation. For 6 lines of code.

3. Extend your class anywhere – You do not like an inbuilt class implementation. No Problem. Exten it. Unlike C++, Ruby does not believe your classes should be rigidly defined. One can write

class String
def myfoo
puts “pappu”
end
end

to extend the standard String type in the language.

4. Intuitive interfacing with C – So easy that I got an interfaced class running in 30 minutes from scratch. I remember struggling for a couple of hours for doing the same thing in Python.

And now I have to try Rails and see what is all the fuss about?

ps :: Why the **** is my code formatting getting lost … !@^!*&#^*_@(_!(#)#

The “Pi” is out

Finally, PI is out in the big bad world. Sometime early Saturday morning IST on the 24th day of December 2005, the team at Bangalore signed off with the note that the plane has landed albeit with a little force. I had signed off some hours earlier so I was not around to see the landing or the champagne popping that followed it but reading the mail hours later did give me a feeling of acheivement that very few things have given me.

So what does PI do? The PI application just released in beta and due for a full fledged release in March, is a desktop photo browsing and publishing software. One might see it as a Picasa on steroids though it is only one side of the story. It allows you to import your pictures on the file system into the PI application and browse through them in friendly date driven format; adding further meta data onto these pictures in terms of tags, titles or descriptions, all of which become immediately searchable. PI allows you enormous flexbility in organizing your pictures through albums. One can create albums out of virtually anything – internal sources like user created tags and search results or external sources like RSS feeds, file system folders and emails. After organizing the pictures in form of albums one can publish these albums to the external world (by default everything is published privately) – either by sharing to everyone or sharing only to certain individuals via their email addresses. PI can thus become the one stop solution for the collecting, organizing and sharing your digital pictures.

And now for the coolest thing – the entire application sits on your desktop. The data does not leave your computer and if your PI node is online, your data is accessible to you anywhere in the world as long as you have a browser and a network connection. In case the user does not want to keep his node online constantly, PI allows you avail the facility of 24/7 hosting – but this is done with your explicit approval, in which case your entire data will be replicated to secure PI servers. Any external information arriving for you when your node is down will be kept here, to be replicated when the main node come up.

The current PI release is a limited release i.e. signup only by invitation. We should hopefully be able to scale up as soon we get a taste of real user loads and how well the infra holds upto those.

It has been just over a year since I have joined PI and the experience so far has been exhilarating to say the least. Working with a team as varied as the colours on the dress of the Pied Piper, over timelines that stretch the concept of day and night, on ideas rather than rigidly defined product specs all have contributed in some way to this experience. And the beta release was the sone pe suhaga for this entire journey.

Pandora – The box of music opened

How does one find new music that one likes? In part by learning the intricacies of why one likes what one likes and then searching accordingly. And more often than not by recommendation of friends. But, to find two people with exactly similar musical tastes is task at which even Hercules would have balked. Can then, one build a product that addresses the above problem for such a varied audience? The guys at Pandora seem to have done it. And done it well.

The trick they use is that when asked about the music one likes, the answer is often a list of artists, albums and songs rather than a list of musical traits. Pandora relies on this information, often at the tip of every music lover’s tongue to expose users to new songs and artists that it feels they might like. These are the same guys who were in the Music Genome Project, whose aim was to classify every musical bit in this world according to certain musical traits or genes. Traditional classifications of genre and outlook were thrown away, concentrating only on the musical aspect. And this was done at the level of each song. Now this database powers Pandora to deliver a great product.

The feature set of Pandora is limited. It allows the user to create stations based on songs or artists they like and proceeds to play on the station music that it thinks they might like. User can give feedback in the traditional Roman way; thumbs up or down. And thats about it. One can edit the stations but I have rarely found it useful. Easier to create a new station. A list of stations in a sidebar to the main player window allows the user to choose any of his created stations. And the main player is also very simple – with a volume controller, pause/play and go forward button. Pretty clean. As for the licensing they have 2 plans – free one with ads on the main page or the paid one with no ads. In terms of features both options are exactly the same. For more details – here is there FAQ.

Clearly this is a project which requires massive resources – both human and mechanical. It is still the task of humans to classify each song by its trait. I wonder whether Amazon’s Mechanical Turk can really be leveraged here. And if a user digs a little deep these days, he encounters a cul de sac. Also as per the current licensing norms they cannot play the user a specific song. Also the feedback mechanism needs to be made more granular, allowing the user to tell why he like or did not like a particular song rather than just good or bad. Further the next step should be bring in user feedback at a macro level, creating communities of users based on what one listens to and allowing users to share stations; this would also leverage the so called “network effect” and allow users to find music they like very easily. Some of the things I would be expecting in a future release.

Pandora is interesting because it works on many of the attributes that Brandon Schauer listed in his recent essay – Experience Attributes: Crucial DNA of Web 2.0 viz User Contributed Value, Long Tail, Decentralization, Co-creation. It also has the potential to leverage other attributes like Network effect and Remixability with very effort. Pandora today has a good mix of what are called Foundation attributes leading to good economic model and the Experience Attributes which in future can differentiate it from competing products. After the success of Flickr, the ante has been upped considerably for purported Web 2.0 products but Pandora matches these expectations.

Now, let the music begin.

technorati tags: computers, web

Some things which caught my eye …

For some time I had been hearing that Ojos Inc. was upto something big. Early this month, it came to my notice they had finally got the alpha of their first product Riya out in the market. And after a very very long time, I was truely astounded by a product. Mind blown, eyes popping out astounded. Nothing less. Since then have been putting off this post, so that I can write about the first hand experience with Riya; but the beta user thing is taking much more time than I had expected. The really great thing about this product is that these guys are not running around catching the latest wave of tagging, web 2.0 etc though they are all that. From the looks of it they have a solid technology behind their product, something that cannot be replicated so easily. Really cool. Their CEO, Munjal Shah, blogs about his experience with Riya here.

Two more of the the so called web 2.0 generation products caught my fancy as well. Library Thing, is your online book catalogue while TagWorld looks like an aggregation of Flickr, Blogger, del.ici.ous and Orkut.

The former clearly appealed to me because I have rapidly growing book collection and my Excel sheet, though adequate for now, leaves a lot to be desired. The other day a friend of mine wanted my book collection list to borrow some stuff and we ended up emailing three-four copies of the same file between. Having an experience like the one above, it can be understood, why some people think that the desktop, email, files metaphor is now truely groaning. As for the product itself it pretty clean and simple to use with some cool features. Tagging is simple. The upload UI however constrained also is easy to use. Syndicating of one's catalogue using RSS is default behaviour, which I thought was really nice. The initial uploading of the book data is painful. Even the upload tool they provide, "Swiss Army Knife" of file imports, shreds out only the ISBNs and adds them to one's library. Hard luck for people like me, for whom books means the title and the author. Plus the free service has space for 200 books. Heck even I have 200 books and that too from the last 2.5 years. Also the search is fairly comprehensive – search on books, tags or persons are allowed. I guess these guys are looking to become some kind of a Flickr of books thing.

TagWorld – your one stop web destination. I can almost see their tagline. They have got in a host of features allowing them to compete with Flickr, del.ici.ous and Blogger/Livejournal at the same time. The best feature I found here, after some hunting around is that one can upload files into ones account. True, can mail them to one's Gmail account and get the same functionality but this feature gives a hint that these guys are thinking big. Beyond the standard, cool yuppie, blogging site. But low marks in UI design of the pages (the ad palcement is pathetic… I know I am getting the service free, but still) and the general user experience. It took me 4-5 iterations to hunt around for a way to search for people. And they claim to tap into the social networking aspect of business.

Also in case one is interested in looking out for more such products, make sure you visit TechCruch.

Web 2.0, X Internet and all that Jazz

What exactly is Web 2.0? Tim O' Reilly defines it here. What then is X Internet? Forrester Research's G.F. Colony defines this here. Both of the above terms, especially the former, seem to be in vogue today and with almost no one very sure of what these mean. No wonder then that Joel Spolsky is slightly skeptical.

However, the fact that there is something afoot is hard to argue against. We are seeing a deluge of ideas today on how applications are to be built. WWW as a platform. Syndicate. Share. Tag. Rich User Experiences. Thin Clients. Quick release cycles. Products as services. Web 2.0 is more or less an overarching term that encapsulates these ideas. This ambiguous and pliable definition, is probably one reason why there are many who pose as Web 2.0 applications. The desired end product is however the same. Simple workflows for the user. And this goal is not new.

What then is new?

User expectations for one. The user today is not satisfied with static content from the web. He wants the content he sees to be dynamic as per his needs. If he wants stock quotes at the top of his website so be it. And if he is barely interested in the NY Times best seller list, they should not even occupy an inch of the precious screen real estate. He wants information painlessly and fast. The burgeoning expectations have in turn forced the major players to forget the old product management cycles, while focusing on quicker releases and frequent but painless updates. They have also forced them to think what the user really needs rather than what they think is good for the user.

And second, certain disruptive technologies [AJAX, RSS etc]. AJAX has shown that the richness of the desktop applications can be achieved with web applications also. RSS and Atom standards have made syndicating data [both in and out] relatively painless. Windows Vista will have RSS integration built into the OS itself, allowing application developers to use the incoming data in a myriad of ways we probably cannot dream about. But the best thing is that RSS today seems to be becoming a standard in which a considerable number of major players are investing in (except Google).

It is with this background that one has to see Microsoft's unveiling of their new live.com service. At the outset, one would be lulled into believing that this is just a clone of another Microsoft site start.com. In fact, the later is much better site with support for Firefox also present. The new site is half baked – not very stable. But it seems Microsoft is finally entering the world where Google seemed to be the only player. And a brief tour of what the Live service will offer in future will leave no pretensions about the scope of this endeavor or the fact that MS is entering the space in a big way. (That the half baked release might come back to bite them, as Joel here says, is a completely different matter.)

These steps are however small steps in the grand dream of finally allowing the user to have everything as a service rather than handing him the entire product in one shot. Everything in this world should be rentable, and more so those things whose frequency of change is high – like software. How it happens can yet be conjectured? Will the browser be the new OS? Or will desktop apps make a comeback? But the end result is can probably be taken for granted.

Google on the desktop

In the last few days Google launched two applications which I think are indicative of it's long term ambitions viz. the version 2 of its Desktop search utility and its new Instant Messenger.

For too long the desktop and the web have been considered separate domains, meeting only when it is inevitable. Google's gambit now seems point to a future where these become one domain – erasing from the user's mind the concept of local and global information. When Google launched its first version of the desktop search tool, it was seen by many as an upstart trying to ruffle the feathers of a giant. With the current arrivals Google had demonstrated its sustained interest in this area.

First to be released was the newer version of the desktop search. This tool however goes much beyond a mere desktop search; it gives you updates from your subscribed feeds and gets to you the latest news snippets, weather reports and stock prices. And they call it desktop search!! It is more like an aggregation tool – though not very intelligent – for information from various sources, both on and off the local machine. And all available to the user on a simple search. It gives a new meaning to MRU (Most Recently Used) lists – tracking effectively web pages, applications, documents recently used and making it very visible (contrary to Microsoft's MRU list which accessed by going to Document's list in the Start Menu). And all in a neat sidebar, expandable at will. This sidebar I believe will be the long term competitor of the famous Start Menu of Microsoft.

And then Google Talk. Despite its apparent immaturity in face of existing alternatives, this might well be Google's biggest release so far. Mainly because here Google is trying probably for the first time to enter into a domain where there are entrenched players. Innovativeness, for so long, the USP of many of its applications does not help here. What is interesting here is that PR strategy of Google seems to be pitching GT more against something like Skype rather than against Yahoo or MSN messenger. The ability to call over Internet is projected to be its USP and this article throws some light on these intentions. Keeping with Google's history, we might soon see a more elaborate and feature rich version of the current application not too far ahead.

When Google came out with GMail, it was yet another web based email service. Not any longer. Developments – including the current ones – clearly indicate that your GMail login might soon be your identity on the web. It would allow a user to seamlessly integrate varied actions into a coherent workflow. Think of you searching for a local florist who does home delivery. You search on Google and send him a mail. The agency on receiving your mail gives you a call on your Google Talk to take your order. This flow is possible today but not seamless. One has to switch between applications and worry about compatibility and other hassles that have got nothing to do with the business in hand.

Lastly, what does this mean for the MS and Yahoo. It is my view, that the belief in MS is that since the operating system is theirs, they will write the best applications for it. It is neither surprising nor illogical. However application development is much more than just getting the optimum performance from the OS and more so when the applications are web based. More and more people today are realizing this fact; and it is for this very reason that Microsoft Vista will be eagerly awaited by many. It is seen by many as MS riposte to Google's advances on the desktop.

Yahoo on the other hand seems to do its business on the web, completely ignoring the desktop. This policy will gain hold ground as long as WWW remains the most reliable, elegant and ubiquitous way of sharing content. But this might soon be a thing of the past; if Hello and Picasa like applications have their say.

While the road ahead for Google is neither clear nor without thorns, it is taking its first steps boldly. Creativity and innovativeness have been its elixir for so long, but how much forward can they take it in this endeavor where battle lines are much more clearly drawn remains to be seen. As for me, I have started waiting for the Google Browser.

A Simple World??

Is technology making this world an easier place to live in? Abhijeet recently put up a post with his thoughts on the subject. I had some time ago also put my thoughts on what the people really need from the IT industry.

However the recent blog of Abhijeet did make me think some more on this topic. It is true that technology today is moving at a breakneck pace, and even truer that not many of these innovations reach the man on the street – definitely not in a place like India. This time I when I went home I did a simple experiment – to check how simple the things are when it comes to computers.

Google prides itself on being the single stop to search information. I told this to my father – who refuses to do anything with computers, saying it makes his life complicated – and asked him to try it out. What I realized after this was that even for a simple action like typing out some words and hitting on 'search' there is a lot of implicit knowledge that a person needs to have. He needs to know that buttons are the equivalent of switches which have to hit upon to produce some actions, also to know which button to push. He queried about what exactly is the 'I am feeling lucky' thing, and I explained that to him and then he asked me why is it needed. The way he saw it was that people like him would have more confusion trying to figure out which button to hit. And then I asked myself, how many times have I used that feature? Is it a necessity or is it just a way of exposing your geek quotient? This simple experiment made me realize yet again, that how far are today's applications are from being intellectually accessible to the common man.

It has also become fashionable for people to brand anyone as inane and bucolic based on his comfort level with the latest gizmos. What they fail to understand are that others have different things which interest them and not gadgets. What they fail to see are that these things have not become interesting enough; they do not give enough return on investment, in terms of both time and money. Yes, one can do really amazing stuff on a cell phone these days but only after spending 3 days checking out its features. Who has that kind of time these days?

And then there is the great issue of money. Today technology at least in India is an elitist passion. The latest cell phone would probably cost a average middle class Indian 3/4ths of his annual salary. A decent desktop would cost him 3-4 months in wages. How much can money affect the propagation of technology? A lot would be my answer. The case to quote here would be the telecom revolution in India. 10 years before, families used to stay up late because after 11 p.m. the rates were 1/3rd. And then at 11 all the lines would be busy and people would end up waiting for days to talk to someone. Today any call at any time within 500 kms is a local call. Pricing slabs are gone. There is talk of making the calls within the country as local. Upshot being even my remote village is well connected by telephone. And telecom with all these strides has still not permeated the lower strata of society.

Coming back to the real question, if usability and cost are the real demons why are we fighting other battles.

Any latest technological revolution, is brought about by people who understand the technology. For these people it is extremely difficult to sit in the place of an average person who has no clue about what this thing is. I being a developer face this problem everyday. The moment I start thinking of the user, it opens a can of worms and my task appears insurmountable. And I more often than not end up making a lot of implicit assumptions about the state of the end user. However what is heartening is that today most of the big players realize that usability is a big ticket item and they are spending considerable time and effort doing that.

As for the cost thing, they are coming down but slowly. The system I brought 2 years back for Rs. 50K is today available for 25-30K. Though not exactly accessible a reduction by almost half in price is not something that has to be scoffed at. The problem however is that the very latest system even today would cost 50-60K. So the reduction in price is also seen as depreciation rate of the product. Sometime back I realized for most of the tasks of a everyday user you do not need a latest system. Unless you are doing programming or are heavily into gaming you do not need the latest P4.

And lastly about the rat race and the quest for truth. What he terms as rat race I term as evolutionary selection. The best will survive and the rest will perish. And as for truth, it does not come to you, you go in search of that. Hence the need to keep doing things, keep innovating hoping that this idea will hit the target. There is no other way.

The bottom line, things are not hunky dory and picture perfect, but the movement is towards the right direction.

Two stories …

One: Adobe and Macromedia to merge

The $3.4 bn buyout of Macromedia by Adobe, raised a few initial questions. First of which is where is the synergy going to come from? And, the second what are two of the least web-friendly companies together going to do?

After some research it is evident why atleast for macromedia this seems to be a win situation. It has for long been trying to push Flash/Dreamweaver combine as a authoring tool for websites. Integration with Adobe products, clearly will be able to leverage these brands – considering that Adobe has a huge presence in the personal information(documents, images, graphs etc) viewing and manipulation space. The above mentioned suite and Adobe products thus are in complete synergy giving the user an almost end-to-end product in terms of development, transformation and publishing their personal information.

I said almost , because publishing and sharing information is a forte of neither of these corporations. And this brings us to my second question , and to the fact that to successfully and seamlessly achieve the above operations one needs to be web friendly. Desktop computing is still here and will be there to stay for some time. But its days are running out. Players like Google, Yahoo and numerous others are trying each day to get user experience on the web as close to that of the desktop experience. It is here I believe that the new conglomerate will face its real challenge.

Two: Google unveils personalised search and saved searches.

I have never remembered any urls. All I need is the Google search keyword. And with this latest offering I do not have to remember those either. Google saves up all my searches and allows me to search on them, refine my future searches on these saved queries and generally freeing my (costly !!) memory space for better things. Indeed a very cool offering but again this might backfire on Google, as sometime back GMail threatened to do.

As Google brings the web closer to an average user , they seem to be largely ignoring issues of privacy and security which is so dear to the advanced user. For example, since all my searches are saved on the Google servers, what stops me from imagining that all this data is replicated on a CIA server. This is literally the main course for conspiracy theorists who started on GMail. Google already is turning into the Big Brother . In fact I haven't yet found out how to turn off the search saving in case I turned it on just for curiosity.

There is I believe a more fundamental problem with this. The engine gives backs the search results based on my past search history . In order to control the effect of my past on my present queries, I have learn a few more gestures which takes somewhat the basic simplicity of Google. More gestures are definitely unavoidable with the introduction of so many new features but the simplicity of the user experience is what got Google its admirers in the first place and under no circumstances should they lose it.

The real challenge to Google is today probably will be getting along what Sergei Brin thinks "is not evil" and what the world thinks is not evil.

Yahoos’ got its mojo back …

Vibhanshus' blog had this interesting link posted …

http://www.gigaom.com/2005/03/26/how-yahoo-got-its-mojo-back/

What the author says about the Google hyper-publicity and the relative anonymity of Yahoo's achievments in its comparisons is more or less true. What however is the USP of Google's offerings is the fact that Google aims to change the way we as users of their solutions do things. Before Gmail the only way to organize your mail was to put them in the folder. Gmails' initial publicity might have been due to the 1Gb gimmick but it was threading of mails and the ability to search rather than organize which would have bought over most of people into the Google camp.

Googles' paradigm is that every piece of information in this world should be searchable. To this end they try to change user behaviors, user expectations via their apps. This need not always however be successful. But Googles' main thrust area still remains basic search over which everything seems to be built. What is a similar core area for Yahoo? Whatever headstart it had in the search market it has already lost it to Google. It is now constantly playing a catching up game. It is in this respect that the companies differ. While Google leads on its core areas, Yahoo follows. And of course market sees the leader, especially if they come with as motley a crew as Google has.

Google Suggest

Couple of days back, Google did it again… Google Suggest, its new offering threw open a whole world of possibilities. The idea is simple, Google added intellisense to its search engine. The webpage now show you what might have intended to type, virtually rendering an older innovation of Google, the "Did you mean this?" page useless.

The intellisense surprised many because of its speed. The service on the best of local machines takes some smart indexing techniques to pull off. Take Visual Studio for instance; it still cannot say its intellisense is good. That Google managed to pull off it in the web scenario is an achievement.

Google Suggest has been dissected and analyzed here …

Blogging and Marketing

The blogs I read generally are on technical issues and working on Windows platforms, I end up reading blogs of people in MS working on the various projects. These provide an insiders view on the various technologies that we are using. A notable feature in these blogs is the openness with which these developers, testers and PMs at MS discuss the various new features and tools coming out of MS in near future and on which they are currently working on.

It seems everybody who is anybody blogs in MS. And reading their blogs one gets a preview of the products in the pipeline that no official white-board or demo will ever provide. They discuss the good things (mostly) and bad things (sometimes) on their blogs about their features. As a result I personally now know what is coming out on VS 2005, in C# 2.0 and in Longhorn. I read the Joel on Software article stating how MS, by bringing in a new SDK (Avalon) in Longhorn and doing away with backward compatibility with older SDKs is going to drive away developers from the Windows platform.

My belief now is that blogs coming out from MS will to a degree stem this rot if it happens at all. Once a developer has access to the design considerations that have gone into the tools he is considering using, it gives him a better hang of the whole thing and he will be much more comfortable in using them. Such issues that will probably never ever pop up in text book. The MS blogs provide exactly that. They can become a resource which in time prove to be as useful to Windows developers as MSDN is today (slightly far fetched).