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Archive for December, 2005

Web 2.0 Apps I Couldn’t Live Without

December 31st, 2005
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Drawing inspiration from this Techcrunch posting on the Web 2.0 darlings that we all have so got used to living with, here is my list :

  • Bloglines : The original RSS/XML News/Feed reader. Many may not like it’s oh-so Web 1.0ish look and feel but one thing is for sure, this is meant to be a Feed Reader and it does this job absolutely well. It may lack things like tagging and so on, but hey, this is supposed to be Web 2.0 right … thing will evolve (I hope they are listening)

    Having seen and used the other alternatives such as Kinja and Rojo, I still went back to good ‘ol Bloglines. And, it also has a sexy little Mobile feed reader to boot

  • GMail : The one that perhaps started it all … AJAX goodness, perpetual Beta, Invite only, Keyboard shortcuts, Labels (aka Tagging). Webmail has never been the same again after GMail

    People may have gripes about it, but for me … this is my primary email service. Period !

  • del.icio.us : Bookmarking and discovering has never been the same after I came across del.icio.us, just about an year ago. Goes to show what a single person can do with an idea. Hope the Yahoo! acquisition only makes this better
  • Flickr : IMHO the one that started the Tagging revolution. How simple, how cool and how so very Revolutionising. Photography is my passion and I trust Flickr to let the world see my work :-)
  • Firefox : There may be some who wonder why this is in a Web 2.0 list … but lets face it … would all this be possible without the superlative experience that Firefox gives. Yuck ! cant think of using these amazing apps on IE
  • Skype : Living a land where International calling is still a tab too expensive, Skype is the answer to most of my non-email communication needs. And the fact that it is now an eBay property only makes it better for me :-)

    VoIP is cool … Skype makes it cooler

    Dont know about the world, but I sure will continue to spend quite a lot of money on SkypeOut

TechCrunch » Web 2.0 Companies I Couldn’t Live Without

Web 2.0, Technology, Internet

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Living Wirelessly

December 28th, 2005
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It has been about 4 months now since I had been using a Blackberry 7730 device as my multi-functional handheld for all my communication needs (Phone calls, SMS messages and Emails on the Go). While I have reservations on calling this Blackberry a handheld (since it is quite largish in size) and not the greatest thing under the sun to handle phone calls, I still have gotten rather hooked to 2 because of the sheer beauty of Wireless Internet access when I am on the move

Since I have a Chauffeur who drives me to & back from work every day (which adds up to about 2.5 hours of total travel in a day), I get to spend time on the device to read all the News and XML feeds in my feed reader

To this purpose Bloglines Mobile quite simply rocks. Bloglines may look a bit ‘uncool’ and may lack a lot of the AJAX goodness that some of the other newer Web 2.0 darlings have, it still does it job and does it really really well. If you havn’t tried it yet, give it a swing

The other cool thing that I find really used is GMail Mobile. I think GMail is perhaps one of the very few non-search winners that Google has got, and though they did take a very long time to launch the Mobile version, they have done a good job out of it

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links for 2005-12-27

December 28th, 2005
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links for 2005-12-26

December 27th, 2005
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links for 2005-12-25

December 26th, 2005
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links for 2005-12-24

December 25th, 2005
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Algorithmic Search Vs Social Search

December 24th, 2005
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Mark Cuban has written a rather interesting post about the debate of whether the future of search would be driven by logic & algorithms or would be social / people driven. In a way, the points he makes are right at the center of the differences in approach being taken by Google and Yahoo!. Google for all practical purposes seems to be relying (atleast for now) on the intelligence & competence they have developed over a period of time and the advanced PageRank / Relevance logic they are known for. They are further using a user’s historical search / click patterns through the use of Personalised search to increase relevance

Yahoo! on the other hand seems to be taking a more diversified approach. They obviously do have their Search engine logic that spits out results, but interestingly are also going down the path of adopting Social Web, ie., using User generated content as a means to get a grasp of what people actually want / express and using this to fine-tune search results (eg., MyWeb 2.0, del.icio.us)

I do not want to do a potential foot-in-the-mouth jumping-the-gun guess here, but my heart says Social Web is the way to go … but then again Mark Cuban does have a good point

To be continued later …

Search, Google
Read more…

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links for 2005-12-21

December 22nd, 2005
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eBay Bloggers - aggregated

December 21st, 2005
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Jason Steinhorn has put together an aggregated blog that consists of select postings being made by various bloggers from eBay (including yours truly)

Head forth to bestofebayblogs.com to catch the action there

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Google ! Where are you heading ?

December 18th, 2005
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To repeat an old cliched statement, we live in interesting times and over the past few weeks, the Search world has only got far more interesting

On one front you have Yahoo! making all the right moves in becoming the leader of the Social Web (with its acquistions of Flickr, del.icio.us and also the investments they are making into MyWeb 2.0)

Then you have Amazon, which in a way has opened up Alexa’s search index and thus sowing the seeds for a thousand other Googles (and some of them might actually implement a much better Search ranking algorithm than Google’s PageRank) and sowing the seeds for verticalization of search (ie., people may NOT come to Google for all their information search needs)

Then you have Microsoft’s Bill Gates stating that he is open to sharing Ad revenues with users. This is a classic Microsoft move, much like what happened years ago when Microsoft decided to make IE free and thus nailing Netscape. In this case, by making this rather blod statement, Gates has signalled his intentions of taking a bite out Google’s main revenue stream - Search advertising. Sure, Google will still make money out of search in the future, but, if they are forced to share parts of it with users in some way or another, the 400+ $ stock price looks very very shaky

And finally, here you have another very very dumb move from Google. Picking up a 5% stake in AOL (uh! are still around & kicking) for 1 bn $ in return for preferential placement of AOL links in the search restults page (yuck!), Technical assitance to AOL in Search Engine optimizing their pages (why dont they make that public knowledge ?)

It is interesting to note that Microsoft had apparently nixed as unethical the proposal for preferential treatment in Search results

Where is all this taking Google ?
It is common knowledge that most of their launches in the recent page (Google Groups, Google Reader, Google Base, Google Accelerator, Google Analytics, Google Print, Blogger etc) have just NOT been the kind of successes that Google is known for (and some of them like Accelerator are pure failures). In fact, other than AdWords/ AdSense and Maps (& to a small extent GMail), i’d be hard pressed to think of more success stories from Google

And with this move, they run the risk of screwing up their Search Advertising program

Crazy, Nuts, Bananas … what else can I say ?
Would the GOOG stock plummets on NASDAQ on monday ? If it does, it is the best possible sign that times they are a chagin’ !!!

More opinions unfolding on tech.memeorandum.com and threadwatch.org

Via John Battelle’s Searchblog

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