Year: 2008

  • One Stop Shops

    I’ve always had a soft corner for Rediff, perhaps because, once upon a time, it was the site that led me to new things on the internet. First it was email, and though I had the eudora and usa.net and a few other mailboxes too, this was the one most frequented and used. Then it was blogs. My first blog was thanks to Rediff again, they got me curious with the messages on the homepage, more than 5 years back. And though I did sulk with them later for taking away a favourite id of mine in an upgrade that happened a few years back, and switched to blogger because of the code wrestling matches they made me go through, like I said, Rediff is still special, a brand that I hold in high regard.

    So it was wonderful to find that they’d done a :p to the strict media portal outlook and introduced Orkut and Facebook feeds inside their mailbox. Yes, it is a great bit of innovative thinking, but nothing stops it from being copied by others. So they can’t stop there, they have already taken steps to integrate iShare, I wonder if having newsfeeds inside the Inbox area makes sense, like perhaps an iGoogle. Rediff is also active on the mobile scene (they even , so if they can move fast, they can actually do a lot of innovations quickly, thanks to their numerous services, and oodles of content.

    And it looks like they are moving fast – they have already invested in Vakow, an sms sharing site, and one that I know a lot of people are using to update on Twitter. Interesting. A mobile based microblogging platform should be fun. But the big news was at proto.in, when they announced their developer platform. What is great is not just the announcement, but the fact that it was announced at proto and not just as some PR release. Rediff is being sensible, and thats good news for the Indian internet scene. Ouch at this allegation though. (via webyantra)

    Meanwhile, the guys who had massive success when they opened their API, had a surprise for me when I logged in today morning. And that was the new Facebook design. While the Home page is more a design reorganisation than anything conceptual, the Profile page is a totally different story. Well, its actually profile pages. From home, a click on your name (as opposed to profile earlier) takes you to the first of the four pages – Wall, where you can use filters for others’ posts and yours, and has your basic profile and friends as well. The Info page has all the details that used to be Information, Group and Pages. Photos are the next page and the last is ‘Boxes’, all the apps you’ve been adding, though I did see a few apps (common) on all pages. Are they Facebook’s own? I doubt that though.

    The important part is that it looks like a deviation from the earlier social networking promise. Though that remains, this seems increasingly like a Twitter and more possibly Friendfeed like direction. This was something that was visible sometime back when a ‘+’ sign could be seen near all news feeds, encouraging readers to start conversations. That soon became a very conspicuous ‘Comment’ tab.

    While I like all this, since it gives me more chances at conversations with ‘real’ friends, (there is only about a 20% overlap with my Twitter friends) I wonder if this is a regression as far as keeping the conversation within Facebook goes. If Facebook provides all the features that say, a Twitter and Friendfeed does, would you be okay with spending the lion’s share of your virtual time within Facebook?

    until next time, the rise of socialism 🙂

    PS. This is the 100th post on this blog :D. Thanks, all the commenters and the silent types. 🙂

  • Burning Issues

    While checking out the classifieds, he wondered why anyone would apply for a job selling ‘Cease Fire’ to homes. Offices were fine, but would people buy fire extinguishers for home? He was startled out of his reverie by the loud sound of the transformer exploding outside, and the thick smoke coming from his burning adaptor.

    until next time, quickfire answers

  • The Grand

    It’d been quite a while since I’d visited The Grand, so on this trip home – Cochin, I’d decided to give it a try, especially since the food there has always gotten rave reviews, and it was about time I made my own judgment. It is located on MG Road, since 1963,  so its a landmark for most auto/taxi guys.

    We reserved a table for 8pm, and were told that they wouldn’t hold it beyond 8.10. Fair. The crowd actually started coming in after 8.30. The menu is exhaustive with separate sections for Indian, Kerala, Far East, Continental, Chinese and so on.

    We ordered a velvet chicken and corn soup (2/3) and a Talomein Soup. Pappadams on the house while you wait. 🙂  The former is a chinese preparation – chicken broth flavoured with dry sherry, and the latter is a combination of shredded chicken, carrot and celery garnished with spring onion. The (velvet chicken) soup was quite good, thicker than I expected, and quite sufficient in terms of quantity. For the main course, we decided to go all Kerala.. ‘when in kerala….’ , and so ordered a Malabar Kozhi cury, an Erachi Varattiyathu, a Meen pollichathu, and a Tharavu Mappaz. Thats four kinds of living beings – chicken, beef, fish and duck respectively.  🙂

    So, the Malabar Kozhi Curry is a spicy North kerala dish, which turned out to be only moderately spicy, that was a disappointment. The Erachi Varattiyathu is cooked beef,  with onions, but with enough flavours to keep it from being bland. Better. The Meen pollichathu (you have a choice of seer or pearlspot) is fish with (usually) a very spicy paste around it. Its actually the paste that gives this dish its character. However, this time it was just some sort of onion preparation and ended up very average. The saving grace was the Tharavu Mappaz (they have a ‘duck’ festival happening here) which was duck cooked in coconut milk. This one was yummy, and the ‘chatti’ (earthenware) that they brought it in did add to the effect, I think. We ordered appams to go along with all, and though I was tempted to have a Kerala porotta, the appams were tasty enough to discourage any steps in that direction.

    But more than the food, which was reasonably good, though not the spectacular I had hoped for, it was the service that disappointed. They took such a long time bringing the main course that I had to ask them if I should be back the next morning to collect the order. (Yeah, I seem to be a bad service magnet these days) But they were pretty good in a very mercurial way, refilling glasses on time, bringing appams alongwith the additional order (not earlier and letting them get cold) and so on.

    All of the above cost us Rs.1200, which was reasonable that 4 people were quite well fed. When in Cochin, its worth checking out for some authentic Kerala food.

  • Increased Mobility

    He was surprised to be told that he was showing off. Wasn’t it a regular custom to send an sms to announce a mobile number change? Of course, this time there was a twist to it. The message said, “My mobile number has changed from W910i to E71. No, you don’t need to save it”

    until next time, numeric only? 😉

  • Buzz Off

    Even after building an entire army of twitter tools, the mania still continues. Hopefully its only a matter of time before the tweeding happens 🙂 Meanwhile, this is a fairly good top 5 list. And since we have a new player in the social scene, a bit of attention has been diverted there too. So it wasn’t surprising to read about Moopz, a tool that tries to reduce the noise in Friendfeed. And its not the first of its kind, there are already other entities, and I’m sure more are in the pipeline.

    Now, as an (almost) twitaholic I’d always agree that any tool which helps reduce the noise would be a blessing. I haven’t used friendfeed as much, but from what I have seen, noise is an issue there too, though I have always wondered about the term ‘noise’ since we are free to choose those we wish to connect to. I think my views have not changed much since I wrote this. And since its difficult for me to categorise noise, I’ll only say that I am missing out on some conversations, and perhaps its more a question of subjective time management than anything else, and creating ‘algorithms’ that work for you.

    And that train of thought makes me wonder whether it would be a good idea to have some sort of a shake up of current services, that helps us better organise our conversations. Something that filters the buzz  conversations we are interested in from the random ones. I realise that it is a flawed proposal to begin with since each service has its own die hard fans. I, for one would love for social networks like a Facebook to be integrated into these social media aggregators, including friendfeed, because there are still conversations I have only on Facebook, since there is already a group of people there, who I have connected with over time,  and who are interested in the same things I am. So how about services that combine all existing ones and then provide some additional value? Well, there already are aggregators (will talk about a few in a while), but I’m not sure if they add to the noise or reduce it. Friendfeed was an aggregator, and now we have aggregators that include Friendfeed as one of the services. Is that an improvement?  So, is it better to just stick on to a couple of services and derive maximum benefits from the conversations that happen there. Yes, I agree that not all conversations need to happen there, but what about the ‘cost-benefit’ between the number of services used and the ‘noise’ you have to wade through to reach the conversations?

    Meanwhile, I read another new entity that aggregates Jaiku, Twitter, Pownce, Friendfeed, and Tumblr. Its called Posty and seems to be interesting. (via The Inquisitr). And though I am yet to utilise it completely, this one – Swurl seems much more interesting, one because it includes Facebook, and two, because it also automatically became a follower on Twitter. Smart! Do check out the timeline feature, I could see what I was upto in 2003!! Wow. Yeah, i know my archive can tell me that, and there is no comment feature yet, but still Wow!! 🙂

    As the services increase, the conversations also do. But does the converse also have to be true?

    until next time, fed up?