Posted 1 year, 9 months ago at 10:23 pm. 0 comments
I have been following how Yahoo’s Open Strategy (Y!OS) has been progressing with a lot of interest. The timing of this post of course couldn’t be worse as Yahoo plans to cut a part of its workforce this week (I am even more concerned since I have a couple of friends at Yahoo and I hope they are okay). But that aside, Yahoo’s new direction with opening up their platform to developers seems to have a lot of potential. Couple that with Yahoo’s very mash-friendly api’s for their properties like Flickr, Maps, Shopping and of course their new search platform, BOSS, and there seem to be enough elements there to make the new Yahoo really interesting. And lets not forget, Yahoo is building Y!OS completely on open source tech and already has a bunch of developers using their open source libraries like the YUI library as well as all the code they have been releasing on their developer centers.
As a developer, its really amazing to see Yahoo putting its future in the hands of developers. There is some aspect of relinquishing control over to the external developers there that I imagine must have been a hard sell.
A nice writeup on Y!OS can be found on Mashable here. In the meanwhile here is an interesting video on Y!OS:
Posted 1 year, 11 months ago at 7:12 pm. 0 comments
I heard about Digg Dialogg this morning from Kevin Rose’s tweet, and checked it out. The idea is pretty cool: Diggers post questions to the guest picked for session and/or digg other questions people have already posted. The guest finally responds to the most dugg questions. The first guest is Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi (her Digg Profile is here, in case you want to add her as a friend).
Looking at her profile is interesting. For one thing, there is a link to the Speaker’s blog. I dont really follow politics as much as I maybe should, and definitely do not follow any blogs, but I did not really imagine a blog for the Speaker. Her other profile on that page is her Facebook profile. I guess its true, everyone is on Facebook.
Back to Digg though, I really do like this format. Going to the questions page, the first questions I saw there were idiotic (”You married? This Digg photo doesn’t do your beautiful face justice. “), but these questions had already been buried. Sorting by the most dugg though brought back some really good questions though. Digg has paired with CNN’s iReport on this one so you can even upload your questions as videos. I have been a big fan of the Digg format and it has been validated even by other sites like Yahoo’s Buzz which do pretty well with more news format (although for whatever reason Netscape’s Propeller didn’t catch on with similar content).
Its been good to see Digg innovate quite a bit recently with an open Digg API, the recent rollout of their new recommendation engine and the Firefox toolbar that I love and which has become the only way I get to Digg stories these days. Oh and the toolbar is completely open source so if you want to grab the source code, you can here.
Anyway, check it out and drop me a comment to let me know how you like it.
Posted 1 year, 11 months ago at 8:08 pm. 0 comments
Just read a rather interesting blog entry by David Heinemeier from 37 Signals (you know, the guy who invented the Rails framework for Ruby). The article titled ”
Don’t be so quick to embrace your own ignorance”, talks about how a lot of people just dont live up to their potential because they do not consider themselves the stereotypical experts in a domain.
Reading the entry I could immediately picture more than a couple of people I know who seem to do that. The other thing I find is a lot which is kind of related is that people who are more than competent in a field undersell themselves in an effort to be modest whereas a converse group of people, blessed with a lot more confidence (and occasionally arrogance) sell themselves enough to seem more competent than the other guy.
I guess being an effective worker is a product of competence and confidence.
Reading David’s blog and his gripe on “for Dummies” books reminded me of this picture I took at my local bookstore a couple of months back:
Anyway, check out the link in the blog entry and the comments thread below, its definitely worth a read.
Posted 1 year, 12 months ago at 9:38 am. 3 comments
Thanks goes to Rob (twitter: robert_francis) for sending me a link to Beth’s blog. I have been reading the entries on this for the last hour and there are so many awesome nuggets here that anyone thinking of social media and online communities can use.
I have traditionally used my blogs as an open notebook for taking notes (Code Zen started similarly, where I could take notes on development), and in the same spirit I am going to note a few good points here:
Questions to ask yourself while building a social network:
* Are you constituents online? If not, why build an online community.
* Are your constituents members of many other social networks and communities? Will they join YET one more? If not, can you leverage connections into the communities and networks they already belong to?
* Are your constituents using mobile devices more than computer based devices? How will this impact participation in more “traditional” online communities?
* Do you really want a community, or are you simply looking for ways for people to access and create content, but they really don’t need/want to interact with each other and form relationships while interacting over time around a topic of shared interest.
What makes for network weaving skills:
* Paying attention and noticing comments and tweets
* Personalized follow up
* Weaving together people
* Saying thank you
Encouraging community behavior:
* Give people a reason to come back, and in the community elements recruit one or two active posters to regularly discuss and comment on new material. - Alex Berger
* Be wary of clique behavior. It always forms, and can be detrimental to community growth and health. It is paramount to your success that the old guard welcomes the new guard. - Alex Berger
* The key is to get alumni influencers involved. If you can get these influencers involved and participating, they will often bring along a number of others. Small colleges use this model as well for alumni relations/fundraising - volunteers from each class do most of the outreach to their peers. - Kevin Martone
There are a lot of other great pointers there, so if you are into social media at all, I strongly encourage you to add this blog to your RSS reader.
There are definitely times I feel like being one step away from being roadkill on the information super-highway. With so much information to keep track of, for a while I have been looking for a tool that could help me with information overload.
For the longest time, all notes I took would be using Notepad and all notes lived in a folder on my machine. I had a couple of subfolders that organized the notes a little but that system started getting flaky pretty fast. So I started looking around for a tool that could help. Back then I was on a Windows XP machine and Karl, a friend of mine, introduced me to ZuluPad. ZuluPad worked for a while and it did solve my immediate need. But, as a user interface developer, I did not enjoy the barebones look of it. It was ugly.
Around that time I somehow got introduced to Google Notebook. Since most of the information I was trying to organize was coming via the browser anyway, having a browser extension with a highlight and clip functionality was really useful. It was no wiki which meant I couldn’t link between parts of the notebook as well as ZuluPad but it was automatically synced between my machines and that was pretty cool (I just found out ZuluPad also has a sync system, I am not sure if it was there when I was using it. In either case, I never used the sync system there).
Google Notebook and I parted ways on offline capability. Notebook just didnt work if you were offline, which I did not know till a what turned out to be unproductive train ride. I hope Google puts that feature in sometime soon though, I still think Notebook was interesting.
In the meanwhile I moved to a Mac and so started looking for Mac tools. There were a bunch of tools that seemed to be okay but I wasn’t looking for something to buy yet, since I get bored of apps soon and wasnt sure how long I would use something once I bought it. I tried VooDooPad for a while but the free version had a page limit which I hit pretty soon so bailed out.
I use Evernote these days and have been fairly happy with it. The killer feature for me in Evernote is the tag based navigation although the navigation seems a little buggy especially when you set up nested tags. Evernote is supposed to be synced as well which is always good to know though I now use just one machine for development. Searching across documents is great. Evernote’s biggest secret sauce is supposed to be Optical Character Recognition (OCR). They talk about how simple webcam shots of your bills etc can be used to organize them since all text will be indexed but honestly I don’t see myself doing that anytime soon. The icing on the cake is the IPhone client which lets you use the IPhone camera and microphone to append to notes as well. Again I haven’t used that but it does give me warm fuzzies.
Evernote is definitely not the perfect note taking tool. The text editor doesnt support even simple elements like lists, forget any advanced formatting, I really wish the documents were wikis rather than simple text, and the AJAX web client was really buggy the last time I tried it. But, right now I have over 50 notebooks in Evernote and they really help keep me organized.
Thats been the quest so far. If you have any tools that help you, do drop a comment here. Also check out this link which lists out the top notes apps for Macs.
Last week I joined Social Browse, another web 2.0 service aiming to be the Twitter for links (see Techcrunch post here) . My profile page on SocialBrowse is here, but you may not be able to access it if you are not in the beta.
SocialBrowse seems an interesting idea but the question is, is it good enough for people to get off the other systems that they use to share links. Just for kicks, I want to talk about the services that I use quite a bit.
First of all, there in my mind there is a clear difference between links I want to archive and go back to later vs. links that I send to friends. There may be overlap but not that often. I primarily use del.icio.us to save links important to me. I used to use google browser sync for Firefox but at some point Firefox 2 started becoming annoyingly slow enough for me to switch loyalties for Safari. Though that moment was brief, and I absolutely love Firefox 3 so far, that did make me use a non-browser-specific app like del.icio.us a little more seriously. Good timing too, since Google has officially declared they will no longer be supporting BrowserSync.
Del.icio.us does have a way to share links with your friends using the for:friendname syntax. However this starts cluttering up my account pretty fast. Especially since my shared links are just silly videos and stuff. Not something I care too much about a week from the day of posting.
As a Twitter user, I follow a lot of links that float around in conversations. They work for the most part. A while back I got into Pownce and I really liked it, it had a pretty clean and well designed interface and came with an Adobe Air app that was pretty well done. For some reason, most of my designer friends gravitated towards Pownce and the developers towards Twitter. But even on Pownce, we never exchanged status updates (well a few did but they were ignored). For the most part, Pownce became a design oriented link share for us. I think the inline image/video previews may have a lot to do with that. But more people got on Twitter and these days my Pownce stream is not that busy. Still the links there are worth archiving, since, well they look so good ;).
Another way I share interesting links is via Digg. Although Digg has a social network feature as well where you can form communities, I do not have enough friends there. But, the way I share links via Digg is a little more convoluted. The links I share there are picked up by different social stream aggregators like Plaxo Pulse, FriendFeed and Facebook. The followup conversations usually happen on those networks.
I was pretty enthusiastic about SocialBrowse. I was really hoping it would be better than Pownce, since for one thing, it would keep the status update chatter out of the link sharing. Some things are really cool. The browser plugin for Firefox brings up updates on the bottom right edge everytime someone I follow posts a link.
There is also a sidebar that brings the linkstream right there, so I dont have to navigate to the site. And tagging links within a small set of available tags make it very easy to find other links within a domain.
The most interesting feature of the browser integration is annotation of google search results web pages with icons of users who have shared that link. That I can see getting pretty useful to filter the more interesting links from others.
But I am not a big fan of the design, its too minimalistic with an unappealing color combination. There is no capability to comment on links shared which is such an obvious interaction. The only communication channel you have available is via email (using a mailto: link, not even an inline form). For a link sharing app not to have comments seems ridiculous. SocialBrowse also doesnt allow you to rate a link. With so many links being shared I would love to be able to filter out only the highest rated in my social circle. Another pet peeve for me is the url for user profiles are ugly and therefore non-intuitive. For example my profile’s url is: http://socialbrowse.com/profile/view/927/. It should be something like socialbrowse.com/arpit or socialbrowse.com/users/arpit.
Either way, I will give SocialBrowse a shot over the next few weeks, maybe there are cool things there that I havent found yet. But again, like most social networks, the value of SocialBrowse is dependent on how many of my friends get on it and right now there are none. I have about 5 invites left to hand out so drop me a comment if you need one.
No other online service out there epitomizes the “Can’t live with it, can’t live without it” sentiment more than Twitter. Considering the amount of downtime Twitter has had recently, its impressive to see Twitter managing to keep as much of its user base as it has (I remain a Twitter addict, you can follow me here). Although that may be changing. A sneak peek into Alexa’s traffic graph for Twitter for the last 6 months reveals a profile that isn’t something the team at Twitter can be too happy about.
But I dont judge the team at Twitter too harshly. For one thing, Twitter was not so much imagined as a conversation engine as a status update app. There is a reason why XMPP or a similar lower level push based protocol is preferred for chat systems than HTTP. If you have a lot of conversations going on, its better that the server pushes them to you than a periodically refreshing HTTP pull. The XMPP based architecture is outlined a little more in this Techcrunch post.
But still, most users have invested a considerable time building a social network on Twitter and we would like to see it work. Maybe they should consider leveraging Google App Engine or Amazon Web Services to deal with the scale issue (although I can imagine that getting expensive and Twitter doesn’t yet have a business model). And with services like Plaxo Pulse and FriendFeed trying to take over the conversation part of Twitter (and other online services), Twitter really needs to get its act together. More than a couple of blogs are now talking about how Twitter’s most recent outage (planned or otherwise) did not stop the conversation with FriendFeed picking up where Twitter left off.
However even these seem, at least to me, threats aimed to have Twitter work better rather than an actual statement of an intent to abandon it. Considering FriendFeed is barely off the ground and has an interaction paradigm very different from Twitter (I go to it a couple of times a day as opposed to Twitter which I have up pretty much all the time thanks to Twhirl ), I am not betting on that yet.
Twitter seems to embody a fundamental concept of Web 2.0: The social network is the content. And migrating that content is hard. But given enough reason, it can be migrated.
Ah, well, at least they have interesting service is down screens:
Posted 2 years, 1 month ago at 10:04 am. 6 comments
Do I really need another blog ?
Well kinda. If you know me personally, you probably know that for the last 2 years Code Zen has been my blog. I started it after a previous blogging fiasco where I was broadcasting my opinions to what turned out to be an audience of one (me). When I started Code Zen, I promised myself I would not use that for my opinions. It was supposed to be merely a repository of my experiments in programming, a place I could keep code I would otherwise lose on my hard disk, and a place to share my discoveries in coding with others developers. As such, Code Zen has been an amazing personal success: It has a steady traffic of about 4500 to 5000 monthly uniques and I have made a lot of friends among developers, some of whom I have met since then and others I really hope to sometime.
But people change with time, and so have I. For one thing I have a lot more opinions today on programming and the social web than earlier (actually when I started blogging, the social web didn’t exist). A few months ago, I realized I had reached a moment of change in my life when I realized I had about 5 more social media blogs than programming blogs on my google reader (from a total subscription of about 130 feeds). I really, really enjoy the social web, pretty much as much as I love programming (and again, if you know me, you know thats saying a lot). And since I had promised I would not share opinions on Code Zen, I needed another channel for it. Also, I am getting really interested in other aspects of the web, getting a lot more into design (web design in particular), etc. Once again, Code Zen seemed like an inappropriate place to put these thoughts.
Hence The ‘Pit Stop. The tagline “Ego Opinion Art and Commerce” is from the Goo Goo Dolls album I love, but also pretty much reflects what this blog is going to be about. Its going to be a lot more personal than my developer blog so having it be the root of arpitmathur.com seemed like a good idea. Also by segmenting my opinions from my blog strictly on programming, you have the option of tuning out of whichever stream you are not interested in :).
Welcome to the ‘Pit Stop :).
[Update: The feed url is http://arpitmathur.com/?feed=rss2 ]
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