Thursday, November 22, 2007

Googler’s nabbed by facebook….


Will Facebook UI gets better than ever…?

As TechCrunch Reports, facebook is capturing the google employees.
Facebook is allegedly grabbing google employees. How and why? Because google become calm, and crossed his halfway of his age, while facebook have a cool offers for goolge employees.

According to sources, good number of top performers have made the switch over the last two months. Googler’s expect to continue seeing at least two to four more leave for facebook each month. Know facebook is targeting skim of the team. Many of the googler’s are leaving, or being actively recruited.

A steady stream of google employees are making the switch to facebook, and competition for top college graduate is fierce as well. Facebook just seems to have a hell of a lot “sexier” offer than Google.

Good, Maybe facebook will get a face lift and get a better. If only for the face lift, facebook is grabbing googler’s ..it seems to making competition with google. If face lift is the only reason then here is a good UI company.
user experience, user interaction technology "For Facebook and Google reference

Anyhow, by these competition employee are getting a hell lot sexier then ever…cross the finger…and pray for this competition.

Monday, November 19, 2007

Flickr by place


You can find a new way to browse the worlds happening.

Flickr, Yhaoo Inc’s online photo-sharing site, introducing a set of mapping features, this week, that makes it easier to find photo based on their location.

“Places” the new service identify latest hot-spots on global map for photo contribution.

Flicker is going to start on Monday his new service “places” where web user can browse photos from millions of geographically located photos on the site www.flickr.com.

Web user can now search photo that might interest them, by more than 100,000 geographical places names. More of the countries, city and regions have their own featured pages.

User can click on a category tag, that will take them to selection of photo, giving them a glance of other flicker users what they find interesting on that tag.

Now the site will give more local appeal to users, as well as attract prospective travelers seeking to get beyond photos of landmark for places they plan to visit

Flickr is increasing new location pages per week.
Places will be available in the eight languages that flickr now offers—English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Korean and traditional Chinese.

Ref:Reuters

Thursday, October 25, 2007

Skyrocketing value of online communities


It’s surprising about Microsoft corp’s investment in Facebook Inc. - $15 billion for 3 ½ year old internet hangout, or the rare shun of online leader Google Inc.

Microsoft paid $240 million price for 1.6% stake in Facebook. This clear the view, world largest software maker, crudely wanted to deepen its relationship with a startup that didn’t have $200 million in annual revenue.

By stamping the deal, Microsoft had loosed previous high-stake biding battles to taking stake in AOL, internet ad service DoubleClick Inc, and taking the ownership of online video sharing pioneer YouTube. Microsoft finally cooked-up Google by taking the stake of Facebook Inc.

Microsoft’s investment, increase the value of online communities like Facebook, Orkut – a place where people look for dates, share music videos and photos, connect with family and friends.

News corp. in 2005 paid $580 million for outright ownership of MySpace.com. Microsoft established the current market value of Facebook to $15 billion, by his investment in the same.

Although Myspace remains the largest social network, while there is so many social site for different activity, like Digg (community-based popularity website), delicious (social bookmarking), Dekoh (Sharing photo, music, books etc direct from there desktop without uploading), Flicker (photo sharing), Orkut (social interacting website) and many more….

Google’s current social network (Orkut) has seen relatively good success on the globe.

32 year old company Microsoft becoming more internet savvy by his successful courtship of Facebook.

Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Test your sanity against online players...MySpace (social networking website)


MySpace Games is expected to launch in 2008, the companies said.

Privately held Oberon Media was founded in 2003 and backed by Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Oak Investment Partners and Lehman Brothers.
MySpace games is expected to launch in 2008.

MySpace formed a partnership with Oberon Media to create a new gaming channel on the website. Oberon Media is privately held company founded in 2003, backed by Golman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers and Oak investment partners.

Users can choose their favorite games from list of games and can add them to their WebPages.

Ref:reuters

Thursday, July 5, 2007

Free Calls!!.



Well getting her number is definitely a big deal but her 'Jaxtr id', could be an easy one. Since their Public Launch the traffic is soring new heights every day.


It is really late to write about Jaxtr and it features, so I would just let you watch this video :



The interesting part about this is the traffic, though it has very recently launched in India
but the most of the traffic comes from India around 32.7% of the complete traffic.

I got the email about Jaxtr in the morning and I forwarded it to some 236 friends. I was chatting with few of them and I discovered that many of them had forwarded the invitation to their complete mailing lists.

The motivation is simple free calls!!!

Wednesday, June 27, 2007

Facebook Users Vs Mayspace Users


Ran across this really cool comparison between the users of Facebook and Myspace by Adam Ostrow. According which Facebook is a preferred place for good kids and Myspace for art fags, punks, emos, goths, gangstas, queer kids. Well Beyondwww would agree to that fact that Facebook is the fastest growing Social Networking site today with over 100,000 new registrations every day and would be the biggest very soon. It would be still early to conclude the comparison as Myspace is still the largest.

Everybody has a beautiful MySpace page and all the pages in Facebook look the same. There are few more diffences in which Myspace is ahead of Facebook, but 85% of the college crowd is in Facebook. So until we give some more time its difficult to categorize the users of both the Networking sites.

Friday, June 22, 2007

Google Gears Vs Adobe Apollo ??

Overtly dramatic title, aye??? The whole world is talking about Adobe Integrated Runtime (started the buzz as Apollo) and Google Gears. So, why shouldn't we too talk about that. In one of the blogs written by Adobe employees I found an earnest but futile attempt to sell a product that no doubt has elegance and finesse but falls flat when it comes to value proposition it offers.

I have nothing against Gears or AIR, they are working towards the same cause as we are but I still consider them as a different league altogether. They don't share the same philosophy and certainly not the same route to a common goal that we are all trying to achieve.

The Common Goal

Suddenly there has been a sharp rise in offline applications, RIA platforms, AJAX, Web 2.0 etc. And thanks to Google and Adobe, people are taking it seriously. The common goal is to provide a desktop based Rich Internet Applications platform, that allows applications to run in offline mode and have the flexibility to sync-up when online.

This would ensure a lot of end-user control on the applications making them more interactive and usable by the ever growing Internet user community. All the major players have acknowledged this sudden trend as an important and necessary step towards growing their market share and are fiercely competing to outrun their contemporaries.

Identifying the Best Way to this goal

There is still a bit of a disarray as a standard has not yet been formed and all the players in the market wish (along with working hard on it) that their's becomes the de facto standard. Who will win the race will be largely dependent on who comes out with a simple and yet robust idea, crosses the threshold visibility early enough and offers a value proposition that no one can deny being genuine.

AIR talks about providing yet another runtime, after JRE and .NET, to be installed on our machines and then to be maintained version after version after version. They are have ignored the importance of browser based application by writing it off as :

...runtime environment that allows you to use existing web technology for apps on the desktop is an obvious next step from building desktop like Ajax applications that seem to be awkwardly confined to a browser window. (Ryan)

Also, their focus remains strongly on making elegant UI simpler to create. But to what end are they pursuing this simplicity beats me. What makes an application worthy is its business proposition, functionality, ease of deployment and availability. These are the issues one has to focus even while providing a platform for end-users. Or a platform that focuses on making online stuff available offline. Both developers and end-users appreciate the need of having offline environments but how far is making classy UI building platforms going to help them. That is something I have strong doubts about.

The only thing that they talk about which makes sense to me is using existing web technologies. Taking away the pain of going through an entirely new learning curve. Incorporating GWT is also a wise decision and even using Flex can enhance the applications' look and feel but trying to belittle the importance of browser might become a cause to regret later. A hint at that is, Adobe's Acrobat Reader and Flash have both been plugged in to the browsers which enhanced their popularity.


Gears as of now, according to me, is playing it too easy and making things slightly more dicey. Even though a noble concept, it doesn't sound like a fully thought through one.

The configuration has to be taken care of by the end-user or developer, a database support is required just to cache resources and provides no other flexibility. The entire sites would require to be re-written using gears api in order to be made available offline. There is no duplication, yet the decision for making content available offline has to be made at the time of designing the site and it certainly doesn't sound the best solution for making offline availability possible for websites.

Gears is just a tool for creating applications.There is no platform as such that might take away the housekeeping pains and let the developers focus on just building applications. The framework sounds 'just ok'.

Road Ahead

I would rank AIR much superior than Gears in terms of utility and flexibility. However, both of them have to understand that it's the end-user and then the developers who are governing the market today. You can't simply make things sell just because you are huge brand name. There has to be something special and long lasting to make it big on the popularity list.

Wednesday, June 20, 2007

Yahoo/4 = Myspace

Wondering is it worth that much???
Well Peter says its a bad deal. Till some extend I also agree with the fact that they missed out on crucial buys like YouTube and FaceBook and Myspace might not be worth quarter of $ 37 billion. But it all depends what do they plan after that? May be Yahoo has a concept which needs Myspace collaboration. Any way its still a rumor so lets wait and watch!!!!

Monday, June 18, 2007

Top 10 Web OSs Reviewed!!

Well the list is huge and you can see more things coming up in the comments section of the post.
The review is definitely a valuable feedback to all the featured products and should help them improvise on their current Web OS venture. the question is how many of them take it seriously and get the required modifications and additions into the market before the others.

Thursday, June 14, 2007

Win a trip for LIfe Time!!

You saw the bus and the bar, now there is prize to win too!!

Adobe calls it the trip of a life time.

Use the AIR beta software to build the most unique Adobe AIR application. Then enter it into the Adobe AIR developer derby for your chance to win a trip of a lifetime or other amazing prizes.

Grand Prize / Best of Show
The Best of Show winner will receive the trip of a lifetime, a travel certificate valued at up to US$100,000, to be used for the travel of your choice!

Five category winners will each receive “The Ultimate Development Environment” to power your Adobe AIR development (and play) for years to come:

  • A Mac Pro 8Core with 4 gigs ram, 1.5 TB (2×75) of storage.
  • (2) Dell 2707WFP 27″ widescreen monitors.
  • (1) one Sony Playstation 3.
  • (1) $200 gift certificate to Amazon.com.
  • (1) Herman Miller Aeron chair.
  • (1) Bose Quiet Comfort 3 noise canceling headphones.
  • (1) copy of Adobe Flex™ Builder™ version 3, Macintosh edition.
  • (1) copy of Adobe Creative Suite 3 Master Collection for Macintosh.
    And one squishy stress ball.

Plus each winner also receives:
A trip and conference pass to the Adobe MAX 2007 annual user conference.
Your application showcased on Adobe.com for the world to see.
Contest open for following categories:

  • Best Business Application
  • Best Community Application
  • Wild Card
  • Grand Prize / Best of Show

This Contest is open to individuals who are citizens or working or studying under a valid visa/permit in the 50 United States (including Washington D.C.), Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Switzerland, France, Germany, Austria, Sweden, Norway, Finland and Denmark, The Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Korea, Singapore, the People’s Republic of China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, India, Portugal, Spain, and Turkey.


The AIR Derby<---------Click me to know more

Adobe is not ( AIR)!!

As the launch(Adobe Apollo-----> AIR) took off on 11th Monday, AIR(Adobe Integrated Runtime) also announced the Bus tour for 18 different cities to make people aware of the things they might require in the near future. The Bus will be covering Seattle, Vancouver, Portland, LA, Dallas, Atlanta, Denver, St Louis, Cincinnati, New York and few more cities.

Well the bus looks some thing like this:





The bus will be wrapped when it goes for the tour so thought of showing it in its initial stages.

Now what happens when the bus reaches Portland?

Well they hit Kells Irish Pub(you want to see that as well):






Who all are invite? Anyone interested in learning more about the AIR.
What happens? A one night conference on Adobe AIR with technical sessions, showcases and discussion.

How much to shell out ? Its free and very much open to you if you are in the city on 12th July, all you need is to register prior your visit.(Please go to Adobe's web site, I cant give you the link here ).
What to Bring? Yourself, laptop, any Flex, HTML and JavaScript apps you want to get running on Adobe AIR. They will provide the beer, Red Bull, coffee, food, XBoxes, schwag, knowledge, venue and bits.

Well I certainly think Dekoh also has things building up at its end. Lets see what have they got to offer except for their incredible product?

Tuesday, June 12, 2007

Adobe AIR(Adobe Integrated Runtime)

The new name for Adobe Apollo is now Adobe AIR(Adobe Integrated Runtime).

Adobe is also announcing a beta version of the runtime, which will include Ajax and HTML support. This means developers can create an Apollo application entirely based on HTML, without using Flash at all.

AIR would be releasing by the end of this year.
AIR and Flex 3 released on Monday.
First time Adobe is simultaneously releasing its programming model and runtime for building rich Internet applications (RIAs) that can be run both on the Web and locally on the desktop.

AIR competes with other so-called Rich Internet Application runtimes, including Microsoft's new Silverlight software and Google Gears and the much talked Dekoh which also supports other web technologies like JSP, Servlets on the desktop.
Dekoh addresses this hole which Adobe has left. Dekoh is a social media platform on the desktop bringing web 2.0 functions like sharing, tagging, commenting, rating and RSS to the desktop.The second difference is Apollo applications run outside the browser, more like desktop applications where as dekoh runs inside the browser....

Apollo also announced a
bus tour in which Adobe will be traveling to 18 cities to perform demos and spread the word on the platform.


Monday, June 11, 2007

Music at your Office Desktop!!

Before I say some thing more, few questions I you need to answer

  • Can you take your iPod to the office?
  • Can you carry your camera phone which has an mp3 player?
  • Can you open raaga.com, youtube.com, or can you download mp3 to your office system?
  • Can you smuggle CDs or may be DVDs into your office premises?
  • Do you think if you could listen to your favorite music, you work efficiency would be hampered?

Well if you are unable to have a 'yes' in your mind while reading this, welcome to my tribe.

May be a solution awaits you saying "Bring Life to Digital Music. Access Your Music from Anywhere ".

I am waiting for the music widget, which I would put on this blog to show off my collections and may be the next time you read some other post of mine you might pull that off to your blog as well.

Thursday, April 19, 2007

First user-generated Web 2.0 awards program

An award program of it own kind.


Here are the 10 categories for the Webware 100:



  1. Browsing: Web browsers, extensions, widgets, and security
  2. Communications: e-mail, chat, VOIP
  3. Community: social networks, groups
  4. Data: search, storage, backup, sharing, and sync
  5. Entertainment: Games and contests
  6. Media: audio, video, photo
  7. Mobile: portable utilities and apps
  8. Productivity: apps, business tools, commerce
  9. Publishing: blogging, web content, design tools
  10. Reference: Mapping, reference works, and education

Well all the 10 categories almost cover web activities going on right now. The products to watch out for.
 
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