Archive for category Google
The death of the scrapbook :(
I have been receiving a lot of new year wishes in my scrapbook lately. Usually I like such wishes, however, most of my friends are using 3rd party scripts to send such wishes to every person in in their friends’ list. I do not think its a good idea.
Maybe I am being judgemental, but I think this defeats the purpose of the scrapbook. The whole idea of the scrapbook is to leave teasers or one liners for your friends while you are visiting their profiles. And maybe for people you do not know yet but want to know more. Its a great way to start a conversation with a total stranger on orkut.
With these 3rd party scripts (in which their own link supersedes the scrap), I am afraid that the charm of the orkut scrapbook is dead. I do not feel like checking my scrapbook when I see that I have a new scrap. Whats the use of wasting time when I will only end up deleting that scrap?
Google will have to definitly take some action for this. Else this will soon become another medium for spam and useless forwards.
Where are we going?
Sometimes I just wonder where are we all heading ?
Now I am obviously not thinking in philosophical terms and talking about tech here. When I turn around and look back at the year which has almost passed away, I see:
- A top notch software giant release a newer version of its operating system which is inferior to its own predecessor.
- Another software & hardware giant announce & release the invention of the year but soon become defensive about it and is now indulged in a cat & mouse game with a handful of god sent angels.
- A company ubiquitously called the synonym of the web releases an open source mobile platform which might make the mobile industry a little less “evil” but is certainly not a breakthrough (as expected from it).
- The Indian guy which gave a software giant the then invention for the web is challenging the same giant (now a copy-cat) with his another breakthrough invention.
These were the major news in the tech world which managed to stick in the feed xmls for the longest amount of time. I do not think that the motivation behind all the above was pure innovation. I see the 2 frogs in a well story going on here. Everyone is concerned about the competition so much that much of their resources are wasted in keeping pace with their competitors. Imagine what it would be like if all their resources went into pure innovation !
This reminds me of my first ever blog post :). Why do we compete ? Why can’t we just go our own way and do whatever we are supposed to and want to? This this this & this will tell you what I am talking about.
C’mon guys ! Its high time wake up ! Rise above the obvious stuff & make us feel proud that we were born in this time !
Happy Diwali!
Happy Diwali!
This is the message I saw when I logged into orkut today :). This inadvertently brought a smile on my face.
The message appears in the header on the top where you have the site nav and is fairly ignorable. Apparently, the message also has some action associated with it which I was unable to test on the slow GPRS connection on my iPhone :(.
Things like these mean a lot to tech nerds like me. It shows that the big giants are paying attention to the vast traffic that hits their servers from India. India (read Indians) is undoubtedly a major consumer of web services trolling around the web. And its high time that the service providers support customization for India. Google started with support for Hindi across all its services and the state of the art Google indic translator revolutionized the way people type in Hindi. Yahoo followed with Yahoo India maps (http://in.maps.yahoo.com -copy & paste as there is no insert hyper link feature in WordPress’ iPhone version).
Now Google is gearing up with Android which I am sure will support i18n. There are rumors for an Indian version of Amazon as well!
This will bring a new paradigm in Internet awareness in India. I can foresee more and more homes signing up for broadband connections.
With customized content for the most dynamic market in the world, the opportunities are endless.
A very Happy Diwali to all of you !
[UPDATE] Clicking on the “Happy Diwali” link on the top changes the CSS! The specially designed CSS for Diwali looks great on orkut ! Thank you Google !
Ojax
So, finally Google did it. We have AJAX based orkut.
The Profile tabs (social, professional and personal), the scrapbook etc. in orkut are now AJAX based. This means that it would be more fast, more interactive and **probably** we will get more “No donut for you” messages.
Well, lets drop the last part and we have a new web2.0 contender! orkut is undoubtly Google’s biggest success after {ofcourse} its search engine and the Gmail.
Everybody is found orkutting now-a-days. Be it office, school or college. similar to “Google”, the noun “orkut” has also graduated to be a verb. God knows how many grammatical mistakes Google is gonna make! But I guess the world can live with some of these mistakes 😉
With scrap becoming the *in* thing, we see people excited to exchange scraps even if they sit next in the office! They find it more exciting to scrap than to call or IM or email. Despite the fact that the scraps are visible to everyone, people like to use them for conversations. Now this is what I call **social networking**.
All in all, orkut has come out to be a clear winner in this social networking thing.
Looking forward to more such grammatical mistakes…