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Twitter should count out @replies and @user from status text July 17, 2008

Posted by User Imageindus in : twitter , add a comment

Twitter messages are limited to 140 bytes (not characters, if you are multi-byte speaker!). However, a lot of messages now carry the usernames, either for @replies or for simply refering to @user in the message. As the twitter userbase grows, people would start running out of shorter names like @t, @ev or @1ndus and eventually go the email route having_my_long_name@emailhost.com.

The day is not far when twitter screen names would @mylongname2008. This one takes 10% of the text from 140 available.

At the minimal twitter should count out the @replies and @user from the 140 characters and make that part of the meta-data. 

The API can handle this transparently, It just requires adding a new field called to-user-screen-name in the API.  The API already has all the information for the sender ids, sender screen names, reply-to-user-id, user-id, etc.

 

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WordPress inching towards full CMS capabilities July 14, 2008

Posted by User Imageindus in : Web, WordPress , add a comment

Matt announced WordPress 2.6. Features include:

 

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Afghanistan’s hidden treasures July 5, 2008

Posted by User Imageindus in : Afghanistan, Art, Ganga, India , 1 comment so far

The “care takers” of Afghanistan’s precious antiquities from the ancient era concealed the treasures from Soviets, then taliban. These were feared to be lost; with the help National Geographic society along with Afghanisatan’s National Museum the unearthed trove reveals Afghanistan to be a metling pot and major trading hub where people from “east” brought muslin, spices, and ivory while the people from the west brought exotic minerals, gems, tools.

While reading the recent article on this discovery, I found a stunning picture of Ganga, the river goddess, carved out in ivory.

River goddess ganga

See the original photos and story at NGM. The treasure is going to be on display at Asian Art Museum of San Francisco in San Francisco, California between October 24, 2008, to January 25, 2009.

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Barack Obama’s lucky charm: Carries a miniature god Hanuman in his pocket June 9, 2008

Posted by User Imageindus in : Hinduism, hanuman, obama , 2comments

Time magazine’s photo blog has a very interesting picture where Barack Obama is displaying the things he carries in his pocket to bring him luck. One of them is a tiny metal statue of the Hindu god Hanuman.

What caught my eye that tiny icon (or Murti) did not look like one of god Hanuman as it has 4 hands, one holding a chakra, the other a trishul or a gada, the other two hands have a lotus and a conch, presumably. These 4 things are associated with Lord Vishnu (Lord Krishna is an incarnation of Lord Vishnu). However, the tiny statue has a tail (it also looks like that while showing this to the reporters, the face of the statue was touching the palm). Sending this image to a professor at Delhi University for further analysis.

Here is the slightly annotated version of the original picture.

chakra.jpgchakra.jpgchakra.jpg

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Starbucks goes Free Wi-Fi June 3, 2008

Posted by User Imageindus in : starbucks , 1 comment so far

USAToday is reporting that Starbucks now has Free Wi-Fi.

Thirsty for more business during the worst slump in its history, Starbucks will try to lure more customers by offering two hours of free AT&T Wi-Fi a day.
The Wi-Fi freebie will be available starting Tuesday to customers who purchase a minimum $5 reloadable Starbucks Card, register online for the Starbucks Rewards Card program, and use the card at least once a month. The two hours must be consecutive. New members also receive a voucher for a free drink.

I don’t need to stop at my friendly Panera bread for a muffin and “a” free WiFi with my order :-)

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[GoogleIO] OpenSocial Primer: What is OpenSocial May 28, 2008

Posted by User Imageindus in : Google IO, Opensocial, io2008, shindig , add a comment

Chris Schalk, Kevin Marks, Patrick Chanzeon on stage at Google IO

Patrick’s High level overview of OpenSocial

  1. Making the web better by makting it social
  2. Jaiku’s Jyri Engestrom’s 5 rules for social networks: What is your object? What are ur verbs? How can ppl share objects? What is the gift in the invitation? Are you charging the publishers
  3. How do we socialize objects online without having to create yet another social network?
  4. Deveoper uses API to access the social objects. eg. LinkedIn
  5. Problem is we have 100s of Social Networks hence the developer needs to learn 100s of different APIs for accessing social objects
  6. Hal Varian talks about Network effects. He is a chief economist at Google. OpenSocial is an implementation of Ch. 8 from his book “Information Rules”
  7. OpenSocial Foundation created by Yahoo, Google, myspace. Goal of the foundation is to keep the specification open.
  8. With OpenSocial you learn the programming model once, er, 80% once and 20% specific to the container
  9. iLike, Slide, Flixster, RockYou etc. are building OpenSocial compliant apps for bebo, linkedin, hi5 etc.
  10. 275 million users are OpenSocial container ready

Chris Schalk on building OpenSocial Apps

  1. Client API in Javascript, REST coming up
  2. JS API in three parts a. People and Friends. b. Activities c. Persistence
  3. JS function can be embedded in gadget running in an OpenSocial container
  4. JS Callback function for returned data
  5. Posting an activity is similar to posting an activity and getting a callback
  6. Persistence. Not clear where the data persists? container or gears like client?
  7. Server side REST services: /people/{guid}/@all for getting a collection of all people connected to user identified by @guid All part of shindig codebase. does pagination etc. REST looks more promising for business apps on OpenSocial compared to JS which could be for cool apps
  8. Serverside integration options: Google AppEngine, EC2
  9. Checkout Google IO code lab

Kevin Marks now

  1. Containers provide a social context
  2. OpenSocial separates app logic from Social Context
  3. An app sees user ids — the container makes them people
  4. Users understand the social contract of the containers
  5. Save apps and users from re-registration hell
  6. Containers don’t choose the users, users choose to join
  7. They grow thru homophily and affinity
  8. Network effect can bring unexpected userbases
  9. OpenSocial gets you tol all their users
  10. Make your plan to localize. You’ll be surprised where the users are coming from
  11. Not just social networks. Social network sites, Personal dashboards, Personal CRM systems, Sites based around a Social Object
  12. Abstracted container concepts at Viewers + friends and Owner + friends. Owner and Viewer are defined by the Container. The application gets IDs and connections to other IDs
  13. The Owner may not be a person. It could be an organization or an object.
  14. Kinds of container — Social Object sites like imeem, flickr
  15. Kinds of container — CRM systems like Oracle CRM, Salesforce.com
  16. Kinds of container — Any web site enabled by Google Friend connect
  17. Container sites control policy. Check the Env., Getting information (Viewer info may not be available, may need permission). Spreading you application (Sending message to activity). Monetization and Installation

Closing Remarks by Chris, Patrick

  1. Apache Shindig open source software the allows you to host opensocial applications
  2. Heavy partner involvement
  3. Host within an hour’s worth of work
  4. Incubated at Apache
  5. Build process of Opensocial apps automated through maven (why not ant?)
  6. SocialSite at Sun is an Open Source project that allows you to turn your web app into a OpenSocial container
  7. Leverages Shindig
  8. Built by Dave “Roller” Johnson of Sun.
  9. Complimentary to Friend Connect
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Endangered destinations May 26, 2008

Posted by User Imageindus in : Travel, environment , add a comment
  1. Great Barrier Reef. Tourism, fertilizer runoff is “decaying” the corals
  2. Mount Kilimanjaro, Africa’s tallest peak and a $1 billion per year money spinner for Tanzania tourism industry, will be gone without ice in less than 15 years
  3. Glacier National Park in Montana. In the next 50 years, without ice the word ”Glacier” may need a replacement
  4. Galápagos Islands — Charles Darwin’s inspiration to his theory of evolution are being menaced by tourism and non-native species
  5. Arctice National Wildlife Refuge, Alaska. Global warming is melting the glaciers at exponential speed
  6. Venice!  Flooding and rising sea level are threating this romantic vacation.

Original story

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twitter outage report May 21, 2008

Posted by User Imageindus in : twitter , add a comment

Twitter outage report

twitter was playing hide and seek with the l33t users of twitterland. Like Jack, I thought of having my own little fun with the outage. The above is a snapshot of the last 24 hour remote monitoring on twitter’s home page. The actual outage was much more; a lot of twitter features were not available for a longer duration.

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WordPress Plugin development, a Windows déjà vu! May 20, 2008

Posted by User Imageindus in : MFC, Mysql, Win32, WordPress, Wordpress plugin, php , add a comment

10+ years ago, in my first job I got an opportunity to code a number of Windows applications using MFC/COM/Win32 API. Windows was getting popular, client-server computing even more; all Unix apps were wanting to have a visual appeal. Came Windows to the rescue. During those days as a Windows programmer, I battled the following:

  1. Writing code in a way that Windows Operating System couldn’t mess it up. Having an application run on 95, 98 Developer Beta and several hot fixes in between
  2. Avoiding clashes with other Windows applications. This is funny, 90% of the time the issues were related to end-users installing/uninstalling other related/unrelated applications
  3. Finally, writing code so that hardware changes don’t mess the application up–Installed a new iomega Zip drive? The D:\ drive stops working. Changed Network properties to make Banyan Vines work? The whole TCP/IP stack stops responding!

Fast forward to Social Media applicaion development today. In my short tryst with WordPress Plugin development, I found that I have to take care of similar things (though in a much easier way compared to writing C++ code).

  1. When writing a WordPress Plugin, you have to make sure that it serves at least 3-4 major revisions of WordPress installations. Few people bother to upgrade (although, WordPress does a good job alerting users in the admin panel).
  2. Make sure that your Plugin plays nice with other plugins and themes. Due to increased flexibility (love them WordPress!) zealous features may sometimes may not work with themes and such; say a theme which has two sidebars on the left and none on the right. 
  3. Most of the times WordPress Plugin code (written in PHP) and underlying operating environment (PHP, MySQL) mix each other well. However, at times end-users may have different settings, database permissions and security sandboxing rules. Watch out for these as they’re hard to detect and the end-user may not have any idea about the configurations.

There are specific examples to the above WP issues which I’ll rant on in future posts.

All in all, these are happy problems and shows the maturity/popularity of the platform amongst the developer community. Neither these are hard problems–requires diligent coding and testing and a generous feedback from the ‘beta-user’ community :)

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Markets are conversation, again May 15, 2008

Posted by User Imageindus in : Facebook, India, Social Networking, World Economy, social media , add a comment

Cluetrain.com:

A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter—and getting smarter faster than most companies.

Markets are ConversationWhen Markets become conversation, the participation benefits the parties involved, viz. (a) The Intent Owner. This is the person who has the money, spends time and effort. In a non-generic sense, this  person is the buyer/purchaser/decision-maker of goods/services/products (b) The “Goods” Owner. A person or an entity who has something of interest for which people will spend time, money and effort.

An Intent Owner collaborates with others for research, analysis and in general to discuss items offered from one or more sellers/providers. On the other hand, Goods Owners researches the intent of the buyers by listening to them and/or participating in their conversations. The conversation leads to perfect markets.

During the old days, a weekly bazaar (aka Haat in some Indian dialects) served just that purpose–Buyers collaborated, chattered while sellers listened, conversed and converted the intent into real money. However, as society got industrialized, the collaboration dropped and became 1:1 (thanks to telephone, email and other 1:1 communication media). Come Social Networks, Markets are conversation again. Social Networks are enabling the same depth/breadth of conversation where people are chattering about products, services, companies, etc. (How this is all coming together? To be continued in the second part of the post).

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