WordPress adds two new widgets

December 31, 2006 at 3:16 pm | In Web News | Leave a Comment

WordPress adds two new features, a sonific music player and also snap the preview anywhere widget.

I have personally used snap widget before on my other blogs, and I feel it has great potential to become big. Snap also has a wonderful new search engine, which lets you preview search results on the rightpane. Its a great service, they even have a wonderful image searching engine, which is based on image semantics and not tags or other names.  Even the Snap Preview Anywhere widget is one hell of a product and its so lightweight that it almost appears instantly. The SPA widget even has an option to search items, which takes you the snap search service . Please dont forget to check it out.

Sonific is a service that lets you embed a music player into your site, blog or profile. Its got a great selection of music but I couldn’t find any popular artists, all the upcoming ones and the underground ones. Be sure to check out the electronica section , its got some cool lounge music.

Google Romance ??????

December 31, 2006 at 9:14 am | In Web News | Leave a Comment

Yes, its more suprising than strange. But the giant is leaving no concept on the web unturned. I just stumbled upon Google Romance, a product still under development in the labs and boy, was I surprised. I mean think about a Search giant getting into the dating field. Google, using its advanced algorithms now look for the perfect soulmates, for you. Wonder if the page ranking will still hold good, if so, women beware, you will only find playas :-)

I think i flipped a lid reading about it. Just check out the tour here . Is this a desperate attempt at page views or just strategies so mixed up that it leads to embarassing situations. In my frank opinion, please stop, dont you care about the brand image? If this trend continues, you will soon see a new service, I bet ya, Google Sleeze :-) and will be the service that gets the most number of hits. Makes sense doesn’t it we have code search, book search, probably blog and mashup search, now partner search, why not porn search? Page views Google….

Online Maps and the masses

December 28, 2006 at 12:06 pm | In Cool Web 2.0 Sites | Leave a Comment

The world is being tagged and almost everyone is usign maps to ascertain their locations on planet earth. Why do you have to stay far behind? You own a website or a portal or any thing of that sort? You can add your own custom maps to you site and see where your visitors come from.

I have listed down three services that let you add yoru own maps with lots of features.

1. Platial: is a service that lets you create your own maps with a lot of information. You can link this to your Flickr account and document the places you have traveled for example. You can also search maps that have been tagged close by to your tags. It looks like a wierd mix of yahoo local with the ease of making your own. Almost all maps provide the three views namely map as in 2d plot , satellite( image seen froma sattelite ) and hybrid( a combination of both. All in all a great service.

2.Flagr:

The same tagging service, it lets you upload photos, videos etc and tag them geographically. You can also embed this map in your website or blog and share cool geo tagged info or media. Searching of people, activities etc around you is also included. Great service.

3. Frappr:

The same kind of service, but you dont even have to sign up. It provides a great embedding widget for myspace, blogger, Hi5 , xanga and other sites. It lets people visiting your profile or site, tag themselves and write comments , upload photos etc. I like its ease of use the best.

All the three are great offerings and Im sure such geo based sites will pick up more mass in the coming years. Geo revolution is goin big and you know it ..

Hey!Watch – Just encode

December 28, 2006 at 10:41 am | In Cool Web 2.0 Sites | Leave a Comment

Hey Watch,a france based site, lets you convert videos into different formats.  It is considered impractical to have such services online due to the CPU intensive processing involved, but these guys are doing just that. There are a host of formats to choose from and they also create a RSS feed for all the videos that are converted by a user. Great innvoation, saves you the trouble of going to the site over and over.

You can rip videos into DVD, Mpeg4 , Ipod formats and guess what, you can rip any video on RSS, basically meaning you can rip out You tube videos. So, how easy is it? Rip a couple of you tube videos and convert them to mpeg 4 and put them on your Ipod. Piece of cake !!

News at Seven – Genx News Cast

December 28, 2006 at 10:29 am | In Cool Web 2.0 Sites | Leave a Comment

Is the future already here? One look at News at Seven and you will be entralled by this sense of excitement and neverending possibilities. To start of news at seven is a prototype of what seems to be th technology of the future. Its an automatically generated news cast featuring animations that read out the news which is in turn collected by searching top ranked stories in news sites.

Picture this, there are numerous news sites which churn out breakign news every second. A bot is constantly monitoring a set of news sources and also the stats on it. When a news article gets more and more hits, the bot picks it up, converts it to speech, adds in an animated character to present the news + add some video footage if any in the source and voila you have your news at seven- Completely automated.  This mechanism does open up things to a whole new world of possibilites and I can’t be but surprised, at what people will think of next. With a lot of services feeding out of each other, especially in the blogosphere, I am sure we will soon have a universal feed of all the top blogs across the globe. I really really like the concept. I have attached a news cast from news at seven, enjoy!!

Revenue on the Web

December 27, 2006 at 2:07 pm | In rant | Leave a Comment

There are many new site springing up by the minute and most of them have one or the other revenue system in place. I was just doing a round up of all the revenue earnign schemes and I shall list my findings as of now:

1 . Good Ole Google Ads: Well this is by far the most used revenue generating system used. Just signin to google adsense, copy paste a piece of code into yoru site and watch the money roll as ads are placed on your site by advertisers.

2.  Pay for service:  Basically  upgrades. You can use the free version of the site but to use other features that are in the menu, you go to upgrade and upgrades cost money. Take Flickr or Rapishare or countless other services.

3. Donations: mostly for open source software sites. If you as the user like what the site or the service has to offer, you can donate accordingly. Take the most famous Wikipedia donation campaign which is currently running.

4. Referrals and Affiliates: Suposing you recommend a service or a site to a person and he  performs some monetary activities with teh site, you get money as commission for letting the user know about that site. Many hosting packages etc  come with such offers.

5. Virtual money : many sites have their own currency which you can use in exchange of real money. Take secondlife for example or soem online gaming sites. These services let you use site money which you can exchange for other items. Second life is cashing in big time with this fake currency.

I shall write more on this as and when I find more such systems in place. Please do add to these existing methods.

EBay Software Architecture – Amazing !!!

December 27, 2006 at 12:04 pm | In Architecture - Design | Leave a Comment

Software architecture isn’t easy and to design an application that scales is tougher than scaling the Everest. I was exposed to the arena of software architecture when I was involved in developing Dzine the CASE, tool in college. Thanks to Prof Sadagopan, I found this amazing PDF about the history and evolution of the ebay architecture.

Ebay has 212,000,000 users, 105 million listings at any time, 26Billion SQL executions/day, 2 petabytes of data and almost 3 billion api calls a month. Thats a mind blowing number and trust me I know, its very hard to keep something of that magnitude working, like how they have done.  Architecture has been one of my favorite subjects and almost every part of it excites me even to this day. Its very sad that my current job doens’t let me flex my archi muscles. I shall start writing more on differnet architectures from now on. But the PDF is a must see for you SA’s out there.

Shuzak – Socionet for Geeks

December 25, 2006 at 10:07 pm | In socionets | 1 Comment

There is another player in the social networking space and this time around its Shuzak. Shuzak aims at becoming a social network for geeks and technology enthusiasts alike. I did take a look inside the site and I like what it has to offer. The concept of communities has been extended to suit a more digg like environment. So all the geekazoids join communities and start topics or threads and based on the number of hits and replies, the thread gains Karma, the topics with highest Karma get on to the top of the list.

The thing I like most about Shuzak is its simplicity. Developer and founder Jawad writes: Since Shuzak is a social network for geeks, a number of features have been added that cater to the specific needs of geeks. For instance, developers can post code which is then highlighted by Shuzak. Or mathematicians can post equations that render beautifully as they would in textbooks.

The components are kept simple and not much importance is given to the other aspects to the network which do not contribute to the flavor of the site. I am really impressed. The only problem I found was googlearchy, the problem with page ranking where the richer get richer and the poorer get poorer. By giving higher karma to threads, only the ones at the top of a community will actually get noticed and it will keep on gaining Karma. The other threads will wither away in need of attention. There should be some kind of a regulatory mechanism. Hope you are listening Jawad and also will take this in the right spirit. I wish the Shuzak and its team the best of luck. Waiting for more news and updates.

See the the Intro video of Shazuk

Adobe Apollo Framework / Runtime

December 25, 2006 at 11:08 am | In Web News, rant | Leave a Comment

Whats the next big thing you ask? This year has seen a round up of some of the most amazing technologies and also startups and I know the new year will only bring with it more forays into technologies, more startups and some really stunnign apps. While all this talk is making me go and explore more, there is one platform that I am eagerly awaiting.

The Adobe Apollo framework. This has been the eye sore amongst all bloggers and tech enthusiasts alike, gobbling up any information, screenshots that they can find on it. I am eagerly awating its release early next year. Over the past year, Flash and Actionscripting has taken over the web world with more and more web sites going the flash way. Apollo promises to deliver the true meaning of Web 2.0. But i cant help but compare it to the likes of Java Web start. Will Apollo be a imitation of it?

A look at what Apollo has been described as, and you will know its a runtime, that needs to be downloaded and installed, after which apps can be built on top of it. Asked if Apollo is browser supported, Adobe says its a framework and typically a browser can be built on top of apollo. Sounds really really similar to Web Start applications. Although I know that flash like looks will give it an edge, but web start failed to deliver and I cannot but think, Apollo also will. Waiting for the New Year.

Apollo screenshots – courtesy Ryan Stewart

Fauxto… Like photo….. Of course….I Like … I Like

December 25, 2006 at 10:26 am | In Cool Web 2.0 Sites | 1 Comment

Its official, almost every great product out there is going to face the storm in the next few years. And I was thinking, some products just cant be duplicated on the web. Like for example IDE’s or photoediting software. Well turns out, Im wrong on both these products. Both have their free online version, and one look, its hard not to appreciate the effort and the excellence.

I just checked out a service called Fauxto. Its an online photoshop clone, built using a flash and someother things. It really amazes me what more will be possible on the web. All the basic image editing features, the layer approach, effects , all the works. If you have ever used photoshop and are impressed at the way things are handled in it, then youwill be dumb stricken by this beauty. Is a little slow though, Photoshop itself is considered to take an eternity to load, so you can expect teh online version to measure up.

Give it a try and Im sure you wont be dissapointed.

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