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Showing posts from February, 2016

Features vs. Users

davewinerabttwtr As  @DaveWiner , tweeted about twitter's innovation stalling because it closed its API than open it, another friend of mine emailed me asking about which Social Bookmarking service I use. To put it in context, in 2008-9, I too had started to build a social bookmarking application Bloozle , which was aimed at sharing links (bookmarks) by users, tagging them (to create 'folksonomies), enable sharing and finally presenting a technology curated 'magazine' for end users to browse. What we envisaged as bloozle, is today available as a combination of Twitter / Facebook based link sharing (with #hashtags acting as tags) and Flipboard based 'curation' of those links for you to read. Long story short - this friend of mine was a part of the team for Bloozle and hence, we share the love to hate Twitter-Flipboard combo for 'stealing' away our success! :-) My friend commented (sic)- "i am just back on delicious and find it way b

Casteism is 'Background'ism

This post by Seth Godin made me think back about a post I made 10 years ago in context of India. Here's what Seth says: If you're moving forward and moving fast, you've no doubt heard it: People who look like you aren't qualified to do this work.  I'm not sure you're a good cultural fit.  I once knew someone your age/race/demographic and they let me down.  I wrote this : ... castiesm manifests itself not just in form of ancestral caste but also in new found castiest approaches like lobbying and groupism. The mindset of preferential treatment to a set of people at the cost of others while violating the principles of fair play and meritocracy is wrong and needs to be uprooted. Seth claims that today is the time when we can all challenge this with " Now, more than ever, attitude trumps background! " Caste also represents 'typecasting' individuals based on their background - in India background may mean birth (i.e. caste), regi

Rise of the CLGI - Command Line Graphical Interface

The IT geek world is unequivocally undivided since more than a decade on the superiority of the Command Line Interface over the GUI! For the uninitiated, Command Line is the black screen, that comes up when you go to 'Start Menu' > 'Run' and Type 'cmd', which you often use to do a 'ping' or 'ipconfig'. GUI expands to Graphical User Interface, a technical name to the point-and-click interface we all use in computers today.  The geekdom has had debates  on why we haven't evolved from a purely textual entry mode into something better, a debate which always concludes accepting that Command line is a superior form of human-computer interaction . With introduction of Siri, Google Now and Cortana - while we have added voice commands also to the debate; its uses are currently limited to searching, giving pre-ordained commands like calling someone in your contacts list. For performing complex tasks such as say formatting your hard disk, ch