Om Malik either does not know about "microformats" especially hCard (which is unlikely) or has willingly chosen to ignore it in his article (see excerpt at the end). The solution to directory problem is not to have a single provider like google or Plaxo collate all information about a person, but to allow any service to syndicate the same standard contact information. The solution is the standard microformat for storing your contact details from email, to phone number/ postal address to social network profile info. Once all existing platforms which store profile info - blogs, email services, eGroups, specialized networks (forums/ batchmates.com etc.) - start using the same format, it will be possible for any service to access hCard info from any other service (provided privacy is taken care of by allowing users the right to share/ not share). Also, this will make it possible for you to store your hCard info at only on of the websites you use (say your personal blog or social

RSS, Microformats, OpenID, Tagging - all these formats, protocols and practices are extending the underlying philosophies of the OSI Model to provide continuity across multi-vendor environments. In fact, an initiative to formalize this 'extention' is already on at dataportability.org . As they say on their website: The technologies already exist, we simply need a complete reference design to put the pieces together. [Their] mission [is] to put all existing technologies and initiatives in context to create a reference design for end-to-end Data Portability. To promote that design to the developer, vendor and end-user community. Notably, all the major players from Google/Yahoo/MySpace to Microsoft/Verisign are already a part of this initiative. However, this initiative, just like the OSI Model - has more to do with the developer/vendor community and little to do with common users. And this is where DataPortability needs to differ from the OSI Model.

Continuing from my previous post, clearly the web of software services to inter-operate with each other need an extension of the OSI Model to services level. There are many service which are working in this direction viz. RSS: Really Simple Syndication RSS is a format used to publish updates of your website content. Typically RSS is used by news websites or blogs - where content is dynamic and requires users to keep checking the site for updates. RSS updates could be just pointers to changes (or summary of changes) or it could contain the full feed ( i.e. all the new content). An RSS is typically read using a feed reader - a program similar to an email client which keeps checking for updates. While the primary function of an RSS feed is to provide information updates - it also helps in separating the 'presentation' from the underlying 'content' - just as the OSI Model separates presentation from data. With RSS in place, you need not read a blog or news only in the fo

Way back in 1977 when a working group on Distributed Systems at ANSI was asked to work on OSI Model ( Open Systems Interconnection Basic Reference Model ) - they had little idea that the concept of distributed systems would one day grow to create the mother of all 'distributed systems' - the Internet. Technically the internet is a massive network of hardware - but conceptually, its a platform (or a cloud if you prefer) upon which Software Services can run seamlessly making it transparent to the users, where the software is running, where the data comes from, which hardware is serving server cycles ... and so on. All this abstraction is possible today only because of the well designed OSI Model which separates the "Presentation" from data and network from the underlying hardware. The OSI model has also helped to come up with protocols like TCP which have made compatibility a non-issue when it comes to connecting computers across the world (which run on different hardw

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As a part of my day job with KPMG, I work with many financial institutions consulting then on their Technology aspects. Indian Financial institutions – especially private banks and funds – aim to leverage Information technology to improve their operations and financial control alike. The top managements of almost all reputed institutions are quite bullish on using technology in all spheres of their work – however when one comes in close contact with the way technology is leveraged on ground, one starts questioning the efficacy of mere top management commitment. What I have observed is that for most line managers , Information Technology is simply about mapping the existing processes on the IT systems, resulting into only the record keeping process getting digitized. The process continues to operate with the same mechanics as before and in effect the process re-engineering opportunities, that an IT implementation offers, are lost. As the Harvard professor on enterprise 2.0, Andrew McAfe

Today as Wikipedia celebrates its 7th Birthday , it can definitely claim to have come of age. Indeed, from corporate to students, Wikipedia is the gateway to knowledge. Wikipedia's value is considered to be of leading students to citable sources, and though it is not considered an appropriate source for citation itself [ 1 ] - its definitely one of the places millions go to in order to start their research . However, apart from contributing to actual knowledge base - Wikipedia's more important contribution has been in changing (corporate) mindsets towards the new tools information technology offers. Thanks to the success of Wikipedia - so many corporate have started their own Wikis , blogs etc for knowledge management within their firms. Ironically, adoption of new technologies has created new dilemmas for the CIO. Earlier, while knowledge was never recorded, it is now being recorded; but, it is spread between uploaded documents, wikis and blogs. And I am wondering what wil

Hemant tells me that Satyam has a whole blogosphere inside the corporate intranet - which Satyam intends to use as a Knowledge management tool - I think it does the same things as what Prof. McAfee describes as "above the flow wikis" - knowledge management outside the day to day flow of work. Hemant also tells me hat some blogs are immensely popular and act as incentives for others also to blog about their work - indeed Satyam has found some way to overcome " the challenge of getting people to use above-the-flow wikis". Read on - the quote below is interesting ... Source: Why Not Widen the Flow? by Andrew McAfee One of Michael's first posts was about the distinction between using wikis and other social software 'in the flow' of work versus 'above the flow.' As he explains : In-the-Flow wikis enable people do their day-to-day work in the wiki itself. These wikis are typically replacing email, virtual team rooms, and project management syst

Marshal Kirkpack Says ... Google and Facebook, two companies that hold more user data and do more with it than almost any other consumer service on the market Source : Google and Facebook Join DataPortability.org from Read/WriteWeb Isn't he being too tech-world-centric and ignoring the "old economy" completely? I think companies who "hold more user data" and "do more with it" than others surely would be Banks and other financial institutions (I am counting out governments as they are not "consumer services") than Google or Facebook for 2 reasons: How many people have accounts with these two companies as compared to how many have accounts with Banks? How much important is data like say "my search history" or "my friend list" as compared to "my credit history" ?? Need I say more .... ? While data portability is an important technology issue (new microformats, APML etc) which needs to be discussed - governments, co

I was musing over how popular are India-specific blogging services on Alexa - and here is what I found. The graph below plots RediffBlogs against BlogStreet and BlogPulse. Click on the images to see enlarged versions I have added BlogSteet [in Blue ]and BlogPulse [in Red ] only for comparison because they are pretty unknown services at least in India [BlogStreet is a coranking site cum blog directory (of Indian blogs) while BlogPulse is a blog metrics tracker (not focussed to Indian blogosphere though)] Observe that the traffic of RediffBlogs[in Green ] - is quite comparable to these 'unknown' services. Now I added RediffBlogs competitor O3 [in Cyan ] from Indiatimes.com to the comparison ... Just observe how the scale of the graph changes - BlogStreet, BlogPulse and RediffBlogs , almost vanish when traffic metrics from Indiatimes are plotted. Clearly O3 is way ahead of rediffBlogs - so much so that - if I were to decide the fate of RediffBlogs, I would shut it down! Link to a

Australian startup Fluc is an innovative new mobile advertising network [where] Users provide Fluc with a profile of their tastes and interests when they sign up for the service, and Fluc uses that information as well as geopositioning data to deliver extremely well targeted ads. I.e., if the GAP knows you're near a mall where they have an anchor store, and they know from your Fluc account that you fit their consumer profile, then they might pay to send you an ad even if your motives for receiving it may be hazy. Instead of going through this complex and extremely expensive 'geopositioning' rechnology - Indian Malls are providing the same service through Bluetooth . Pros - cheap, definitely targeted and users 'opt-in' by enabling their bluetooth connection Cons - Every Mall must set this up independently, If the user  does not make his bluetooth  visible to the mall, the promotion cannot be done (but this service is an opt-in anyway) I suppose I will give full

The first results of the Human Genome project (HGP) have started coming in. Hindustan Times reported in a front page article today that Humans have evolved fastest in the past 5000 years since we separated from our 'parent' chimpanzees - and the rate of evolution is seeding up, also thanks to " the surge in global population ..... since more mutations occur now". The research in specific is not of so much consequence, as is the fact that the genome project has started its data analysis stage and some results have started emerging. Why this is exciting is because the HGP holds the key to several breakthroughs in the field of biomedicine - and probably a permanent cure for several unconquerable diseases like cancer and AIDS. Scientists also predict that when the study of the Human Genome is close to completion - it will lead to development of 'customized medicine" - wherein each person can be given medicines depending upon what would best suit his/ her ana

http://noserub.com NoseRub is a protocol . Applications with the NoseRub protocol keep information about profile data for each of the contacts. These profiles get synchronised between the applications/social networks ... and can be used by any other NoseRub service . NoseRub uses already available standards like OpenID , RSS and FOAF to provide the goal of having a truely decentralised social network. How do I own my data? Decentralised means, that people may be able to store their social network on their own server and those servers to interact and synchronize automatically. One company doesn't own your data and social network anymore, you own and control it . We understand NoseRub not only as an application, like what is running on Identoo.com and which everyone can download and install on their own servers. We want even more freedom for the people who want to use NoseRub. More: http://noserub.com/q

[Q]... do you have a sense of how you would place it all historically? [Tim Berners Lee]I'll answer that one in a thousand years' time, if that's okay. [LAUGHTER] I think trying to write the history, at the time I think it's very difficult. we didn't know whether we were going to be looking at history or not, because when you look at a curve like that, an exponential curve going up can often just tilt over and crash back down again. And there were a lot of other projects we've all had which have done that. How very true - Tim Berners Lee put it quite aptly that an exponential curve could as well crash and end up looking like a 'blip' on the scale of centuries in history. Many of us Millenials remember the craze that VCR's were in the 90's - some of today's most hyped innovations like the i-Pod or iPhone could as well end up similarly. It is too early to place any new technology or trend as a game changer - which is a mistake that many a te

Josh Catone wrote on RWW a few days ago in favour of Facebook having groupware tools built in ... The reason I gave in Monday's piece was convenience. Right now, I have Basecamp projects open with four different groups, meaning I have to remember passwords to four different Basecamps. That is in addition to the hundreds of sites I already have to remember passwords for for other things I do online. The more you can get the things you do under a single umbrella, the less work you have to do get to work. I think he is asking for apples from an orange tree ;-). Isn't he asking for a single sign on to all his online tools, rather than ask for making the social network (facebook / orkut etc) as his virtual operating system for the web? Well Josh - there are things like the OpenID or Windows Live ID to embrace rather than ask for everything to be embedded into facebook or orkut. Just because teenagers use social networks whole day, we shouldn't misplace our faith in them!!

From: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/5_essential_mobile_web_apps.php This app is a Java-based version of Gmail for mobile, which features IMAP sync, attachment viewing. Phrases that were associated with Gmail for mobile by our readers included: "just works", "simplicity", "functional", "useful", "a joy to use". Commenter "mr white" said of the Gmail java app: "This *is* clearly the path of the future. All your e-mails, all the time, everywhere. No more tedious synching with this outlook / that outlook and the webmailer. Now bring on calendar and contacts." Nathan commented: "A very nice frontend onto a very nice service, and it does a rather nice job of reformatting files for the tiny screen. That's the sort of feature you don't actually appreciate until you're out in the countryside with nary a hardline in sight and need an address that was wrapped up in a .doc in your inbox that you

My GMail Inbox suddenly seems to have received a lottery in storage space - my Inbox size has suddenly jumped to 3681 MB which till yesterday was hovering around 2900 MB. I tried to figure out as to what happened but all I could Google was a blog post written way back in March which predicted that it would take 5 years for Gmail to reach 3.5 GB ... Anyway, so like a kid who gets a 100 bucks ' bakshish ' from his grandpa - I should start planning as to how I am going to spend the 1/2 GB extra space that I now have (not that I have exhausted my current space, but still). For starters, I will no more bother to delete 'heavy forwards'; then I could restart receiving a lot of email from mailing list where I have set up 'no email' option. To avoid email overload because of this, I will simply filter these emails, make them skip the inbox and have them marked as read. I know what you are asking me now - why the hell receive those emails if you aren't going to read

I am going to speak on the topic of Blogging 2.0 at barCampMumbai2 today ... With this we also will open the registration for the beta of our web Application bloozler .... you too can check it out here . I have been working on this concept since more than 1.5 year now, since I made this blog post. Hope you all find it an interesting and useful webApp .... Here is the presentation I will make.

India is Orkut's largest market after Brazil, so it makes perfect sense for them to embrace Indian languages .... and they have started with Hindi Makes sense - after all US is almost sold out to Facebook and MySpace and China is a different world - so better concentrate on India which will be among the 3 largest economies of the world in the coming years.

The title of this post is just to went out my frustration at the animatedly friendly line you see in invitation emails for Shelfari (Do we like the same books?) . Actually, I am not frustrated at the service or the way it introduces itself - my objection is to something else ... read on if you are interested. The service is really an amazing concept - I wish I would have thought it and launched it. The way it introduces itself too is really good. Having tackled with the problem of 'introducing' websites myself - I do feel this is one of the better ways to do it. But isn't there is a limit to how many times you invite a user?? My first point is that if a user has invited me to the site and I haven't responded means that I am not interested in the service for one reason or the other. It could be pure disinterest or may be that I don't have time for it. Either way - I AM NOT INTERESTED!! Then why should the website send me a 'reminder' for the invitation?? Th