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Showing posts with the label Web2.0

Socialism, Communism, Open Source and Browsers

I love Firefox and the Mozilla foundation - it was the beacon of innovation when Microsoft tried to kill it with repeated versions of its buggy Internet Explorer! If you were involved in software development or managing online products circa 2005-2008 , you would know the nightmare it was to develop a website compatible with IE and its myriad of versions (IE6 was especially notorious)! At that time, Firefox was our ray of hope, and I would have tried to evangelise almost every friend, family or client to ditch IE and embrace FF. With clients, however, the big problem was, Firefox was an Open Source software and the corporate world has a certain amount of scepticism towards this species of software. [Ironical because most of the largest software services in the world run on Operating Systems which are clones of Linux and most of the web's websites run on Apache - these two being probably the largest Open Source projects in the world!] Source:  Netcraft Webserver survey 2017 ...

How to create a successful online business

This post is based on content from guest author Aisha Singh  - many thanks Aisha! When you think about a successful online business, names like Amazon, eBay or Flipkart come to mind. While these companies have mushroomed from garage ventures into colossal corporations, there are also millions today who are making a living out of online properties which are capable of more or less running themselves - think of blogs, classified websites, tech help forums, and even YouTube channels. Case in point - Amit Agarwal , who after working with brands like Merrill Lynch quit his job to become India’s first professional blogger. Running an online businesses is not only exciting but also many a times allows the owner more time to engage in leisurely activities rather than being stuck in a corporate job all day long. Creating a successful online business is of course no easy feat and you will have to work very hard in the first few months/years in order to reap the rewards later on....

Social Media vs. Traditional Media

Image Credits: Flickr user vernieman An eminent programmer was referring to one of the most typical challenge the Media today faces - how to find out the most influential people on Social Media? Who is more influential on twitter - Barkha Dutt or Amitabh Bacchan? Who is more influential on Instagram, on Facebook? Is the number of followers the only metric which matters? What about the quality of content? What about the quality of followers / fans? How do we measure this "quality"? And if we can measure these individual factors - what is the algorithm to combine these to create a common metric, the rating which will be used to rank people based on their influentialness on social networks. Some startups have attempted to solve this puzzle - just like this eminent programmer is also trying. Klout and some similar services look like they have cracked the nut, but Klout gives a pretty high level percentage score - so its quite possible that two people have exactly the same ...

Does Facebook take serendipity out of your online experience?

While reading this article on RWW , I went to Mark Zuckerburg's Facebook profile and lo! I see all of my own contacts on that page as people who subscribed to Mark. What I was probably expecting to see on Mark's page was a list of his close friends, a few close facebook employees or industry veterans etc; not people whose status updates I anyway see on my Facebook stream every few hours.  It's true that seeing that some of my own Facebook friends follow Mark's stream means that I too would be tempted to follow Mark - in fact this is even more true if the page I was visiting for not a public figure like Mark but a mutual friend of a friend, whom I wouldn't follow / subscribe to otherwise. However, Facebook takes the concept of familiarity to a complete extreme. In fact, wherever I go on Facebook, my own network follows me closely. For example, I go to a new Facebook page through someone's recommendation appearing on my FB Stream, it is usually the s...

How Flickr helps cleartrip sell more travel packages

Cleartrip.com - an online travel portal has started a new section called Small World. The feature showcases select destinations around one's residence or internationally. This a is really novel service - not only users get to 'preview' a holiday location, the approximate travel and lodging expenses are flashed immediately on the screen. Once you click on a chosen destination, you are taken to a detailed view of the destination with a Google Map 'to' the location, a slideshow of photos from the destination, flight and hotel details arranged in 4 boxes on the screen. The flights with their prices are displayed in a calendar format while the hotels can be rearranged by their tariffs and traveler rating using sliders. The Google Map widget also has markers for Sites, Restaurants, shopping destinations and entertainment hot spots. The fun part is that Cleartrip has partnered with Yahoo / Flickr and Lonely Planet - the slideshows showcasing are made using photos from flic...

Zapak - a dynamic and proactive Web2.0 company?

You might be surprised to see the title after the post I made last night. But I am really impressed the way Zapak has reacted to my post. Read on to know more ... When I made the post last night, India was still in deep slumber; and when India woke up - I was in deep slumber. But while I was asleep, the Zapak team woke up to my blog post - they thereafter tracked me through various Social networks and by the time I woke up, I had a couple requests from their team to connect to me. [The earliest one was as early as 7.57 AM India time] I was surprised (and impressed) about the speed with which they contacted me - so I sent out my contact details, and Lo! Within less than an hour I had them calling me explaining that the mail I received was because of some kind of spurious network activity and was a "security issue" which they were dealing with. They requested me to remove the image which I had put up on my blog, because it revealed some internal statistics they were tracking. W...

Zapak's Faux Pass

Update : If you are reading this - please also read my follow up post Zapak - a dynamic and proactive Web2.0 company? which is an account of the events which happened after I made this post. Someone at Zapak.com (also ZapakMail) seems to have conjured up the "good idea" of sending out Birthday emails to its members. But as they say - the implementation and not the idea is what creates success - apart from the fact that the email looks like a 1990 word document [and that too hardly like a greeting or newsletter of 1990 but rather looking like some office document] - the email commits the one of the worst faux passes of the internet world. [The Image has been removed] The email [below the part shown above] contains a list of all email ID's who have registered their birthdates for the day! Not only is everyone's email ID being revealed to everyone else, their birthdates are also revealed. For so many people who keep variations of their birthdates as their passwords - ...