This is my first smart phone and I thought I should share my experiences around my phone.

Google Nexus S

I live in India, a country with an abundance of power outages in the name of load shedding and repair. A feature that I never thought I would use came to my rescue during these dark times. The Wifi hotspot tethering feature. With my 2G connection, on multiple occasions, I was able to connect my laptop to the internet to do some just in time work.

I also use Twitter a lot, so without question the Twitter android app has probably been my most used application. I was able to use applications like FourSquare, PicPlz etc to post pictures and to check for tips and tricks at a given location. My wife and I went to this place where I ordered a dish from a FourSquare tip and loved it.

I have also started fulltime on my own software venture. With my Android, I have been able to stay on top of all the important emails that I get. Helped me a lot when I was meeting investors and prospective customers; Blackberry wielding folk who prefer Email to texting or calls.

I cannot forget Google Maps, that has helped many a times when I was lost in the outskirts of Bangalore and Pune(A city which I knew nothing about, direction wise). I also downloaded an app to control PowerPoint slides which I used once. And thanks to that critical Rackspace app that I once used to restart a cloud server in distress. Special mention to Shazam and SoundHound that I use ever so often to identify those familiar sounding tunes I overhear.

Now with the new Ice Cream Sandwich launch, I am really excited about the reworked OS and can’t wait to get it on my phone.

Go Android!

“You never know where you are going, until you know where you’ve been”

There is a big message in that quote. The message being, never underestimate the historical context behind a certain field of study. Take any occupation, a student starts out learning the history behind the field and understands why certain things are done a certain way. The pressure for jobs and commercialization of college education has completely ignored the importance of the historical context and are running with (what educators term as) nextGen syllabus, which helps students secure jobs in the industry.

Just yesterday, I was involved in a debate about doing away with C and C++ in Under graduate Computer Science in favor of languages like Ruby and Lisp. Learning Ruby and Lisp will guarantee you jobs, but not the understanding of why those programming paradigms are so powerful. One can never understand why C++ was a game changer if they didn’t know C, or why Java was so much better compared to C++. Same is the case with the Ruby. One will never understand the power of  a dynamic language unless they have used static  compiled languages. In the recent past I have met fresh graduates who have not done either C/C++ or Java but have directly used Ruby and NoSql stores instead of a RDBMS. Would I be comfortable recruiting such folk? I don’t really know. But one thing is for certain, the historical context should almost be an imperative when it comes to technology. In a talk by a senior consultant in my company, he highlighted how they would write code on paper and pass it to a typist who would type on a terminal and run the program. I developed a whole new respect for IDEs.

There is a completely orthogonal view of the world. People with a lot of historical context become really close minded to change and picking up newer technologies, and newer ways of working. During the last two months, I have also been working on a social collaboration platform to be deployed as a platform for knowledge management in my company. The early reactions from youngsters has been phenomenal. The 30+ crowd is still trying to get their head around this concept and in more than one occasion, I have found myself trying to explain how this would be a new way of working and dealing with information overload. I am reminded of reading books about how people were averse to the introduction of the Typewriter, or how in the later part of the 20th century, people were skeptical about the introduction of PC’s in offices. Industrial automation also created a similar furore as most experts (at that time) thought it would displace human labor and create massive unemployment.

Knowing all of this historical context helps me understand that skeptics aside, the new social way of working will definitely redefine the way of working in an enterprise. In my opinion, the power users of any sort of information system (be it consumption or delivery) will be uncomfortable with the thought of losing their way of consuming information. Picking up a new technology would mean learning new tricks, skills and reworking to get to the status of a power user. But change is inevitable. One has to trust the wisdom of the crowd and become more open minded to change, and accept changes in the way of working, technologies used and so on.

There are claims that Open Source will one day completely displace closed software. Same goes with free online advertising, sometimes also referred to as ad exchanges, where a person places an ad on his/her site and in turn gets his/her ad placed on somebody else’s site. There are claims that free online advertising will one day displace Google’s monopolistic hold on online advertising. Frankly I think most of these claims are exaggerated and baseless to a certain extent.

Am I the only one who has a problem with transactions that do not obey the traditional laws of Economics? The market, or as Adam Smith would say – the foundations of human society,  runs on the buy-sell model. When something is free, it means other non quantifiable commodities get traded, like goodwill and trust.  In such circumstances fairness is the biggest casualty. But is there really a model which can ensure fairness in these situations ?

Yes, there are plenty of trust based networks at play in our real life, but they all reach a saturation point. A typical game theoretic scenario, the person to defect first gets a very high payoff ; In a network, everyone else suffers. People will cheat, one way or another. Like I mentioned before, fairness becomes a higly debatable issue. Though, the categorical imperative bestows humans with decision making powers, it doesn’t state the thresholding for these decisions. The only final outcome of these networks is that one person is going to hit it big and make the others suffer.

Naturally the follow up question will be:  how does Open source survive? I explain this using results from game theory. In any homogeneous population, ie either a defecting or a co-operating , a small group of people,  co-operating with each other while defecting against the general consensus , always has the ability to hold their own and, in some cases, even win against the entire population. Examples of this are plenty in real life,  for ex: corruption or the mafia. So, as long as that small bunch of people stay loyal to each other, such networks will continue. Open Source, is slightly a more complex beast than I described it to be, but it broadly falls into the category I mentioned.

Incentive mechanisms like reputation points, virtual currency etc usually try and emulate a real world materialistic economy, but they are limited in their reach and appeal. Eventually, people loose the initiative to compete for these non materialistic resources. Besides, in a medium such as the internet, where identity itself is questionable, how will people trust each other. Has anyone ever wondered if those mails, which inform you of the billions you have won, were ever real? I guess not.

In conclusion,  I ask, is there some mechanism design or a strategy that can ensure fairness (provided its defined accurately) whilst ensuring the continuing growth of such trust based networks ?

I remember liking programming for lots of reasons, but one which I particularly remember. Unlike the other subjects in school, like math or physics,  programming had no boundaries or a legacy to deal with. By legacy, I mean there were no equations, constraints and I didn’t have to reciprocate what some mathematician proved 400 years ago. I have always enjoyed freedom and programming gave me that freedom to express myself.  I guess, I can claim that most good programmers have taken up programming because it lets them play God or be creationists of some complex entity.

Anyway, there are a lot of interesting and fun facts through these ten years and I shall pen some down.

1. BASIC was my first programming language. PASCAL was probably my first compiled language.
2. I wrote my first sorting routine ( an act I call, truly understanding the programming abstraction) sometime during Jan 2000.
3. I got my first computer in 2001. AMD Athlon 1.7 GHz with 256 MB Ram and 40 Gb harddisk . “OMG 40GB” , was my friends reaction.
4. I disliked C early on, due to my PASCAL roots, but grew fond of it later on when I completed my first large scale project ( A linux text editor, which I proudly wanted to call, “Better than VI“). This is also where I wrote my first recursive functionality which resulted in people actually wanting to read and understand my code.
5. My first exposure to Linux and OSS was in 2002, I think it was RedHat linux 7.1 with running Xwindows.
6. I almost lost my entire project due to a floppy malfunction. USB’s were expensive and uncommon then. CD writers expensive.
7. I learnt about data structures in 2002.  My lecturer, one of the few good ones, was kind enough to teach us the intuition behind data structures and write the implementations ourselves. Our other lecturers taught programming from a book and expected us to replicate the programs written in the book.
8. I would like to thank  my data structures lecturer who spent hours helping me debug and correct programs. It was probably the first time I looked at code from an outside perspective and yes, I realized the importance of indenting code then and there. I have never not indented my code again. (Remember we are still in 2002).
9. I learnt about OO during christmas vacations of 2002. Loved it. Loved the paradigm shift in the way I thought about programs
10. My first OO program was one class with 50+ methods in it (Yup, there was nothing OO about it, but its a start)
11. My first large scale OO project was building a Paint like utility using C++. I am still proud of this work because I learnt about programming abstractions and class reponsibilities here. I still remember writing my first button class which was fully reponsible for itself.
12. I learnt PERL in 2004 and wrote my first web application. An online messaging, calendar and collaboration utility for friends and corporates. ( yes, this was my first social app). When I saw Myspace very soon after that ( MySpace was still pretty bare in terms of features then) the only difference I saw was that other people could see who my contacts(friends) were and network with them.
13. When I first discovered databases (2003), I thought, “wow, somebody made my file I/O’s really easy”. It was also an amazement because I had thought of a unified file writing and reading mechanism to solve all my I/O woes. Problem was getting it to work with many languages. I couldn’t get my head around it and thats when I learnt about databases. Imagine my surprise and rejoice. The first database I used was Oracle and later MySQL ( it wasn’t even relational then). My database project earned me 100/100 in my finals.
14. Compiler Design was one of my favorite subjects. I loved the fact that I could understand how they build programming languagues. Lex Yacc was probably the best thing that ever happened to programming. Prateeksha and I wrote the specifications for a shift reduce parser for C++. We used an A1 sized sheet of paper to write down the shift reduce matrix. After two full days writing the Shift Reduce rules, we realized we had messed up somewhere.
15. I wrote a prototype of my CASE tool in 2004.  My proud entry to the world of .NET. I had my official copy of Visual Studio.NET 2003 and .NET 1.1 . This CASE tool would eventually become my fnal semester project and also enter Microsoft’s Imagine Cup. We reached the Nationals for the competition. I called it Dzine.
16. Even though I had learnt java in 2004, I didnt use J2EE till late 2005. when I started writing simple J2EE apps. I also figured that javascript, that language I had used to validate my controls in HTML (in 2004) , had suddenly taken the world by storm. Everybody was talking about it. Web 2.0.
17. I sat for two whole days to figure out how yahoo mail was autocompleting email addresses I typed. After two days and a whole lot of searching, I learnt about AJAX. I was already on Gmail by then and didnt really understand the underlying plumbing that was holding the application together.
18. Within the next 4 months I put AJAX and J2EE together to work on Samparkh with Prateeksha. I wrote an online chat application using AJAX ( inspired by Meebo). Remember this was a time when firebug wasn’t around and I used a tool called Venkman, which I am sure many of you haven’t even heard of.
19. Then, Grad school happened and so did Microsoft, and the list of wonderful projects that I did during the two years I spent there.
20. Special mention to BigKahuna, which took almost two years to perfect and won the Google Product Engineering Competition 2009.

Am I a good programmer? I dont know. But, I will continue to remain a programmer. Most of my friends know that I dont take sides. By sides, I mean OSS v/s Closed source, Linux vs Windows , Google vs Yahoo, and this is because of the vast and varied experiences I have had with all these different entities during programming. They all have a special place in my heart and I cannot choose one over the other. Programming is changing fast, and all I can hope for is that that I dont wear out of ideas or skills to call myself a programmer in the years to come.

A list of all the wonderful projects that I have pursued over the years is available here.

/* Get the latest 10 photos from flickr where the photo name contains cat */
SELECT * FROM flickr.photos.search WHERE text='Cat' LIMIT 10

As you can clearly see the language makes querying a service and receiving its response really really simple. This is how most new psuedo languages are. They work with service end points and emulate an existing programming language’s syntax to do that. These languages are built with mashup’s in mind. The dangers of such an offering are already imminent. Services are good as long as they are up and live.   Take for example any of the Google or yahoo  Api’s and you will find wrappers written by people in such pseudo langauges to make your life simple. Even in the enterprise space there are such languages being built which query custom services and makes building applications really really simple.

Another observation of mine involves loose typing in these languages. Most new languages are loosely typed. Most of them take from python which lets the user take care of the typing. SQL by far has been the most emulated language amongst these pseudo langauges. Take for example JoSql to add SQL like capabilities to operations like file handling or Linq in .NET which exposes a sql like interface to datastructures. These improvisations have dramatically reduced time to turn ideas into code and rapidly prototype the application.

There are limitations to using such improvisations; some that even I can vouch for. Loosely typed and unstructured languages are good as long as you are not working on large scale systems. If you are hacking up a solution to a problem that you are facing, these pseudo languages look to be real problem solvers but when it comes to working in teams, projects that need to go into production, you start getting into big problems. Though I am a python fanboy, I faced problems when I was working on python and perl on a large project with a team. Interfaces would be unclear, poor documentation would literally spell doom and tons of other problems that we never thought we would face. There are others who complain of the very same thing. I am guessing we will see a flood of such languages in the future thanks largely to applications evolving slowly into services and it will be difficult to guage the quality of these services. Twitter’s API tried to make their service more stable but the mechanism they chose didn’t satisfy many developers.  Lets hope we figure out a way to make these more reliable and stable. I guess its the developers call to be judicious about what language and service to choose when building applications.

The problem with open source software is its lack of quality. And how is this lack of quality downgraded even more ? its due to the lack of proper documentation and support. Its pitiable looking at the so called open source enthusiasts who advocate open source like they live and breathe it, but when it comes time to get the basics of software engineering in place, you see them stepping back from the limelight. The problem can be attributed to the fact that institutes teach programming but doesn’t teach quality standards. Its gives you a very good idea why there are probably 300 projects that do the exact same thing on sourceforge and its so because the people who actually want to use one software don’t get enough help, documentation on it.

  Have you ever tried looking at code that you wrote a year ago ? I have code that I wrote sometime in 2003 and trust me , I cannot understand a line in it. Why ? you cannot remember ever function that you wrote in life. Is it so hard to understand? Im sure most of you guys have taken classes in software engineering, its impossible to have a good software system without support and documentation. I shall take the example of a project that I am planning release soon.

 Thanks to about a dozen people who contributed to the code, there is a lot of redundant code and almost half of the code, is not being used. What do we do now ? do we release it in the shape that it is ?  Im sure the download size will probably double. Also, a lot of segments of code are not documented. How will it look when people see their names flashing at the top of a code file next to the @Author with lines and lines of spaghetti code with no documentation or explanation of their intent.

 Even with the valiant attempts by a professor, our testing strategy has largely been designed not to test, but to con people into thinking its a testing strategy. Is it that hard to test ? No , it isn’t ; its just uncool work. Our project also contains a multitude of technologies like jsp’s , java, javascript and there is absolutely no architecture diagram or a data / control flow diagram. Most of the JSP’s and Javascript is still undocumented let alone being tested.

 The last bit is that usage. Its not as simple as gcc project -> ./a.out . There are a lot of things that need to be configured and specific data formats, size restrictions and tons of other configuration information that needs to go into the system. But there isn’t a single document or a written account of how to go about setting up this project and executing it. Im sure even Donald Knuth wont be able to properly configure and run our project (No offense to Knuth, just used him as a figurehead) . Who will do the job of documenting it so that people who will actually want to use the project, get the documentation that they require ?

 Its strange, the same people that commend Apache projects for their wonderful documentation and support forums do not put in a similar effort for their projects. I am not even talking about the technically inept people, I am talking about people who can do technology well. If the future patriarch’s of technology do not follow the basics of getting a project right then how can the next generation of programmers survive with such unkempt software. If you cannot contribute to making open source better, then please stop advocating it. Its better naive people pay for software which gives them support and service.

In our effort to program the cool, we have forgotten the basics of engineering. Its a shame they call us engineers !!

Tags: Opensource, software engineering, documentation, testing

  After that started the GCraze. Almost any entity that had a G before it was sought out to be the most watched property on the web. This craze still holds; the only difference is that the craze has moved from web developers to general public. Most G properties are running only because of the G in front, sort of like the Y! of the late 90s. Call it fate or just too much popularity, I think a lot of people are coming full circle.

 Over the recent few days I have seen a lot of discontent among all the G users. I shall list most of the ones I remember, but you will get the idea

 - Mail : probably the most sought after mail service in the recent past has its own share of problems. The first being slow connections. You must see Gmail running at our university, when 250 people share a 16Mbps connection, Gmail takes on a life of its own. Mails dont open, conversations are not updated and the chat feature is a pure disaster. The biggest problem I have with Gmail are the intrusive ads next to my mails.
 - Orkut and Google Talk: Orkut was the social network for India, so claim many people. But if it wasn’t for the G tag, I would have liked to see how far Orkut would have gone. I know this having competed with Orkut for a year. The problem with social networks with no personal value add to it ( unlike del.icio.us or flickr) tends to grow boring and spam and other marketing material get the better of the network , you have no choice but to opt out. I consider Gtalk as a piece of art , a wonderful piece of software who got the design and the user experience part just right. But Orkut integration did one very awful thing, it increased my contacts on Gtalk from a mere 10 to about 200, which I really didnt want. Some say I missed a warning to the same, but now there is no undoing it. Lot of my friends are shifting back to Ymsgr and Windows messenger because they see more peaceful days there.

 So thanks to these problems and more, there is a reverse migration to older properties who over time have become better and people are rediscovering their long lost loved ones. Google is doing all the right things with other properties though. I love the reader and just cant do without it and thanks to the sharing and the friends aspect of it, its almost like a new paradigm of use of RSS. Docs also is really cool, though I still like using Zoho, coz its home made and is just purely awesome. Thats about it I guess.

ps : Inspiration for this post comes from my valiant struggle for almost 2 whole hours to get Gmail to work only to see a “Your Account is experiencing Errors” or something. And then I try Yahoo Mail and its so wonderfully fast and awesome and guess what, hotmail works like a charm too. Also, my adsense account has served almost 100,000 ads and yet I haven’t made enough money to buy a decent meal Come on. 100,000 is six digits and they account for something, then why not pay me.

Tags: google, gmail, google talk, gtalk, orkut

•  Follow yearly maintenance schedules to ensure that your furnace and air conditioner run efficiently.
• Unplug rarely used appliances such as a TV located in the spare bedroom.
• Dry your clothes on a laundry line instead of using a clothes dryer
• Replace all incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescent lights (CFL). CFL’s last up to 10 to 15 times longer and are 75 percent more efficient than incandescent bulbs.
• Turn off lights when leaving a room.
• Switch off your monitor or close the lid of your laptop when not in use. Remember always to shut down the PC before going home from Office.
• Set up your monitor to go to sleep when idle for more than 10 minutes.
• Reduce the brightness in your monitor.
  
• Do not unnecessarily leave electrical items like your phone, camera on continuous charging.
• Ventilate your room and use fans and Air conditioners sparingly.
• Always check the emission of your vehicle, remember to tune your engine optimallyto cut emission levels.
  
• Share a carpool or drive with a friend to work or college.
  
• Don’t waste paper, use a computer wherever necessary.
  

I also found out that I emit 3.056 Tonnes of Carbon dioxide every year   This is my environment day post

Technological convergence refers to a trend where some technologies having distinct functionalities evolve to technologies that overlap, i.e. multiple products come together to form one product, with the advantages of each initial component.

I recently wrote an essay on digital convergence for a course im taking. The essay talks about how telephony and computing converged to become the phenomenon we know as the internet. The essay talks in detail the history of both these fields and highlights significant landmarks and events that laid the foundation to this ocnvergence. Its an interesting read for anybody wanting to learn about the history of the internet.

Click here to download my essay on Convergence

Data has far outgrown the domains of just text. Today we talk of mutlimedia data, urls, semantic data and many more application specific formats. Information on the Web is in JSON, REST , XML , Microformats etc. With this vareity in data formats and representations comes the inherent need for flexibility in storage and querying of such information. Almost all database users know of the conceptual modelling required for the design of any database, the key principle being that more tighter the model, more efficient the database. The integrity of the database is only as good as the integrity of the data. But you cannot talk of data integrity with the kind of formats available today.

Clearly markup data dominates the web . Though databases have developed features to better support , store and validate markup data , the initial design of databases was never to store the wide variety of loosely organized data. Querying of such markup data is fruitless and so is the attempt to index, sort , aggregate this data. To develop a custom database capable of all the above mentioned operations could be a solution, but the given the non standardized nature of this data and its probability of change, you would have a tough time scouring the web to search for changes. Plus these databases will not be semantically inter operable.

Developers are taking notice of a new scheme of storing data, I call it the bucket store. The design is roughly the same as that of a hash table, where data blocks are stored in buckets and hashes are used to index or refer to these buckets. A little improvisation in terms of adding upper layers like domains, groups and so on to complement the schema, table in a database is done to make the data easily classifiable. The advantage with this scheme is heterogeneity in data formats and the absence of constraints.

Several products are offering such services at dirt cheap prices. Take Amazon’s S3 or the recently launched Simpledb or CouchDb which offers a host it yourself version of this storage. Amazon S3 has businesses running on top of it; of the many I can recall Slideshare running on S3. With the advent of more mashups and heterogeneous data being churned out by the web more of such non DBMS related storage options will be employed. Given that this paradigm does implement all the enterprise important features like security, access control , backups, transactions etc and mature modeling methodologies that can rival the ER are proposed , I don’t see any problem in this becoming the most viable and cost effective option for data storage.

Incorrect Semantic Interoperability describes mismatch in the format and representation of data belonging to two parallel applications which prohibit them from interacting with each other or prohibits possible migration. Take the example of ERPs like SAP and Oracle Apps, they essentially perform the same computations and solve the same problems, but do they interoperate? No. The data representations for both these applications are bespoke, which makes it unique to one product or a line of products. It is reasonable considering the fact that market domination is obtained by developing custom formats and providing custom decoders, but there is a bigger concern. For large players, data is collated and there is usually a Business Intelligence solution in place and with different products being deployed at different centres, the additional overhead of conversion of the data is imminent. Also two separate applications cannot talk to each other though they are probably linked up sequentially, you have to bring in additional middleware for format conversion and make a common bus.

Efforts like RSS, SOAP and others have been successful only to a certain extent that the format is correct but semantics are still loose. It has to come together sometime, if not now then later, when the data is huge. And the answer is yes, the Indian IT industry survives because of such semantic interoperability. Most of the workforce is maintaining these enterprise bridges (that holds together these different applications) if not building them. A majority of the work involved in the service sector has to do with writing compatibility plugins or writing migration scripts and patch ups. If it was for SI , we wouldn’t have jobs.

There are a set of people that like the innovation happening on the web front and are adopting 2.0 technologies like there is no tomorrow. Everything from office automation to project management is now managed online on productivity service providers.  Concepts like wiki, blogs, forums etc are fast appearing as mainstream applications in organizations. Surely as technology evolves and takes new shape, we will see a dramatic shift in adoption of these new tools .

In contrast , there are the other people who have been around for a long time and have seen a lot of productivity applications. To these people, technology is nothing more than a fast changing fad and prefer to stick to their old time favorites. Take people who have seen the main frame era, such folk just don’t appreciate concepts like distributed computing, virtual servers etc. Quotes like ” our mainframes never needed mirroring”, are common. People who still live reminiscing innovation of their times like spreadsheets and ERP’s.

It may be hard to believe but these form the majority of the so called power users of organizations and these legacy softwares( pun intended) , are maintained and supported just for their usage. Its distrubing to know that enterprise software lags open source software by at least 3 years , in terms of innovation. This lag can clearly be accounted to the legacy lovers who insist on using their accustomed softwares. Where does product development go in such a case. Office 2007 is seeing very slow adoption due to a change in the usability. Will this set of users be responsible for the sluggishness of product development? who will convince these users to adopt newer software? more importantly how? What will these users demand 20 years from now?

Its a strange question, but yes its an emerging market.

A recent trip to the Yahoo Developer network portal also showed some glaringly visible tributes to the field of performance. First , there is YSlow, a plugin which works along with firebug and tells you why a website is slow based on certain pre defined parameters. How about an entire section of a site dedicated to performance. Blogs, presentations, talks, podcasts, videos on performance and its related fields. Do you want to know the thirteen rules to speed up your website, then do read this. You are likely to find one of the reasons in this showing up in YSlow.

Also feel free to join the exceptional performance group to discuss more on high performance websites.

People are moving to more open source technologies and are beginning to discard enterprise software. Take for example a migration in my company, people moved from Weblogic to Tomcat, Oracle to MySql and other host of open source technologies. Problem – open source software isn’t usually made with a lot of scalability in mind, unlike enterprise software that is meant to be scaled. So , when this bunch of non scalable software sits on an enterprise bus, you need performance to match if not better the enterprise counterpart. This is where performance tuning comes into play and as more and more open source finds ground in the enterprise, more such challenges with regards to performance have to be addressed.

Google is going to put a cookie in your browser that will record information everytime you read an ad served by Google. The cookie helps Google predict what kinds of ads the person clicks on and will probably help serve better and more relevant ads. Up until now the ads are served based on the content of the site and also the publisher’s preference on the ads. The  cookie also doubles up as a proof of click ( think click fraud) and more material for publishers to analyse the hits to their ads and mine for patterns. Though the purpose is for ads, Im happy its a step ahead in personalization. The cookie acts like a distributed store of personal information that can be mined by ad servers and then acted upon.

The possibilities of this technology could be endless. Based on my previous post, where I wrote about a distributed implementation of a personalization database which all applications can use to customize data better, google’s cookie is one step towards such a solution. If every browser had cookies of personalized information then applications ( aka good applications) can mine these cookies and get useful information about the persons Net habits and preferences. But a cookie has size restriction and cannot probably be used to store the abundance of personalization information. You can use a add on activex plugin or a firefox addon like google gears with underlying SQLite database and do wonders with it. Of course this would mean about two years of thinking of standards and more bureaucratic gibberish, but once done, it will be a truly distributed system and the web, partially personalized.

You could be served the right category of blogs on wordpress, get the right videos on the opening page of you tube, see the relevant news on CNN , see the most relevant feeds on your RSS reader and much more. Personalization ahoy !!

Think of the same thing in software. A software that is programmed based on generic constraints and the software dynamically learns from its environment through input devices like sensors and then adapts to the changed environment. The classical shortest path problem can be taken as an example. If a crawler running through the shortest path is lifted from its path and put somewhere else, will it be ale to comprehend the change and then quickly adapt or will it be lost. What if the graph changes and produces a lot of cycles or what if the problem statement changes during the course of the program.

I know that a very few people are relating to what they are reading, but the belief that a machine can learn and adapt is what scientists are trying to prove everyday. Machine learning is taboo after movies like iRobot and Terminator, but trust me, we are far far away from something like that. If we can solve a subset of problems of adaptability through an expert system, that will be an achievement in itself.

But how do you go about designing software with such requirements. I would go one step ahead and call it no requirements or changing requirements with no defined thresholds. No current methodologies like  OO or aspects can cater to such a requirement. Probably a new scheme of designing learning software has to be developed. Taking tips from AI and the Turing thesis, a perfect turing machine is what is required. Its a hard call but we will get there one day.

Blogging empowered a generation of people to share their views with their peers. Its almost amazing the number of people who started writing after the invasion of blogs and how many are still active on this front. Some of the pioneers of blogging have been Dave Winer whose archives show  articles as early as 1997 and also John Barger:

  On Dec. 23, 1997, on his site, Robot Wisdom, Mr. Barger wrote: “I decided to start my own webpage logging the best stuff I find as I surf, on a daily basis,”and the Oxford English Dictionary regards this as the primordial root of the word “weblog.”

Wall Street Journal

DuncanRiley differs by saying Justin Hall was the first to use blogging format, Barger came up with the term blogging. Hall and Winer got started in first quarter of 1996. So we are 11 or probably 12 years into blogging. I would again like to thank all my inspirations namely Nicholas Carr, Om Malik, Mike Arrington ,Robert Scoble, Sadagopan , Rajesh Jain, Kiruba Shankar and tons more. I shall try and export my reading list and post it so you can see my sources, till then ……hurrah !! for blogging.

What if you want to hire someone to build an online community? Somebody to create and maintain a virtual world in which all the players in an industry feel like they need to be part of it? It would help if that person understood technology, at least well enough to know what it could do. They would need to be able to write. But they also have to be able to seduce stragglers into joining the group in the first place, so they have to be able to understand a marketplace, do outbound selling and non-electronic communications.

Seth Godin writes about the Online Community Organizer as the job of the future.

I agree with Seth on this point. Apps are becoming more and more social. The social product is only as good as the hype it creates. Take Kevin Rose’s Pownce or Guy Kawasaki’s truemors , these sites generated enough hype prior their launch because of their high profile entrepreneurs. Almost every person wanted to take a peek at these products when launched. Aren’t these people organizers in their own ways ? Marketing a product has been closely associated with getting Techcrunched or Read/Written, its word of mouth marketing at its best and these people are the ones that are drawing audiences and giving them reason to stay.

Even Joshua of Social Design vouches by it. After a certain point, it will be people who will influence the audience of a social app. I sure as hell would join a social network where I could find the Real Bill Gates, if he can be there, so can I, thats the idea. An Online community organizer will have to be one with an impeccable reputation and a neat resume, one that can turn heads. He/she must be able to talk people into joining a product and using it and even deliver the promise of a fruitful app. Its not enough having high profile people in your Organizers list, you need to a have a good product. Marketing will only take you half the distance, the product has to endure the other half of the audience’s prejudice. Its a tricky predicament to let people from all walks of life into a product that was never meant for them; your organizer must have been a patron of the genre or must be at least influential enough to draw audiences of the right kind.

Its indeed a job for the future.

There are innumerable number of apps that are being created on the facebook platform. Existing applications like wordpress are taking heed and porting their apps into the platform. Some of the initial apps have been taken over and VC’s are announcing seed fund for apps built on the facebook platform. Its like everyone wants a part of the 26 Million uniques visiting the site and want to cash in on the phenomenon. So what did facebook do right ?

As I had written earlier in my barcamp post, it makes more sense for applications to be launched as a part of a larger community rather than brave the web alone. Social networks have proved time and again to be good source for informing people or attracting traffic to your site, essentially great place for marketing. Facebooks plans of monetizing the network had to make the site open to public , which they did by opening up to public signups. The next step was to innovate inside the network. Knowing very well that cramming features into facebook will not result in anything but chaos, facebook needed a serious shake up in terms of the features offered to the users. Rather than putting in the effort themselves, they put efforts into making a platform that allowed for people to build apps on top of the facebook community. This ensured a plentitude of apps and also increased pageviews because of these apps. Its a killer strategy.

The popularity of the platform speaks for itself with tons of apps being built on facebook and the increase in activity on the network. Does this mean we will see more social sites opening up to inorganic growth ? There’s no doubt sites like myspace and digg bring in large number of uniques to their site, but will they provide a way for external sites to tap into the community, if it guarantees them more pageviews and more uniques. This has an implication of spinning off into a business of its own in which you sell a community to a service provider. I call it community as a service.  Or will they risk deterioration in quality and increase of spam due opening up of their services and continue to stay organic. Its pretty obvious that the wealth of resources the platform got facebook was plenty but it was facebooks inherent security and privacy features that made sure that there was minimal exploitation.

Do you think your app can provide Community as a service ?

I had written about Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and how it used the power of collaboration combined with automated project management to get arduous work done from people. Taking and extending on the same paradigm are newer applications that try and achieve some good from these collaborative applications. Its like the Seti project which uses your computational resource when idle, these applications use the power of human intelligence to contribute to a greater cause.

Take GalaxyZoo for example.  A project from Oxford, the site aims at using the power of collective human intelligence to aid in pattern recognition. Users are given images of spirals and ellipses to recognise and defragment. The images in essence are images from deep space and the project aims at mapping a virtual universe using GalaxyZoo.

Similarly you have clickWorkers from NASA, a project that aims at identifying craters on Mars. Another useful outcome from these breed of apps is the ability to help in digitizing scanned text or old books. Distributed Proofreaders and ReCaptcha both provide simple to read captchas that form parts of old books that were garbled up by OCR’s while being digitized. Users help in recognizing these garbled , machine unreadable  text in the form of captcha’s and the user input is then given back to the system.

Another interesting collaborative app is the Google Image Labeler. This attempts to solve a problem of tagging images , a usually boring task is made interesting by allowing users to pair up and brainstorm over words that they can come up with for images. Points are given as an added bonus and to keep the game interesting.

There are many other projects that are currently incubating in research labs which are toying with concepts that use this form of collective human intelligence. The challenge will be to streamline these apps into everyday applications and make them more inherent and not be looked at as an overhead. Take for example digg, they ask for captcha auths on submitting a new story. Rather than projects like recaptcha, why not have these captcha’s fit into sites like digg .  That way, the the number of captcha’s served up and translated will be more and will seem more useful to do.