A friend of mine along with a bunch of other contributors has started Desitech.in a blog site that covers a wide variety of upcoming technologies, events ( now thats something that I look forward to) and interesting startups. Here is their description about the site:

Desitech is a technology journal which covers events, products and technologies relevant to the Indian audience. The journal features various columns including event announcements, event coverage, interviews with personalities, startup profiles, product comparison, etc

Seems to be interesting. Prash, best of luck on the project.

I have been trying to make a web property OpenId enabled and its a cinch. Just download and install libraries for the multitde of programming languages and then just follow some basic configuration steps , map the OpenId users to your user management system and you are done. Here is a list of all the plugins available for OpenId enabling your site.

OpenId has really come of age and with Yahoo announcing support its become a neccesity for almost every web App. I would even go so far as to mandate websites , old and new , to enable OpenId on their sites and save the users from the painful signup and confirm cycle. The sheer number of OpenId holders should be motivation enough for properties to go the OpenId way.

The older tracking code urchin.js will still continue to work for at least another year but there will be no feature updates or compatibility with the newer features. For me , this change means revisiting lots ( and I mean lots ) of pages where I have embedded the tracking code. Lets hope it goes smoothly.

In what can be termed as a not so wise decision, Google has decided to rid its customers the privilege of choosing where to put their ads. You will not be seeing the advertise on this site link on the served up google ads.  Was this is a good decision, is still debatable. The reason : the ads that people put up on sites do not get clicked as much as the ones that the adsense computers pick out. The numbers back up their theory.

Its still a feeling of insecurity – if you ask me. As a publisher, I would like to publish my ads on certain sites that I know will give me better ROI. This situation is very similar to the proof of the four colored theorem. How will google prove that the ads that are served though the adsense engines do really help in better marketing the publishers wares? Is there even a quantifiable measure to check the validity of those ads? Sure the numbers back up the case, but the minority could definitely have done better things in terms of sales. Not all transactions on adsense go down as ROI, its only what the publisher decides to track. If the publisher has no shopping cart or an online selling model, how will the adsense inpact be felt. All these are questions unanswered. But for now the algorithm rules supreme.

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 !!

I am a big fan of new technologies, right from js frameworks to flex to apollo to silverlight, I have always taken pleasure in checking out possibilities. I have even made proof of concepts whenever I could. But frankly speaking , adding download and install plugins like the flash player, silverlight runtime etc is seriously an overhead. The web dev team in my office still develops for IE 5 and Netscape Navigator; you really cannot expect to deliver next gen apps to such people. Whats more depressing is that a majority of the populous consists of those people . I think the success of js frameworks like dojo, yui , prototype was the fact that their model didn’t require any new tricks to your usual browsing habits. In fact, many of these frameworks gracefully degrade down based on your WYSIWYG’s configuration. I don’t think its safe to call these overhead based technologies like gears, sliverlight, apollo – web technologies. But , thats just my opinion.

Well how about a install all pack which contains all the runtimes required. A single update patch on XP Service pack 3 and Vista Service pack. That should make at least 60 to 70 pc of the world ready to receive these technologies. But back to the point , Google Gears .  Will update after checking it out. I like the promise of space, the reader promises almost 2000 articles and thats a lot of space   let m wait it out.

Myspace is acquiring its leading photo sharing widget provider photobucket for just over 250 Million dollars.

Yahoo photos will be shut down in a couple of months to promote flickr. One touch migration to flickr, photobucket, shutterfly etc will be provided.

Microsoft gives a sneak peak at its next version of SQL Server 2008 at its first ever Business Intelligence conference , project codenamed Katamai.

Google unveils its universal search ,  a platform for searching all content and data types.

Microsoft Live mail matures with Ajaxified interface thanks to its asp.net ajax. It even boasts of a Live desktop client that integrates outlook, windows messenger and search. Could spell an end to other mail clients.

The new interface has also removed the rough edges the application had in terms of usability and have done a tremendous job on the personalization front. Its worth a look.  If you liked the older interface better, then thats on the offering too, just a link away, but the new beta homepage is worth the effort.

It adds more credibility if you use homegrown technology to show your prowess rather than use third party tools. Anyhow , you would traditionally expect a flash app to look and perform better than js based apps but this contradicts general expectations. The fonts are terrible and essential emulations of desktop apps like multiple window chats are missing. I somehow don’t see people using this service, at least when you have services like meebo around. And to add to the misery is the traditional Yahoo vertical banner that takes 30% of your real estate away.

you can check it out as http://webmessenger.yahoo.com/  or as web.im

Here’s a screenshot of the app – click to enlarge

Adobe has revealed that their Flex technology will go open source. The essential parts like the compiler and debugger are going open source , so all the flex developers can be relieved. I don’t the more essential Flex Builder will go Open anytime soon though. Its just obvious that not many are that fluent with ActionScripting and MXML, and the builder is what makes flex such a powerful resource. I have read countless blogs from people who come from web dev backgrounds, who have found the design and implementation of Flex apps very confusing. Its exactly like the .NET and Visual Studio dependency. I know very few .NET developers who can do without Visual Studio, its isn’t even supposed to be done that way. The decision is an attempt to let the developer community contribute to the flex platform and make it better, also probably give Apollo the push it deserves.

Microsoft Silverlight, aka WPF/E is a contender against flex for its capabilities of building RIA’s. Considering that it just released its SDK to developers , it will be worth watching which technology picks up turbulence and is accepted world wide from the developer community. Both these technologies promise a seamless desktop/web experience, the one where you can work offline and drag drop things to your desktop from your browser and sync with existing apps on your desktop. Considering that both have downloadable runtimes, developer SDK, local filesystem access and proprietary development environments will make these two very close competitors. People are already expecting MS to announce silverlight to be open in the forthcoming MIX.

Even though I have never worked with WPF/E, I have heard enough praises about its look and feel, ease of use and great build and deploy tools. Microsofts Expression is the recommended tool for Silverlight development and we all know how MS likes to spoon feed developers. I have done Flex and even made a POC of types for my personal page and its a cinch to develop simple forms and everyday applications. I would like to get my hands dirty with Silverlight too to be able to talk about it(Calling all MS execs to give me a free license ).

 Its sort of like a bookmarking service but at a more abstracted level. Though I don’t see people thronging to use OpenDNS instead of their regular browser bookmarks or social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us , but its a good service for network administrators.
   If you are an network admin for a company, college or an institution, you will be aware of the wealth of useful applications that are present on the intranet. You will also know that many of these applications are hosted on different internal servers and aren’t really that accessible either through their URLs or through their navigational qualities. Many go as far as creating a central repository of links to these internal application, but the larger the list grows , the tougher it becomes for searching the services you require.

 Instead use OpenDNS, and you make mail point to your internal mail server, or HR point to your internal human resources portal. Its a cinch to use and doesn’t require you changing your DNS lookup tables in your gateway machine.

So, whats all this buzz about? Its about making web applications work even when you are not connected to the net -think of it as pulling an outlook in web applications. This area has seen a lot of action recently with the launch of many products and technologies that help achieve the cause. Om Malik has called it the age of the hybrid apps.

The biggest problem, of course is the availability of ubiquitous broadband, without which even the smartest web application is as bright as Paris Hilton -Om

There have been a flurry of launches int his space starting with the Adobe’s hope for the future, Apollo, which was released in its early alpha stages to users, downloadable here. The other releases like Yahoo Widgets 4 which offered desktop widgets which were available offline, and Joyent’s slingshot which allows offline capabilities on rails applications. Some of the early products that gave offline capabilities include Zimbra mail and now released desktop, Zoho office suite and some other productivity apps that I cannot recall. We even have Dekoh a sub continental player in this space that allows for developers to build collaborative webtop based apps on their platform. The newly released Live mail service could definitely use an offline offering to maintain its monopoly in the market.

Firefox 3 is also adding a storage element  , sort of like a datastore for applications to access and store data to be sync’d later with the server. Apollo solves this problem by allowing filesystem access which is a rare commodity in web technologies.

One project I followed closely throughout its development was the Dojo offline toolkit that has been released now with some minor bugs. If you are a developer interested in building offline apps, then I suggest you use Dojo as there is none simpler. With the advent of more widget based applications, webtops and other concepts of the future,we will be seeing a lot of activity in this space.

Google talk uses the open XMPP protocol for IM and the Jingle protocol for voip. They had announced a while earlier that their primary goal was to achieve interoperability. Gtalk already allows you to talk with other jabber users and interop with jabber servers. Their goal of Im everywhere, shared by my favorite Im service Meebo is close to reality with this addition. I can’t help but relate this feat to the flash based google talk service,  gtalkr sevice that got googled some time back and the two creators joined Google to pursue their IMbitions.

Anyway, its a great addition and will definitely see some traction  in the IM space. I think
Orkut users will be happiest if it integrates into the network, not having to depend on the gtalk client to IM . Some screenshots.

Get the code here.

Good for the budding SEO’s  of the new era.

People from many states, colleges, districts and minorities each have their own support group for Obama. This is a good move by Obama to gain trust in people. If not anybody, Im sure the Bay Area folks will be glad to vote for him for his sheer ingenuity in leveraging technology as a medium for campaigning. Just goes to show how much social networks will /have become a part of everything human.

This is something that I couldn’t even imagine. Such use of socionets were unheard of before this. But its a good ploy. What else could social networks be used for ??

Educators and teachers in under developed countries suffer a poor a student to PC ratio and this technology will enable them to make any students work together on a single PC. All you have to do is buy USB slots and more mice, the technology will provide distinct colored mouse pointers ont eh screen for each mouse. Students can then work on a collborative enviroment, porbably on a quiz, a puzzle, a painting  or a game of some sort.

A SDK is also ready to let people harness this technology and is available for download here. If you feel your application is something that can work better in such an environment then go ahead. The scheduled release date is sometime in May.

The content has to monitored for relevance and also cleanliness, as most of these brands revovle around products for kids. Take their first offering  the Wii site for example. More  information here. I just wonder how much information does Yahoo have, can that be quantized? how much does google have then ?

I just finished seeing Yahoo Ourcity, a local mashup site that localizes to your current city and shows a mashup of information collected from the various Yahoo brands. Quite recently I have begun to notice a trend in sites that localize content based on the access point . For example if I were to log into Orkut from Bangalore, I would see a lot of Bangalore friends, but if I were to log in from say the US of A , i would see more friends from the US than from India, its more relevance to the data.

Yahoo OurCity also does the same, by showing you a localized version of the site. The portal features current news,weather information, photos tagged geographically to Bangalore in Flickr , upcoming events in Bangalore and other info like movie listings, events, blogs etc. This is where Yahoo stands out from the other web giants. Yahoo has a tradition of building great audiences around a product, they did with their mail, answers and My Yahoo which are forerunners in their own right. Our city is definetely a great concept, add to this the usablility of Yahoo products, great backend services like Flickr, News, maps , videos , del.icio.us and other systems, and you have a great portal which will pull in people like bugs to pest-o-flash. Social networking features is not given that much of an importance, considering thats the most requested/required feature. nevertheless this concept of the Local Daily portal will work. Below are some screenshots.

Adobe will be relinquishing control over the Portable Document Format or PDF as we know it to AIIM, the Enterprise Content Management Association, for the purpose of publication by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).

Proprietary formats are not accepted by lot of government based organisations as they see it as a threat to their data. There are a lot of proprietary formats available like the PDF, Microsoft text etc, but since their adoption criteria is challenged because of their closed scheme of thing, companies are thinking otherwise. Good move by Adobe, although they stand to lose control over what they created, but they tend to gain in sales of Acrobat if the format is accepted to store critical data.