Most Webservices that are catered to the “always on” mentality. While that is certainly true in the USA and other european countries it is certainly not true even for the best in places like India. Electricity is still not “always on”. It can be “mostly on” at best! I live in an apartment where if electricity goes I’m covered for 16 hours so my electricity is “almost always on”, but that is not true for the rest of the country!

Internet in this part of the world is again “mostly on”, server outages happen often and is unavailable for hours together! Bandwidth is metered if ur on a 1mbps connection, slower connections however have the unlimited option. Internet is still expensive in this country I pay about 3000Rs / 75$ per month for 10gb. So CNN pls think again before u automatically start playing a video on money.com! You just lost me! Broadband still accounts for 10% of the internet population in India. Think about the rest of country!

Mobile is “always on” in India my phone is connected for unlimited bandwidth for 400Rs / 8$ a month! The speed isn’t too great but gets the job done. A mobile phone is so vital in this country that coffee shops are providing cell phone charging ports while u sip ur latte!

Given the importance of mobile and “mostly on” Internet access the “cloud” becomes vital in this part of the world! I am willing to bet that most broadband users in this country carry high end mobile phones with GPRS which means there is good probability that they would be willing to pay a nominal fee for accessing their data! Gives micropayments a whole new meaning! Apple lost a tremendrous opportunity when it screwed up it launch by pricing the phone higher than the US market! What were they thinking! Nokia has
Made major in roads here bcos they understand the local market!

3G is scheduled to launch next year (hopefully) and if priced right the adoption levels would be crazy! Mobile operators, cell phone makers, VAS providers are going to make a killing!

So if u have webservice that has an international audience keep this in mind , you will audience will be loyal and happy but mostly done right the oppurtunity to make money!

Gotta go charge my phone .. Cheers!

I am writing this post on my iPhone while Internet and electricity is down :

Image via b_d_solis

Now that I have your attention.. Here it goes ..

Bangalore had its 7th version of the ‘Barcamp’ unconference! Yes you heard it right, thats 7 in 2.5 yrs! I attended the first one in April of 2006. Kudos to the group for keeping it going.. But the coverage of this event has got me thinking about the conversation on the web .. I am only using this event as a example to illustrate my thinking..

Back in 2006.. The event coverage for Barcamp was great.. Tools like ustream.tv, seesmic, backtype and twitter were not in place. Blog was still in fashion, flickr and tags were being used liberally and one would even find youtube videos of the event.. Tracking the conversation would be as simple as tracking google’s blog search and flickr. Youtube videos were linked to blog posts. The conversation felt intimate and networking was great!

The conversation on the web has obviously evolved and is a lot more distributed today. A variety of mediums are being exploited but various tools that address the need. But it feels like the very purpose of these is being defeated .. It doesnt feel INTIMATE! (It is an entirely different story that the coverage of bcb7 was below average to say the least, the twitter feed was pretty good but thats pretty much it) Arent they tools supposed to enhance the quality of these conversations? How many people outside the valley use these tools?

Or is it just that the there is a need for a tool to tie these together to provide the whole picture? Tracking an event takes a whole lot of effort! Here are a few steps

• First organizers need to standardize on the tag for the event!
• Need to evangelize the use of the tag!
• Register the tag/userid on hashtags, twitter & whole bunch of places!
• Register with upcoming.org/eventful.com for the event.
• Broadcast live (like techcrunch’s live feed for TC50) or get someone to broadcast it (like scoble on qik.com)

For someone to follow the event the end user has to do the following ..

• Subscribe to upcoming.org/eventful.com
• Refresh the following windows every few seconds
• twitter search
• google or ask’s blog search
• flickr & youtube search
• backtype search
• seesmic / 12seconds.tv search

• During or after the event the user does one or more of the following:

• Subscribe to blogs/twitters/seemic/users that your discover
• Mark as read items in blogs that you have already read due to your search windows!
• Mark links on delicious/magnolia
• Add friends to various social networks
• Add friends to various IM clients
• Keep checking blogs/twitter to see if the podcasts have been released (Oreilly’s where conference!)

WHAT A PAIN! At this point, tracking an event just adds to my information overload. I have to work way hard to track an event (Whether or not I am attending it)

I think Marissa Mayer from Google stated it nice when she said she looks at web models as either push or pull!

Unfortunately following an event on the web is a pull mechanism right now rather than being a push mechanism after one expresses his interest!

Make no mistake about it .. This problem only gets harder as more niche tools for personal journalism expand.

I would luv to hear how you follow conferences on the web.. Would you like to see it evolve? If so how? Please share your thoughts! Wonder how the scoble’s and Loic Le Meur’s of the world track conferences.

Technorati Tags: barcamp, bcb7, conferences, social_tools, thoughts

scobleslinkblog NowPublic Unleashes Scan: Crowd Powered Media - http://wgt.qlnk.net

Jason Calacanis JasonCalacanis some nice DEMOPIT feedback: http://tinyurl.com/5lz46b

om om does anyone else feel that for news thatmatters to user turn tolocal news. ike delhi bomb blasts how many times old tv is just late-lame about 3 hours ago from Twinkle
Robert Scoble Scobleizer I am getting a demo of http://www.hubdub.com cool predictive engine for news.

Chr15 P1r1LL0 chrispirillo Best way to download photos (en masse) from Flickr: http://ping.fm/HYRiO (OS X, free)

Steve Rubel steverubel Jeff Sandquist has long had a great 7-day rule for new apps. If it doesn’t stick, it’s gone. I am doing the same. http://tinyurl.com/5j63l2

Anybody know of a good way to share twitter favorites other than retweeting or cut/paste?

Technorati Tags: links, twitter

I finally migrated off of my JRoller blog to wordpress. Thanks to the wonderful support of Rick Ross @ DZone. I have known him since the Freeroller days and he was kind enough to hook me up. He had to tinker with a setting for a couple of minutes and I ran the template that exported all my entries from 2002. Yep thats right! Thats when I started blogging! Conversation used to be lot more intense and exciting .. Didnt have to reblog a whole lot to get on top of Techmeme!

Anyways heres a shout out to Rick! Thanks dude!

P.S: I am selling my old domain blogforthought.com, let me know if you are interested!

Finally got around to making the transition from blogforthought.com to arjunram.com! Imported a good chunk of my older blog from jroller in here! They still need a proper export functionality!

New posts will be sent to my Twitter page!

Still need to integrate my google reader likes! More to come soon!

Finally got around to installing the worsdpress client on the iPhone. The interface is clean and I hope to use the client more often! Not sure if I have an audience anymore but things have been crazy! Got married, been travelling like crazy and more big news on the way! More to come ……

OK, so I’ve been released from my NDA. I was alpha testing an upcoming feature of Plaxo Pulse — this feature has not yet been released and now that my account has gotten shut down it’s not clear whether it will be released. It is a Facebook importer that works just like any other address book importer.What does it collect?
Names and email address and birthday.

So Scoble wants to export his friends and sync up with plaxo. Here is how he could have done it:

Tools that he would have needed:

1. Facebooksync (217 people already use it!, Review here!)
2. Macbook Pro (Which he already owns http://scobleizer.com/2007/11/16/caught-in-apple-restart-hell/)
3. Plaxo sync tool Names and email address and birthday.

Run Facebooksync which downloads the contact information (Name, email, date of birth, photos) and syncs it up to your Mac address book. The plaxo sync software that is running will sync his addressbook up with his Plaxo account. I do this all the time.

So whats the big deal? Why the hoopla? Everybody is all over this issue. I even twittered scoble with this suggestion. May be he hasnt looked at the twitter stream yet (he mentions that he looks at only 10% of his tweets) so I am going to give him to benefit of the doubt! He is usually good at analyzing before crying foul! Hope he sees this post!

However there is a bigger issue that needs to be addressed, who owns your/my data? I believe this is issue that needs to be addressed and people are going after the biggest target. I am proponent of me owning my data! If you as a company are making money out of my data then the right thing for the company to do is to let me export my data and use it the way I want it. But its just not facebook, its everybody Yahoo, linkedin, google!

I do believe Chris Saad’s Dataportability.org is the right way to go! The same is true for attention data and apml. I have even suggested that browsers need to support apml natively.

I am no facebook junkie but I think the issue of data portability has to be addressed by all companies.. You use my data to make money then u let me export it! Period! As end users we need to get companies to sign agreements with us when we sign up.

Am I smoking doping or am I just missing this point? Chime in!

A frustrated user looking to break the browsing shackles (in the mac world). Most of the suggestions are applicable to windows as well.
As Light as Camino

Is this really too much to ask? I’m not talking about running twenty tabs. I am talking about 5-7 tabs and browser thats open through the day and doesn’t take a gig of memory. A browser thats snappy and NOT a memory hog!

Culprits: Safari, Firefox, Opera

Attribution: bdepardo

As elegant as Safari

Search is paramount! You are searching for something or the other. Safari with Inquisitor wins this one period. I luv the way safari highlights my key that is being searched. I luv the way Inquisitor shows me the results as I type and how most of the time I dont need to wait to open up the search page in google. I wish this functionality was available for any of the custom search engines that I can add in firefox.

Culprits: Firefox, Camino, Opera

Attribution: mac_vegetarian

Attribution:Zephyr1982

Full screen without clutter

This one should be so obvious! Someone you wanna read your long blog posts (Marshall K posts are long) or watch twittervision without the other clutter on your desktop. Opera nails this one! Can the other browser please fall in line!

Culprits: Firefox, Camino, Safari, Flock

Attribution: jsuplido

Most used sites as start page

Opera has this one nailed with speed dial. 9 most frequented websites. Gone are the days where people just visited one site. Depending on my mood I pick one of the 9 sites. Very nifty! I like flock’s streams but more on that coming up soon.

Culprits: Firefox, Camino, Safari, Flock

Attribution: krilli

Favorites, Favorites, Favorites

Every browser fails this test! Flock comes close with integrating delicious & magnolia but is far from nailing this feature. Heres what I would like. I want my browser to import existing bookmarks into delicious and auto tag the sites that it can find on delicious (the delicious plugin on firefox offers default tags) and then from there on whenever I drag and drop a link I want it to pop a window to tag it. Please give me a bookmark toolbar with 2 options .. most recently used tags / most popular tags

Culprits: Firefox, Camino, Safari, Opera

Attribution: e-strategy.com

News Feed / Friends stream

Flock does the best job of this but comes real short of being an usual feature. If there is one thing Facebook has sold then its the news feed. Pls dont make me sign in and out everytime! Pls let me use claimid(Check out Chris Messina’s claimid page) if possible if not save my user id/passwords locally and retrieve the feeds and consolidate my newsfeed! P

Culprits: Firefox, Camino, Safari, Opera

Attribution: Chris

Feed reader Integration

Integration with Bloglines/Google Reader. Please its long over due! I want my browser to be able to sync back to Google reader. Google Gears integration is not what most reader find ideal. Ideally it should be a side bar. Digg spy like feature would be freaking awesome but I know Im getting greedy. Any kind of integration with Google reader would be great!

Culprits: Firefox, Camino, Safari, Opera

Attribution: CaptQuirk

Media Browser

People create audio/video content all the time or link to them. Be it podcasts or videocasts(scoble’s the culpit, LOL) or seesmic (Loic keep up the good work) videos. I want a media browser that I can queue up links for it play on the sidebar as I browse. Right now I download it to my hard disk and then have to play it later Or I have to have have a browser window and an iTunes window open to watch the video and browse the web. Playlists are already being used in web players check out msnbc TV or cnn, how tough should it be? Also Songbird already handles media. And please make the media browser smart enough so that it can extract the flv/mov/avi/mp3 file from the playlist link rather than taking me to that page like the media browser in Flock does today! Credit goes to Flock for getting this started .. A step in the right direction but a long way to go.

Firefox, Camino, Safari, Opera

Attribution: Geek glue

Portable

I luv foxmarks on firefox. I would like the option for a similar service where my browser data / state is encrypted and stored! or let me store the file in a usb drive / ipod / iphone. Please build the client that can upload/download/import data into browser so I can goto any machine and login and start off where I left. Peace and harmony!

Culprits: Firefox, Camino, Safari, Opera

Attribution: Frank Hamm

Microformats Integration

Microformats went main stream when google maps started to support it. I constantly use it to download restaurant information to my address book, sync it up with my iphone and off I go! Please natively support it and make it extensible. Dont make it into a plugin for people to download and tweak! Your never going to get people to use it. Most browsers have plugins to support it and support can be spotty depending on the browser.

Culprits: Firefox, Camino, Safari, Opera

Attribution: David Nemesis

Private Browsing

Sometimes you just need Private browsing.. My browsing is my business! I dont want to be messing around with cookies and removing history, especially when Im at a friends place and having to explain twitter.

Firefox, Camino, Flock, Opera

Attribution: apple.com

APML Integration (Nice to have)

Attention data is going mainstream in 2008. Browser will be foundation for such data. Please work with the APML group (or get Chris Saad to work pro bono LOL) to come up with a tool using which I can export my attention data. Allow me to filter out data that I dont want exported (be it sites or be it time of browsing). People will be more open to exporting attention data if they have a tool that will let them filter stuff out.

Culprits: Firefox, Camino, Safari, Opera, Flock

Attribution: weaverluke

Browsers need to evolve, none of these ideas are revolutionary. If I had all these features why would I ever leave my browser. I have not included features like tab browsing & form filling which most browsers do a good job implementing. What would you like on your browser that you don’t have today that is making your life painful? Let me know your thoughts. I will update this post or followup with another.

Google appears to have started to promote its blog search on its main page, just like they promoted other properties like google news. The last google promoted google news, here was the effect as Hitwise reported:

when Google placed a link to Blog Search on the Google News home page, causing a 168% surge in market share for Google Blog Search over a two week period”. Since then, approximately 60% of Google Blog Search’s traffic has been coming directly from Google News, compared to less than 1% before the change.

Its only a matter of time before adsense pops up on blogsearch. Meanwhile technorati seems to be enjoying its slumber party!

Technorati Tags: blogs, google, search

What is a Lifestream?

Aggregating RSS feeds is not something new, its been around for a few years. As web users we leave our digital footprints at these services, be it twitter, youtube, flickr or last.fm. A majority of these services provide RSS feeds. An aggregation of  your various digital footprints is your Lifestream. Some people also refer to it as “Life Casting”, “Activity Stream”.

Why on planet earth would one create a Lifestream?

If you are like me when you want to share content that you create and like, then your audience is craving for a Lifestream. Case in point my brother, he has a moblog, a personal blog, a photoblog and a flickr stream. And I for one am tired of checking multiple sites/feeds.

Any good examples of Lifestreams?

Kevin Rose, Fred Wilson (he is a VC), Steve Rubel are good examples. I have a Lifestream as well.

How does one go about creating a Lifestream?

There are several services that allow you to aggregate your life stream. I am currently using tumblr to aggregate my Lifestream.
Here is how I have created mine:

flickr + delicious + blog + twitter + blogroll favorites = my life stream

I have also made a twitter feed for my lifestream using twitterfeed.com this way anybody can follow my lifestream on twitter.

Steve has taken this one step further and integrated what he calls his reply stream: responses to his twitters + inbound links for his blog (I wonder what happened to his blog comments?)

Aren’t you worried about posting some much information online?

Most of the stuff that I post online and made public are things that I want to share with other people. For instance my personal pictures are flickr are protected. But it is a good idea to make sure you are a bit cautious. I don’t advertise my feeds on a network like Plaxo’s Pulse. It aggregates Lifestreams of all the folks you are connected to. My audience is different on here than it is on Plaxo. You could also use some of the other services to protect your life streams.

Other than aggregating feeds is there any other reason to create a lifestream?

One of the exciting things that is happening is APML. It is mark up language that captures ones attention. The idea is to compress all forms of Attention Data into a portable file format containing a description of ranked user interests. Check out an excellent post of Attention profiling written by Marjolein Hoekstra @ Cleverclogs.com here. Lifestreams offer the right kind of data that can be used to convert into APML. So why should you care? Remember every-time you try a new service that ask you to setup your personal preferences be it my.yahoo.com or netvibes or spotback (reminds me of the days where you had to train the computer for text to speech!). In the future you will only plugin your APML. Even better you could  sign in with your openid and authorize access to your APML and voila the service is personalized! A couple of things need to happen for us to get there:

Need a service that convert a Lifestream into APML

There is one such service that does that today, Engagd.com. Check Emily’s excellent post on conversion of a Lifestream into APML. But this service doesn’t seem to be working properly as yet and hence have not been able to review the quality of data that it produces. Dandelife claims to support APML but I have not been able to get it working.

• Need web platforms/service to support consumption of APML

At the moment there is only one service that consumes APML, Particls. Others such as bloglines, newsgator have promised to support the standard. Please check out the APML workgroup and members area for more info.

You have got me interested in Lifestreams, How do I keep myself up-to date?

Mark Krynsky’s excellent Lifestream blog can be found at lifestreamblog.com. I will make an earnest effort to post my finds and updates on here as well.

Is there a market leader in this space?

There are several services at that provide life aggregation. A comparison of some of them can be found here at lifestream blog (its not upto date). This space is starting to heat up with Google’s acquisition of Jaiku and funding(750K) of tumblr.com, but the fireworks are just beginning! So sit back, relax, get yourself a drink and enjoy!

Technorati Tags: apml, Blogging, lifestream, tumblr