Saturday, April 14, 2007
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
Catching Up
A lot has happened in the tech world and in my world. I have kinda drifted away from this blog due to extremely stupid and irritating web filtering at work. One cannot access even blogs!! There is this really irritating filter called websense. It categorizes all the websites into various categories and the admin can blog them...category by category! Shopping, tasteless!, dating and personal , GMAIL, webmail, proxy avoidance, Message boards and clubs, Lifestyle and society! and Sports!! are some of the categories that are banned there. Well not for very long ...I have resigned and will be joining a travel search firm.
It is amazingly stupid that some people think that you can actually make people work in a organization by limiting access to the net and setting entry and exit restrictions! Maybe in a mill or something but where you have people working on large projects and most of the work is accomplished by taking a personal interest, a ban on things junta does in leisure time is suicidal. No wonder out of four people in my cubicle 3 have already put in their papers.
I think the new India and new Indians are a very different from the old India that was there 20-30 years ago. Censoring tactics like china is not going to work in a free country like India. Some may argue that censorship does exists in movies. Well hindi movies anyways don't have a lot of free speech and change the world kind of stuff. Moreover there is no choice. Job scene on the other hand is a very different ball game altogether!
Tech world in the next post.
It is amazingly stupid that some people think that you can actually make people work in a organization by limiting access to the net and setting entry and exit restrictions! Maybe in a mill or something but where you have people working on large projects and most of the work is accomplished by taking a personal interest, a ban on things junta does in leisure time is suicidal. No wonder out of four people in my cubicle 3 have already put in their papers.
I think the new India and new Indians are a very different from the old India that was there 20-30 years ago. Censoring tactics like china is not going to work in a free country like India. Some may argue that censorship does exists in movies. Well hindi movies anyways don't have a lot of free speech and change the world kind of stuff. Moreover there is no choice. Job scene on the other hand is a very different ball game altogether!
Tech world in the next post.
Monday, January 29, 2007
Indian Social Networking -- Part 2
Sometimes this whole idea of Indian Social Networking reminds me of 1999. A disaster prone, completely unfeasible idea of selling a service on internet (free substitutes of which are already available). Indian public just won't buy anything online. But then whats the harm in trying (if money is not from your pocket). Maybe they can sell cakes, cards, t-shirts, CDs, DVDs, flowers etc. Then they can also act as job search websites! ..Imagine naukri turning into a social networking website!!!
Wednesday, December 20, 2006
Social Networking in India
Orkut, Gazzag, Friendster, Myspace and a score of others! What is so attractive about social networking that we hear almost every week about a new social networking portal?
Well, there are many reasons. It would be repetitive to list all of them here. Though the most fundamental reason I can think of is that these sites are a gold mine for search portals, job portals and all such other portals that makes them so attractive for internet firms and VCs worldwide. People who otherwise fill personal information forms elsewhere with "not so correct" data seem to fill loads of "correct" data at these sites which can be mined to correctly serve targeted ADs.
Targeted ADs then translate into good revenues for firms who advertise online. This strategy is very cool for US and other nations where e-shopping is a big rage.
But what about India ? Here we do things differently. We hardly buy anything online. E-shopping is not such a huge business here. Why and how can a social networking start up target good and steady revenue in a market such as India. My solution is a little far stretched and may not be true at all. But then it never bad to listen to a new perspective.
When I see social networking portals such as Yaari and Minglebox coming, I see a clear lack of business idea. How are they going to make money in market where large internet user base doesn't translate directly into revenue. And also what different strategies are needed to tap this market. Make no mistake, user base of such portals is big and used by people who have money to spend. Every tom, dick and harry in my office and elsewhere has got an orkut account. Not only that these people log on to these portals several times a day.
First look into differences in Indian and US internet scenario. In India, despite a major telecom boom, internet speeds are slow to say the least. Most of the ISPs provide at max a 256K'b'ps connection. That is Kilo bits per second and hence at best can provide 32KBPS of net speed. (Two things this 256Kbps generally tops at around 150 Kbps and MTNL just annoucned a 2 Mbps connections...Things are bad but changing!). So what does this has to do with a social networking portal ? A lot! Bad net speed translates into a slow and heavy social networking portal into a beast which sometimes takes 1-2 mins to load a page....sometimes. This maybe a reason why people in India are still stuck with Orkut when elsewhere Myspace and other such rich social networking portals are becoming popular.
On the other hand telecom boom has made sure that almost everybody now has got a phone and people spend a lot of time and money on these little gadgets.
So the million dollar question which still remains unanswered is who does one go about making a Indian social networking portal? Here is what I suggest
1. Make it simple, keep the total loading time on a 128 Kbps connection less than 10 secs...preferably 3-5 secs. Thats a big task. 128-256Kbps would generally be around 80-170 Kbps. Thats 10-20KBps. That means pages should not be larger than 50-100KB (at max 200KBs). You need to let go a lot of images that you put into those menu bars, buttons etc. A text only page with 8-12 , 5-7 KB highly compressed images seems to fit the bill. Keep that CSS file as small and custom made as possible.
2. Server side need to be very quick. Java is a complete no -no. Php would invite wrath of hackers(though it would be fast) and would be difficult to maintain (coding wise). RoR is good and fast too...with less security issues and a carefully tweaked Apache server with a fast database (I am careful not to mention which one) would be good. Lisp is also a solution. Static pages is not a bad idea it seems(if security aspects are taken care off). What I mean is that user profile pages and home pages need to be a static html file. No database connection (or very less of it). Would definitely be faster that database driven dynamic pages.
3. Ajax is the key. A lot of users in India like Gmail. Just because it's swift and prompt. A lot of ajax coding would also make dynamic pages a lot faster than they usually are.
4. Link with major Indian ISPs in such a way that there are server which serves the user has a internet back bone of that particular ISP. This is rather doubtful starter but whats the harm in trying.
Business side of it
in the next post
Well, there are many reasons. It would be repetitive to list all of them here. Though the most fundamental reason I can think of is that these sites are a gold mine for search portals, job portals and all such other portals that makes them so attractive for internet firms and VCs worldwide. People who otherwise fill personal information forms elsewhere with "not so correct" data seem to fill loads of "correct" data at these sites which can be mined to correctly serve targeted ADs.
Targeted ADs then translate into good revenues for firms who advertise online. This strategy is very cool for US and other nations where e-shopping is a big rage.
But what about India ? Here we do things differently. We hardly buy anything online. E-shopping is not such a huge business here. Why and how can a social networking start up target good and steady revenue in a market such as India. My solution is a little far stretched and may not be true at all. But then it never bad to listen to a new perspective.
When I see social networking portals such as Yaari and Minglebox coming, I see a clear lack of business idea. How are they going to make money in market where large internet user base doesn't translate directly into revenue. And also what different strategies are needed to tap this market. Make no mistake, user base of such portals is big and used by people who have money to spend. Every tom, dick and harry in my office and elsewhere has got an orkut account. Not only that these people log on to these portals several times a day.
First look into differences in Indian and US internet scenario. In India, despite a major telecom boom, internet speeds are slow to say the least. Most of the ISPs provide at max a 256K'b'ps connection. That is Kilo bits per second and hence at best can provide 32KBPS of net speed. (Two things this 256Kbps generally tops at around 150 Kbps and MTNL just annoucned a 2 Mbps connections...Things are bad but changing!). So what does this has to do with a social networking portal ? A lot! Bad net speed translates into a slow and heavy social networking portal into a beast which sometimes takes 1-2 mins to load a page....sometimes. This maybe a reason why people in India are still stuck with Orkut when elsewhere Myspace and other such rich social networking portals are becoming popular.
On the other hand telecom boom has made sure that almost everybody now has got a phone and people spend a lot of time and money on these little gadgets.
So the million dollar question which still remains unanswered is who does one go about making a Indian social networking portal? Here is what I suggest
1. Make it simple, keep the total loading time on a 128 Kbps connection less than 10 secs...preferably 3-5 secs. Thats a big task. 128-256Kbps would generally be around 80-170 Kbps. Thats 10-20KBps. That means pages should not be larger than 50-100KB (at max 200KBs). You need to let go a lot of images that you put into those menu bars, buttons etc. A text only page with 8-12 , 5-7 KB highly compressed images seems to fit the bill. Keep that CSS file as small and custom made as possible.
2. Server side need to be very quick. Java is a complete no -no. Php would invite wrath of hackers(though it would be fast) and would be difficult to maintain (coding wise). RoR is good and fast too...with less security issues and a carefully tweaked Apache server with a fast database (I am careful not to mention which one) would be good. Lisp is also a solution. Static pages is not a bad idea it seems(if security aspects are taken care off). What I mean is that user profile pages and home pages need to be a static html file. No database connection (or very less of it). Would definitely be faster that database driven dynamic pages.
3. Ajax is the key. A lot of users in India like Gmail. Just because it's swift and prompt. A lot of ajax coding would also make dynamic pages a lot faster than they usually are.
4. Link with major Indian ISPs in such a way that there are server which serves the user has a internet back bone of that particular ISP. This is rather doubtful starter but whats the harm in trying.
Business side of it
in the next post
Sunday, December 03, 2006
M$ and Novell
Not as bad people are projecting it. Give some credit to M$ for atleast taking a step in forward direction.
Google and Orkut
It's nice to see small changes appearing in Orkut but I still think there is a lot of room for improvement in orkut. For instance that Donut thing is really very irritating. Also the way they have integrated gtalk with orkut ...sucks! They could have integrated the Gmail-talk into orkut and that would have been quiet something. But still...atleast a start. Scrap alert feature is quiet good though. But scrapbook page needs to be ajaxified...completely
What about a picasa and orkut linkage ?
What about a picasa and orkut linkage ?
On Future of Google
Google recently integrated most of their services. Google talk with orkut, google talk with gmail, docs (writely) with spreadsheets, docs and spreadsheets with google pages, Google groups new avatar in gmail format etc. A lot of stuff still needs to be done like photos with gmail and gtalk(maybe even docs). Then there will be search integration with spreadsheets, blogger with gmail (even gtalk with blogger...who knows!). And many more such small-big changes...
But what Google apps or for that matter other web apps lack is a server at the client end. I think we users think it's very unreliable to have a important document stored only at Google servers. I think there is a need for Google to use Google Desktop as a server at the client ends so that user may also work offline. This, in my view, requires a lot of innovations. Saying it easy but actually doing it may not be possible at all...due to concerns of size, memory requirements, reverse engineering concerns etc. But if done, it would be a definitive step towards a web based era of desktop computing and this I think is what google is about to do in near future.
But what Google apps or for that matter other web apps lack is a server at the client end. I think we users think it's very unreliable to have a important document stored only at Google servers. I think there is a need for Google to use Google Desktop as a server at the client ends so that user may also work offline. This, in my view, requires a lot of innovations. Saying it easy but actually doing it may not be possible at all...due to concerns of size, memory requirements, reverse engineering concerns etc. But if done, it would be a definitive step towards a web based era of desktop computing and this I think is what google is about to do in near future.
Friday, September 01, 2006
Tata indicom in Mumbai - system crashed?
For past 10 hours I am not able to call anybody and vice versa! I called up customer care and they told me that there is some technical glitch. Anybody else experiencing similar situation?
Thursday, July 20, 2006
Blockspot
Blogspots get blocked and they instantly start blaming the government about it.
I won't do it because
1. Government issued a letter to ISPs to block *some* blogs and ISPs goof up and block the whole domain name-not fault of the government.
2. Bloggers point that their "freedom of speech" is being crushed by the government- Not exactly. Govt. never tried to block blogpsot on the whole. It was the ISPs. They also say that blocking even a few websites is not good and is "censorism". Well, yes it is censoring and yes it may be violating the spirit of internet. But violating the freedom of speech. Don't think it is the same. One of the websites quoted there was hinduunity, which is a hindu extremist website, spreading hatred, and thus government took a correct step by banning that. But then aren't we disallowing those extremist to express their views? Yes we are! But would you
allow LeT to run a advertisment campaign on say some private news or tv channel?
allow al-quida to start a news channel in India to air their 'beheading' acts and give justifications about it ?
allow a banned hindu extremist organization to run a radio channel which airs programs about how to start riots and how to kill most number of muslims in your locality?
allow a terrorist organization to give newspaper Ads asking for donation to their cause?
Nahi na?
Then why should we allow such sites to exist or remain accessible? They are not much different than radio, tv or newspaper. They are also source of news, data, views, articles and advertisment...form is a little different.
Anyways, lets explore the technical part of it. Why did all these ISPs goofed up ?
Well banning a *.blogpsot.com is very easy. Just do a DNS lookup of blogspot, get th IP address and put it into "access denied" list. But banning a particular subdomain such as http://abc.blogspot.com is much difficult task. As this subdomain has no seperate IP address.
So now that ISPs are slowly allowing the domain .blogspot.com to be accessible, can we say that this is all was there to the story ?
Maybe or maybe not!
For the starters bloggers are still fighting it out on the google groups and blogs
Also there may be a small subtle point we may be missing here. Banning of these blogs may have been a exersize by the security agencies to locate those people who access these blogs. And this maybe the very reason not to make the ban list public. The ISPs may have been asked to route the access requests to these particular blogs/sites to govt. servers which in turn register the IPs and thus secuirty agencies would have been able mark out locations from where people are accessing it. This may not be a very intelligent idea to get the IP addresses of the culprits but a very practical idea...yes definitely.
I won't do it because
1. Government issued a letter to ISPs to block *some* blogs and ISPs goof up and block the whole domain name-not fault of the government.
2. Bloggers point that their "freedom of speech" is being crushed by the government- Not exactly. Govt. never tried to block blogpsot on the whole. It was the ISPs. They also say that blocking even a few websites is not good and is "censorism". Well, yes it is censoring and yes it may be violating the spirit of internet. But violating the freedom of speech. Don't think it is the same. One of the websites quoted there was hinduunity, which is a hindu extremist website, spreading hatred, and thus government took a correct step by banning that. But then aren't we disallowing those extremist to express their views? Yes we are! But would you
allow LeT to run a advertisment campaign on say some private news or tv channel?
allow al-quida to start a news channel in India to air their 'beheading' acts and give justifications about it ?
allow a banned hindu extremist organization to run a radio channel which airs programs about how to start riots and how to kill most number of muslims in your locality?
allow a terrorist organization to give newspaper Ads asking for donation to their cause?
Nahi na?
Then why should we allow such sites to exist or remain accessible? They are not much different than radio, tv or newspaper. They are also source of news, data, views, articles and advertisment...form is a little different.
Anyways, lets explore the technical part of it. Why did all these ISPs goofed up ?
Well banning a *.blogpsot.com is very easy. Just do a DNS lookup of blogspot, get th IP address and put it into "access denied" list. But banning a particular subdomain such as http://abc.blogspot.com is much difficult task. As this subdomain has no seperate IP address.
So now that ISPs are slowly allowing the domain .blogspot.com to be accessible, can we say that this is all was there to the story ?
Maybe or maybe not!
For the starters bloggers are still fighting it out on the google groups and blogs
Also there may be a small subtle point we may be missing here. Banning of these blogs may have been a exersize by the security agencies to locate those people who access these blogs. And this maybe the very reason not to make the ban list public. The ISPs may have been asked to route the access requests to these particular blogs/sites to govt. servers which in turn register the IPs and thus secuirty agencies would have been able mark out locations from where people are accessing it. This may not be a very intelligent idea to get the IP addresses of the culprits but a very practical idea...yes definitely.
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