Technology. Without Error

Goodness Gracious I just noticed I have not updated this since the 21st… You would not believe I spend all my time in front of a computer. Seriously!.

I am distracted with work, personal projects, just generally being a companion to my partner, my day is full to overflowing from lunchtime to midnight. I am not complaining though. life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re going to get.

I go, my lords and ladies; just I will make more of an effort to blog more often. Truly! I mean it!.

That was an automated post generated by the lazy bloggers post generator. This post is dedicated to all my friends who tell me they have no time to make a blog post and haven’t cleaned up the dust and cobwebs on their blogs. Go to the site and create your own automatic lazy blog in less than 5 minutes. No typing required. Guaranteed.

On a serious note, if you wrote a post on your own, it would take lesser time. But once in a while, it does a neat job…

I came across Strands, thanks to Turoczy, as he was giving out invites to the beta version of Strands and my experience with it has been wonderful. Since, Strands is in private beta, I did not have many invites to offer my friends. I wanted to share my experience with others, so the best way was an interview with the Strands team. Part I is with Kalong Wong and Part II is with John Rogers from Strands.

This is part 1 of the Strands interview. Interviewed is Kalong Wong, from the user’s perspective.

Me: What is strands? (your point of view)

Kalong: Strands is a website where you can display your life in the form of notes, blogs, images, websites, videos, etc.- most everything you do online. Your content can show your followers what kind of things you like and what type of person you are.

Me: Content aggregation services are available by the dozen, what sets strands apart?

Kalong: Yes I have dropped by different aggregation sites like SocialThing! and Friendfeed but never signed up. One thing I noticed about Strands that is different from those sites is that we focus on content more than social connections. We are more about discovering new things, finding new websites, places to shop, interesting videos, etc. than staying updated with the latest girlfriend dramas.

Me: Tell me more about the other services which the company offers

Kalong: Strands.com also hosts moneyStrands (in beta, similar to Mint.com), StrandsSocialPlayer (music recommendations via certain cell phones), StrandsBusinessSolutions, MyStrands (music recommendation network) and partyStrands. I work very specific with Strands so I’m refraining to go into detail about the other branches I don’t know very much about.

Me: How does Strands stress on the “social” aspect of Web 2.0?

Kalong: Oh dear lord I’m not even sure what Web 2.0 is! I only took one Computer Science class my whole life, freshman year of college, and completely failed. The only F on my transcript.

Me: For a user, the most important aspect is convenience.

Kalong: Yes, right now since the site is in beta, many of the functions aren’t quite convenient yet and maybe it even takes quite some effort to share things on Strands.com. This should improve considerably by the time we release it to the public. Adding feeds should be much easier.

Me: What would you like to tell the new strands user?

Kalong: Don’t worry too much about finding your friends on here! Use Strands as a way gather your internet activities into a display for others discover and share. Use Strands to discover other people with the same interests and stay updated with the best content.

Kalong: I hope this helps! Sorry I couldn’t answer all of them. Let me know if you need any clarification. Good luck!

Part II of the Interview

Interviewed is John Rogers, Social Media Lead at Strands

Me: What is strands? (your point of view)

John: A life-streaming and discovery site designed to bring together the online services you use, share them with friends, and discover what’s hot among the people you care about.

Me: Content aggregation services are available by the dozen, what sets strands apart?

John: We see aggregation as a commodity, anyone can do it. The real question is what value can be added to the data you aggregate. We want to put some intelligence on top of this data by adding personalized recommendations. The key differentiator here is that our goal is to help people discover new things, and we provide them tools to do that (filters, hot posts, and soon recommendations).

Me: Tell me more about the other services which the company offers

John: Some of our services: The MyStrands Social Player is a music player for mobile devices that lets you discover new music, connect with people, and share your tastes with friends. It has recently received Nokia’s Mobile Rules Award http://blog.strands.com/2008/03/19/mobile-rules-winner/

MoneyStrands, which will be launched soon, aims to help people better manage their personal finances (http://blog.strands.com/2008/04/29/moneystrands-expensr/). Business solutions: we help online retailers use our recommendation technology, so they can in turn help their customers discover the content on their site

Me: How does Strands stress on the “social” aspect of Web 2.0?

John: Users can generate content both on Strands and on other services, and distribute it to the people they care about on Strands with the freedom to share and re-use.

Me: Content aggregation services are the incarnations of information overload. comment.

John: We play in a very noise arena What sets us apart from other players, our recommendation engine, will help deliver content a user likes, and at the same time eliminate some of the noise they don’t. The signal-to-noise ratio is key, and something that is always on our mind.

Me: What would you like to tell the new strands user?

John: Invite your friends (everyone in the private beta is given some invites), and tell us what you think! A service like Strands is much more valuable with friends, and we love hearing from our fans. Listening to our early users is a great source of inspiration for us, and it is fairly regular that we will send a cool Strands t-shirt to a fan just to say “thanks”

The following questions directed only at John

Me: What is strands according to you?

John: Strands is a discovery platform, consisting of aggregation, recommendation, and display engines

Me: When is strands likely to be ready for public release?

John: Soon

Me: Can we expect strands to work along with mystrands,  money strands or other services in the near future?

John: Ideally everything Strands will exist under one roof – one account, one username, one password. — There is a natural fit between our music discovery service MyStrands and our new life-streaming service, and soon they will be closely integrated. But when it comes to integrating social media with personal finance there are some reservations. Understandably some people aren’t comfortable mixing to two, and we wouldn’t want to do anything to add to this. Ultimately, we will listen to our fans and go from there.

Me: During times of high volume, most services go down. How do you plan to combat this?

John: Strands.com has been engineered from the ground up to scale, our #1 goal was to build a scalable design from the get go. Having this as a design  priority and knowing we expect huge #’s of users and items, we have designed for future, and this should help us alleviate some of the issues other services have experienced.

Me: The interface of strands looks great and feels great as well? How did you manage to come up with something like this?

John: Thanks Rohit, glad you like it! We’ve heard lots of great feedback about the interface, and don’t plan on straying far from what we have now. The way I see it, we came to this idea by listening to the experts and designing for the novice. We want to provide all the tools to give a technologist everything they want, but at the same time keep it simple and clean enough for a novice to enjoy the service as well.

Me: How is Strands technology superior to other services?

John: We could tell you but then we would have to kill you No seriously, we have been focusing on developing recommendation technologies for a while… our differentiator is our focus on personalization.

Well, now you know who the next governor of California is going to be.
Prerequisites: You have to star in one of the terminator and the Batman series (remember Freeze?). This is how machines plan to take over the world. Check out the trailer of the Terminator: Salvation. Its not much, Its more like a sneak peek than a trailer and doesn’t tell you much about the storyline.
Considering I am watching Dark Knight the day it releases, I can’t wait for the terminator as well. The 3rd part was a bit too boring in my opinion and I hope part 4 delivers something better.
Check out the review of Dark Knight tomorrow, right here on thunderror.com

I have been on deviantART ever since 2002 and needless to say, I have seen it growing up across the ages. Deviantart is the biggest art community on web and it is the best. It covers a wide range of art, right from PC wallpapers and themes for applications to poetry and prose. Deviantart got me interested in art and over a span of 5 years, I have loved every change that they have made on their website.

The art on deviantart nevers ceases to amaze me and till date I have not come across a better website for an artist (whether he draws, photographs or writes) there are even sections for sculptors and wire metal artists. In short, its your one stop shop for art..I love the new version of the deviantart released recently. The new version is code named sleek and man “it is sleek”. The version brings in a new interface for browsing. The search works like magic and dA watch submissions appear on your page along with the screenshot…As with the previous versions, the user menu which lets you delve deeper and deeper into art categories remains, but the new menu has been radically improved. I would complain that the user page has not seen much improvements. But then, that is something minor which I should overlook.There are lots of minor and major tweaks everywhere and all of them improve the browsing experience drastically. The interface is surely a welcome change and makes dA all the more a powerful tool in the world of online art.

I planned to write a small tumblelog about dA. But then, I love writing about dA and so it is here on my main blog. Check out the new deviantart here. So what are you waiting for. Signup now!

And check out what the version has to offer in the video below. I loved the video, so I thought I’d share. If not anything…the video is as good as the new website.

Are you using Firefox? I presume you are. If not, discontinue reading this post. This post is for all those firefox worshippers out there, who have multiple Firefoxes running around the web. A sneak preview at the latest from the secret labs of Mozilla. We have our history, our preferences, our bookmarks, history, passwords and everything on one PC and then try to replicate the bookmarks again on our firefox on another PC. What do we do about the history. Imagine browsing last nite from home and then coming home and searching for that website you browsed the previous night. Here is your solution. Mozilla’s offical labs product, WEAVE.

Install WEAVE like you would install any other extension for firefox. I installed both at home and work. Then create a user ID, password and a passphrase(this encrypts your data..when it is backed up on the servers). Do the initial sync. Go to your second PC and login using the ID, password and the passphrase. Then, sync. Voila! you have all your bookmarks. It simply super cool, considering the project is still in advanced stages of beta. So, your data could be lost. USE AT YOUR OWN RISK! I took it because it was worth reconstructing to try out the project.

I did run into a few issues trying to work on the sync. It repeatedly refused to sync and the error log said failed to acquire a lock. Now, the solution to that would be to go to Weave preferences -> Advanced -> Debugging tools -> Advanced -> Reset Server lock. Another issue I faced that it took me several tries to login to the help forum for Weave. But once it syncs, its miraculous. I happened to have both the PCs open at the same time and my PC2 actually asked me whether I wanted to open the webpages which were open on PC1.  Weave also plans to come up with more and more user interactivity with the webpages in its future releases.

Now I wouldn’t advise installing Weave if you are paranoid about losing your bookmarks, history and stuff. Otherwise, try it out. Available here.

Weave is the Mozilla labs prototype for online services – this is what the addon installation description says.