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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…

Toluu is an interesting web2.0 tool which provides you with new and interesting feeds for your RSS reader/aggregator.

How does Toluu work? Upload an OPML file or add feeds manually. Based on your interests, shows other people with similar feeds. Like something? Click on the feed and say add. The feed is added to your aggregator (Not Toluu). You choose your aggregator, be it google reader, bloglines or whatever you may choose to use.

A list of the feeds you subscribe to remains on Toluu and it allows the engines at Toluu to pick better recommendations for you. The match engine shows promise and the idea is simply superb. It fills up the narrow space between you and your feed reader. Now that’s a market noone has tapped. Love that, simply ground breaking…Right now Toluu is in private beta and you can request for a beta invite code by signing up at their site. The best feature is the fact that you don’t have to fill up your profile if you have a twitter id. Auto import of your profile from twitter and if you want even makes a twit every time you add a feed to your profile (great!). Check out my feeds here.

The site design is simplistic and easy to use and navigate, the true mark of the birth of a new success story. Great use of technology, easily one of the most innovative technologies recently…Try it out today.

Or (as always) you could ask me for one

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.

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.

Ah! here is something..Something drastically new from the Google stables. I love Lively. I presume it was some poor startup acquired and made a part of Google labs (If this statement is wrong, feel free to correct me)

Lively’s description says “Create an avatar and chat with your friends in rooms which you design”

Google lively is a mini secondlife clone. where you can create your 3d avatars, interact in real time in interesting rooms which are filled with avatars. Lively allows you to download its client software which allows you to login to lively (for which you use your google id.) But all the action happens inside your browser window (currently it supports IE and firefox) . Select a name for your avatar and your appearance. Select a room to go and you are all ready to mingle in the 3d world. Clicking on a place in the 3d dimension, takes u there instantly. clicking and dragging your avatar moves you around. chatting works great, the animations are slick and smooth, but the load times are a pain. a few screenshots of how the world looks anyway.

But be warned that lively is still in beta and still inside Google labs and you are likely to face lot many issues, many of which I have already faced. So if at all there is something you would like help on, ask me and if I have come across the issue, I would be more than happy to help. I love lively, Google’s very own second life.

Do give it a try here. And don’t forget to leave your comments down here.

All pictures, logos, trademarks are properties of their respective owners.

I wanted to review Plurk when I started using it..but never got around to writing this post…Plurk basically took the idea of using status msgs/microblogging to the next level by a little bit of social networking features as well.

Plurk allows its users to update their current status using 140 characters (just like twitter does) But, their similarities end there..Plurk uses a concept of a visible timeline (all your posts are chronologically arranged on an animated timeline) This is in contrast with twitter’s way of presenting your (and your friends’) posts in a fashion similar to an RSS feed. A follower is someone who is informed of every update of yours and a friend is a follower whom you follow as well.

The most talked about feature of plurk is the karma feature which tracks the level of your interactivity and assigns a number to it. Higher karma allows you to unlock more smileys, more interface changes etc. Karma could very well encourage people to interact more, but would also make them very well spam to increase karma. Plurk is soon revamping its karma system..so that should be taken care of..

Another much appreciated feature is the ability to carry out entire conversations over an update. This allows users to interact more freely and responses are chronologically ordered and grouped with the original status message allowing users to follow a complete conversation from beginning to end. For the first few days I used plurk, I completely ignored twitter..but after the new shine washed away…I use it alongside twitter. Plurk unlike other web 2.0s does not share its API..However, there are many sites such as hellotxt, lifestream, ping.fm which already support integration with plurk.

Join me at Plurk!

Twitter is down from today morning…Out of touch with the tweet world. All I see on my twitter home are the catbot, birds and the broken piece of electrical connection..On the plus side, saves a lot of my time. Twitter is a time waster, no matter how much you try not to think that way. The morning has been really productive in the absence of twitter. Why does twitter go down? Some of the reasons that the twitter folk have given us:

• Part of our caching service required an unscheduled restart
• This was a planned maintenance project
• finished a major infrastructure project tonight
• some caching issues—namely, the /home timeline cache wasn’t being updated correctly for everyone
• and many many more…

All of the above are from Twitter’s official blog..But the fact is easy to understands, the network infrastructure is too weak to support the kind of volume which twitter handles. I read somewhere that twitter’s staff are not enough to support the network, which could be true as I note and quote from one of their official blogs

“I just left the office, at 6am, with most of our engineering and technical operations team. That’s only a handful of people, but we were all there all night”

All said and done, I wish twitter would get its already upgraded infrastructure upgraded enough to handle the traffic or atleast give us prior information on scheduled outages and estimated downtimes (not that they have to be accurate). But, there is one thing which I read somewhere, “We need twitter more than it needs us.”

Awww…twitter is still down, ground control: “may”day…

Update June 25, 2008

Twitter now has whales instead of the bird and the broken robot. And here is a workaround which twitter has brought in to reduce load.

I cannot click on replies.

twitter is stressed out a little bit now..so replies is disabled.

Now, thats stress management at twitter. But, since we have the site status available on the twitter blog, I know that twitter is down. But, I would like twitter to do something about it, rather than telling me that the site is down…I  also note that now API requests have been limited to 20 per hour.

I thought of writing this post when I started noticing that many of Twitter users were technological geeks whereas the tech challenged were satisfied with their myspace and facebook profiles. Twitter for me paved way to microblogging. Allows you to blog even when you are short of time, in short bursts of under 141 characters…

Updates could be posted to twitter through gtalk IM, mobile phone and many other tools such as twitterfox, twhirl etc..What exactly do people update on twitter..Just anything, anything you feel like..Its a way to rant into the web..to show your joy, to reveal yourself to the web..or simply just update a new website you have come across, your new blog post, the evening movie you are going to watch, any upcoming event you plan to visit…And all this is shared with your followers (friends)

I decide to write this blog for all those people whom I invited to twitter who wanted to know what twitter was all about…
Read the official twitter FAQ here

Well, how does it go about it?
Step 1: Go to Go2web2.0
Step 2: Decide what you are going to buy today
Step 3: select the interested subject in the tags *even random clicks will do
Step 4: find your target web 2.0 start up company *even random clicks will do
Step 5: Analyse company’s competition (is it worth fighting over?)
Step 6: Contact start up company
Step 7: make secret deal for undisclosed amount *very important
Step 8: Buy company and use your signon for logging into that site
Step 9: kill competition example 1
example 2
example 3
example 4

I could just go on and on with the examples, but I am sure you would have learnt that the steps work well right now…There you go. saves u time, cost(of course it does, trust me) and all the pain of innovating (you aren’t good at that anyway ever since your only creative employee left you last december to create his own web 2.0 start up)

Need more help to decide what to takeover go here

Its been some days since I have last blogged. So here it goes; All of us have our favourite list of webpages which we have made up over the years. Here are my personal picks

Deviantart
I have been a lover of electronic art for some years now and being a avid worshipper of photoshop and 3DSmax, Its no surprise that this site gets the first mention on this post. I love the community effect which dA has to offer. Every artist gets his own page…The ever helpful forums and of course the fact that its free for use and of course if you wish to have a paid account, its available at a cost..I also love the way you can add art to your favourites. Even if you are not a digital artist, it’s a great place even for just wallpapers and skins…The artists at dA are really talented; some of them I guess are even better than professional artists. One of my fave artists who has his own website for wallpapers would vlad..check out his website at link..

Flowers2mail
Ever felt like sending flowers to someone? Look no further, a few mouse clicks allows you to send a lovely bunch of flowers arranged the way you wish to your loved ones.

Orisinal
The cutest website with the best and simplest of the flash games with the best music..Enough to keep anyone engrossed for hours together..

Musicovery
Music to suit your mood. The best online radio I have heard..I love the way music is organized using a lovely flash interface. Try it once…its really addictive

Goowy
Right now goowy doesn’t allow new accounts to be opened…I already guess I posted a whole blog on this topic..So just a link..

Technorati
The best blog search engine out there..Google blogsearch is good as well; but I love the way technorati presents the information. Google is a website search engine primarily and technorati is a blog search engine

imo
The best and the most versatile webbased chat client out there. Supports gmail, yahoo, msn and aim and doesn’t require a signup at all. You sign into one account and all other linked accounts are signed in automatically. Only gripe is (no support for yahoo chat rooms, which I guess only koolim offers)
Post to be updated soon..