Google+ is not Facebook

I have been blogging a lot on tech things these days. Although I want to maintain my status as a mixed bag blogger by writing about anything and everything, I could not resist writing when I come across something new. And the topic of the day is Google+ with all the media attention it generated in the week. 

Did you see the day's xkcd cartoon? Google+, What is it? Not facebook. What is it like? Facebook. How true! Let us compare and contrast Google+ with Facebook later. Before that, let me walk you through a simple tutorial.

Do you know how to increase popularity to your website or product?

• First, create hype! Do your best! Blog about it, make some tech blogs write about it and let a few top shots try it and make sure they feel good about your product.
• Second, restrict access to your product. Give access to people based on invites. And then, very shortly make a big announcement that you ran out of invites. The bigger your announcement is and the sooner you do it, the greater will be the hype generated.
• Third, make sure to leave some ways so that people can get invites and call them hacks. So, the final picture is people have to hack their way to get access to your product.

And, Google followed all the three steps to make their new social networking stint "Google+" popular. And "the hack" to invite your friends is update your status message and share it with your friends through email addresses. They would get an email with a link, and clicking on it would create a Google+ account for them.

Google+ is the new Facebook. Unlike, Google's previous digs at social networking the interface is much cleaner and simpler. Remember how Orkut was filled with clutter in order to compete with Facebook's apps. And, Google Wave only saw the ebb but never raised high unlike a wave. Looking at the design of this new utility promising to connect you with your friends and family, this is here to stay.

If you have noticed the recent change in Google.com's interface, then you should understand that it is part of the big plan. Once you have created a Google+ account for your self, then the right most corner of the black bar on the top will come to life. You will have the "Share" box and notifications indicator waiting hungrily for your action.

Google+ lingo and insight tutorial (Level: Beginner)

• News Feed on Facebook is Stream on Google+.
• "What's on your mind" is Google+'s "Share what's new".
• Pages on Facebook will be called "Sparks" herewith.
• The famous Facebook "Like" button's competitor is not so well known "+1" button.
• Friends or Family are the only two categories on FB. We have the new "Circles" concept. Drag and drop your fellow Google+ members into Friends, Family, Acquaintances, Family circles. You might as well create your own circle.
• You have your Picasa photos, Google Talk and the infamous Google Buzz integrated.
• Hangouts and Huddle are the new features to watch out for. Huddle is the group messaging feature and Hangout is the polished version of video chat. I am yet to explore these features completely.

So, are +you ready for Google+ ? 

Technology, Love and Hate!

Skype might possibly look like this later this year after it gets integrated with Microsoft Windows Office suite! Who knows if we are all made to create and use Windows Live ID if we want to continue using their services

Do you think it is a big deal when Microsoft announces to buy Skype, the free video conferencing software which became a huge hit in the recent years? I think so having been a loyal Skype user for the past few of years now! Microsoft having had this reputation to monetize their technology makes me wonder if Skype also encounters such fate. Worse if it gets integrated with their Office 2012 suite for which we have to shell out bucks and soon enough made to pay the $8.5 Billion they have invested in buying Skype. Who knows, Skype might be made to stop supporting iPhones in order to boost up Windows phone sales. But for Microsoft this is a big step in capturing the user base of the Internet and Video Communications leader. Pity the loyal Windows Live Messenger, hope it does not get shelved after all the service it has done since 1999. 

The founders of Skype had quite a bumpy ride all these years despite their product being a hit among the masses since their product is widely popular for the free services they offer. But I still am unable to comprehend if this deal with Microsoft is a fitting finish to their effort or not! Let's hope this deal at least adds the much need cool factor to Microsoft that Kinect failed to completely bring to this technology corporate. Steve Ballmer, the CEO of Microsoft, known for his eccentric behavior in the media and public conferences said "Skype is a phenomenal service that is loved by millions of people around the world. Together we will create the future of real-time communications so people can easily stay connected to family, friends, clients and colleagues anywhere in the world."  

On the other hand, Google has been trying a lot of different things! Latest being their Youtube service testing its luck in movies business. Starting yesterday, Youtube is offering movies for rent at youtube.com/movies. I believe performance wise this new step does not create any major lag, as Youtube is used to seeing 35 hours of free video content uploaded to its servers every minute. Buckle up Netflix; what's your strategy now?

With all possible updates from technology giants, I wonder what Facebook is upto! All hail the "Zuck" and wait for the next big security lapse in Facebook. 

Like the Dislike button

Have you ever observed the "like" to "dislike" percentage on youtube videos? For most of the popular videos with huge number of hits, the general trend is the ratio of dislike to like is about 0.1. And if a video isn't a worthy one, the ratio only increases. Earlier the videos on Youtube were rated based on a 5 star scale. I wonder how this effects the way videos are perceived by viewers when they see a particular number of likes and dislikes.

The "Dislike" button, do you like it?

This also makes me wonder about what would happen if Facebook is to introduce "dislike" button. It would only make us realise how much crap we end up posting on Facebook through status messages and etc. And also, Facebook has been smart so far in not introducing Dislike button, and this way everyone feels that no one dislikes what they have to rant on a daily basis! What do you think about this?

I know you better than you do yourself!

Very recently I came across a website which offers a service to build profile of a person you want based on the information it collects from websites and social networking sites across the internet over time. Just for a nominal service fee. I really wanted to try it out and see how much it knows about me, but the money part stopped me from doing that. Although it did not stop me from digging further and trying to understand how people give out their information, knowingly and unknowingly.

I was happy to find that typing my name in search box of Google or Yahoo returned me to my web page. But I was totally annoyed when I looked up my phone number. The search results returned a map with a marker pointing at where I live and driving directions to my home.

Technology has made it easy for our information to be available to general public. The face recognition feature in Picasa, the famous photo editing software from Google, only makes me wonder about the pace at which technology is advancing. I downloaded Google image search results for Shahrukh Khan, and using Picasa tagged one photo of Shahrukh's face as SRK. And, this is what it does. All the mugshots of Shahrukh Khan were automatically identified by the software as SRK on my laptop. Can you not think of how this technology can be used to access people's information over the Internet? A simple image search with my name returns lot of images I posted over time on various sites. Only a matter of time, these profile building websites would have access to all my pictures on internet through smart use of algorithms.

With the advent of 3G and smart phones, giving out information has become lot easier. Every application I use on my smart phone wants to know more about me. They reason saying that we can take better advantage of the application by providing our personal information, our interest and our tastes to it. And we buy their reason. Some applications would even access my location and geo tags all my activity. This way I make it easier for the profile building websites to chronologically arrange my activity, travel, pictures and what not. How does a graph indicating how our preferences changed over time sound?

The day is not far when we find our profiles from those websites to be better than our personal diaries. Doesn't that sound scary?

Socialize for Caffeine

I'm not writing about attending meetings and events for free coffee. I know there are quite some grad students among the readers of the blog, and I know it's totally worthwhile writing about free food event experiences. :D

But now, if you want to read more about Heisenberg Food Uncertainty Principle or Opponent-process theory of Free Food or the pros and cons of different types of free foods, then you are redirected to this hilariously written article.

Coming back to what I wanted to write is how socializing will be important for your blog. Socializing in the context of our blogs is social bookmarking your articles by posting the links on Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz, Digg, Stumble Upon and what not! Phew! By doing all this we in a way do Search Engine Optimization (SEO). For those of us who want to be known, published and read by more people than ever before, doing this now is more important since Google has changed its crawling technique. And they call their new page indexing method Caffeine, at least that is their code name which the general public are expected not to care about. If you still wonder about the reason for that name, I can say that it's the outcome of Google techies after lots of caffeine consumption during meetings and coding times. Well, may be every product of theirs is but with this they might want to show their gratitude to coffee.

With Facebook's huge investment in Hadoop targeting real time analytics with a latency of few seconds, Google now tries to optimize their multi-layered architecture of their indexing mechanism. Caffeine is said to work better for blogs and media content, in finding relevant search results from social media for the search queries to keep up with Facebook, Twitter and other social websites. And this makes our blog entries show up better if the links to our webpages are updated on social media and book marking websites. Here is an excerpt from Google's blog post announcing this new technique:

Caffeine lets us index web pages on an enormous scale. In fact, every second Caffeine processes hundreds of thousands of pages in parallel. If this were a pile of paper it would grow three miles taller every second. Caffeine takes up nearly 100 million gigabytes of storage in one database and adds new information at a rate of hundreds of thousands of gigabytes per day.

Now, this change sure comes with some things to remember:

• Earlier indexing method used "meta keyword" HTML tag in the web pages while looking for relevant content. With Caffeine, it's the density of the words.
• High quality inbound links, original content and uniqueness, as always, has their share of importance with Caffeine too.
• The speed at which your page loads is an important factor for Google Caffeine. This is something I need to work on for my blog page also.
• Age of your site or blog also plays an important role with this new technique.

On the concluding note, Google Caffeine works better for bloggers since it is faster in indexing our content. But, with the increasing content it gets difficult for your page to be among the results of a search query unless you write with more focus on content. Carving a niche for your self become more important than ever before.

Adios,

Vee...