Category Archives: Technology

Facebook : They will never forget you ’til somebody new comes along

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They will never forget you ’til somebody new comes along – Eagles from the New kid in Town

I am writing this post at the time when Egypt is undergoing a Facebook Revolution, a movement of hundreds of thousands of protesters who have come together after using social media like Twitter, Blogs and Facebook for organize and demand of a regime change in their country. Needless to stay, at this point, Internet is under a clampdown to stop the freedom of expression!

This post is not about the revolution, it is an insight into this Juggernaut of Facebook, a country with over 500 million users. It one of the stickiest websites on the internet, the centerpiece of an Oscar nominated film and probably one of your favorite websites.

Facebook is not the first social network, neither it will be the last, but it has been the most impact-full. It took over from the erstwhile leader MySpace  in 2009 and has exceeded all estimates of its impact. Millions of users share vital information about their preferences on their profile pages, which further helps facebook categorize and provide extremely well segmented advertising opportunities to businesses. Its better than Google, because while google earns its dough by targeted advertisements based on search criteria, Facebook moves ahead by stitching user profiles and their own personal network in the process.

Looking back, there was a time when ICQ was the killer chat program, and Yahoo! was the killer email website. The internet evolved, most of these internet applications committed a few mistakes which coupled with better/newer services brought on the table to give users an opportunity to move.

Orkut might have been trolled by Orkutiyas looking for a hookup and had its own share of donut server errors, MySpace became a playground of over customization of profiles and a haven of pedophiles. At the same time facebook innovated with its interface, and applications like FarmVille. This was their window of opportunity, and the irony of most collaborative internet services is the same as their well publicized strength…they are social.

Users stick to a social network/tool only till the people who matter the most to them are active on the same network. The exodus begins the moment when the important people in your network start moving to a different website(these maybe just 10 out of your 400 friends!). So what would make the users move to a different website from Facebook?Well, I don’t know…and I wish I knew that(would have loved to invent it). But I do know are the threats/risks which Facebook faces today, which could accelerate the exodus whenever it happens:

  • Privacy concerns – A normal user may still not be conscious of the risks which they are exposed to because of Facebook’s questionable privacy policy. However, user awareness on this issue could just turn the tide against Facebook!
  • Rogue apps - Email spammers killed off good web mail services with weak spam filters. Similarly, rogue and unregulated apps on facebook are taking away the sheen of safety and utility of the network. As more and more such unregulated applications continue to flood our walls by posting our first facebook messages or profile views, it poses a bigger challenge to ensure that the user experience is not ruined.

Am not a doomsayer, but every product or service has a life-cycle specially when it is not a need but a want. The only way to beat this curve is by staying ahead of it.

My 2010 list of Social Networking Behaviour in India

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As the year draws to an end with plenty of you looking forward to another year of bungled resolutions, I decided to sit back and create a list of my top 10 observations of Social networking behavior.

  • Top(and most Hated) Trending topic of the year: #justinbeiber

    • Yep, this 16 year old singer refused to leave the trending topics for over 6-8 weeks back from April to May. Much to the irritation of people like me who had never heard his music (and still refuse to do so). Thankfully twitter changed their trending topic algorithm, and we got respite from beiber fever!

  • Biggest Activism achievements of Indian Tweeple: Ensuring that the world doesn’t forget My Name is Khan, Commonwealth games and Media Mafia

    • 2010 was the year when tweets became an important source of news and gossip for the newspapers and news channels. However, tweeple took things in their own hands by relentlessly pushing for visibility of stories like the Media Mafia (or Nira Radia), CWG and MNIK.

    We the tweeple, somehow, represent the intelligentsia!

  • Biggest Loser of the year: Orkut

    • While Facebook went on to become home to 500 million users around the globe, Orkut has been already admitted to the ICU, dying a slow painful death. Our frequent gaffes at #orchutiyas who loved to send the gals a fraandship requests has just reduced the life span of Google social network.

  • Most Popular tweep of the year: @shashitharoor

    • While I’d love to claim the title for myself, but this gentleman was the paycheck Indian newspeople for a good 3-4 months. He was closely contested by one Mr Lalit Modi, well it did cost both of them serious troubles in their jobs. As for me, I was just happy that @shashitharoor once retweeted my tweet :)

  • Silliest Social Networking behaviour of the year: Its a tie between self like and hubby like (will explain below)

    • Self-Like, the event when the said user posts a message on his/her wall and then goes on to click the Like button herself. Behaviour bordering narcissistic I say!

    Hubby-Like, the event when a married/committed/uncommitted/committed-but-publicly-friends users mutually like each other’s wall posts on Facebook. Furthermore, they even chat on the said wall, even if they might be living in the same room or would have been a part of the posted photograph!

  • Most complex trending topic of the  year: #eyjafjallajokull

    • Ah well! The Icy nation shocked the world, and this time it-could-not-be-named threw the airline industry into a spin! Well, i still cannot pronounce it, had to google the spelling as well :(

  • Most common view on my facebook feed in 2010: Relationship updates and the likes!

    • While the facebook feed resembles a wedding album for a good year now, its this view which is most common on facebook these days. XYZ is married – 5 likes, ABC is in a relationship – 6 likes, GHI is single – 4 likes. No matter what these people did, someone did like the change, and no it doesn’t mean that 4 people who liked the updated single guy status are chicks! No matter what you do, there are people to Like it (specially when Dislike is absent from the social network)

  • Biggest Indian twitter achievement of the year: #icionicIndianAds as a trending topic

    • It happened on the 2nd of February, #icionicIndianAds made it to the top of the trending topics on Twitter. I don’t know how many of you were a part of this frenzy, but i remember blowing upto 3 hours of office time on this trivial pursuit. Needless to say, it was an eventful day which I throughly enjoyed, thanks @dharmeshG! (this was before indian trending topics were introduced)

  • Top words on twitter profiles in 2010: photographer, journalist, actor and social media evangelist

    • The combination of these words my friend, is the holy grail of being popular on twitter. Chances are, that 9 of 10 people on your twitter timeline have one or more of these keywords in their profile. You ain’t a twitterati, if you ain’t got it!

    With this I shall end my 2010 list of social networks in India.

    If you’d like to follow me on twitter, click on @ankurmehrotra. Hope you have a great new year ahead!

Twitter Clients for Nokia – A shootout

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I had been promising a blog post if someone suggested me Nokia Symbian based Twitter clients. So here it is, a set of 4 free clients tested on my Nokia 5230 3G phone.  Hope one of these fits the bill for you, almost all of them are easily available over Nokia Ovi or otherwise(have given a link though). Of course I have not tested Gravity, because it is a paid app.

Snaptu

Snaptu is a Java based client and as a result supported on a variety of phones, which makes it an attractive application. Another key advantage being that it is more like a mashup of different applications like Facebook, Weather, Twitter, Picasa at a single place. The user can add or remove his favorite applications as provided by Snaptu.

I have been a loyal Snaptu user since I bought my phone and have been using it primarily for Twitter.  The biggest issue which I faced with Snaptu is on screen rotate, in order to fit in to the rotated screen the application tries hard to fit in but almost always gets stuck at ‘Rotating…’ and I ended up restarting my cell to get the app back on. This is quite annoying if your phone has an accelerometer and supports screen rotate.

Advantages

  • Java application, runs on many phones including older N Series phones
  • Wide range of apps can run through Snaptu, making it a powerful single point of access
  • Auto updates silently as key app runtimes are downloaded on runtime
  • Good Interface
  • Supports Retweet, DM, URL access
  • Separately shows Updates and @ tweets, which makes it a very powerful twitter client

Disadvantages

  • Gets stuck at screen rotate
  • Speed

Tweets60

As the name goes, Tweets60 is for Symbian 6 OS. It is a very light client, particularly quick to install and use on Nokia phones. Touted as the next big thing after Gravity, I tested TweetS60 Lite on my phone, hoping that it could just be the end of the search.

Post login the application doesn’t show any signs of trying to update my timeline. It’s a long wait as the polling settings are manual. This enables you to save GPRS bandwidth if its expensive on your side of the world.

Ok so I now selected the Refresh setting from the Options Menu(not as navigable as Snaptu), but this User Interface would definitely be very useful on a non-touch phone where two menu options at the bottom are to be used for almost everything.

The application did refresh my timeline, but scrolling is painful, not as smooth as Snaptu and I ended up using the stylus. The Profile images never refreshed and while the timeline is updated I cannot scroll through.

Advantages

  • Made for Symbian
  • Light
  • Supports all basic functionalities including following, unfollowing, RT etc…
  • Can easily minimize the application to background
  • Stable

Disadvantages

  • Interface not as colorful/cool as other clients
  • Does not fully utilize touch features of your phone, although rotating works well.

STEW

STEW is a widget for Nokia phones and can be easily integrated on the main screen shortcuts of your phone. I had read amazing reviews about STEW on the net, so decided to test it out myself.

STEW opens through the browser of your phone, although this may not be noticeable.

I dab the application to open it, and wait…the screen goes blank! I get a feeling that it is hung up but no, it comes back to life…a good 7-8 seconds of staring at the blank screen. Okay so here I got, entering my login credentials, and the screen pops a warning that the login details are being sent as plain text and would not be encrypted!

Then the cool STEW interface pops up. I love the color theme and cool icons, but the application doesn’t support most of the common twitter features. All I can do is update status, search for tweets or view the refresh settings. Moreover, on screen rotate the timeline text does not justify within the screen edges, thus not readable.

Advantages

  • None really, except the interface

Disadvantages

  • Very slow load times
  • Very limited tweeting support, unless you with to type @ or RT yourself
  • Text justification goes for a toss when the screen is rotated

Nokia Messaging for Social Networks (BETA)

The is the last application I tested on my Phone. As you can see it is still in BETA, and is freely downloadable on Ovi.

The communities application supports facebook and MySpace too, the user needs to add his account details and can simultaneously login into these services.

The loading time is slick and the interface is quite comfortable. The best feature is a right side pane on the screen which has shortcuts for DM, RT, @ and favorites. It makes it very easy to use the application, it also has a planned support for uploading images directly from the phone and tweet them. There is also a drop down which can be used to select twitter pages as on the website.

One downside of the application is the constant popups requests for internet connection authentication which renders it almost impossible to use on my phone. Maybe other users do not get those popups.

Advantages

  • Nokia’s native application
  • Supports Facebook and Myspace too
  • Smooth interface
  • Supports most common twitter features
  • Screen shortcuts

Disadvantages

  • Still in Beta
  • No option to save login details
  • Annoying Internet authentication popups

Installing Nokia Ovi Maps and the nightmare!

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Installing/Upgrading Nokia Ovi Maps on my Nokia 5230, and then downloading India Maps data on it was not an easy job. This deserves a DIY post.

I believe this installation process would atleast help Nokia 5230, 5530, 5800 XpressMusic users, maybe others too.

Before we begin, the pre-requisites for this are:

  • Microsoft .NET 3.0 framework or higher must be installed on your computer
  • Nokia PC Suite must be installed
  • Data Cable (needless to say here, but you’d need that) for your Nokia model

A lot of readers would tell me that the process I mention below is longer, and I could have done the updates via the Nokia Ovi Suite instead (which I did try to do, but the India map data would never download properly, even after 5-6 attempts).

So here’s are the two applications you need to download, and everything shall be fine:

  • Nokia Maps Updater – Download this to install latest version of Nokia Maps on your phone
  • Nokia Maps Loader – This one is critical to download the Map data for your country on your Nokia phone (the advantage is that you’d use less of your data bandwidth while using GPS now, as the map data would already be on your phone)

Once you are done installing the above applications, do this:

  • Run Nokia Maps Updater, connect your phone to the computer, download the latest version of Ovi Maps. Let it sync and install on your phone.
  • Keep the phone connected, now Run Nokia Maps Loader, Select your country and click on download maps. It’ll download map data from the web onto your computer and then sync it up on your phone.

Only disadvantage is that your phone needs to be connected all the time, and it screws up when you get a call in between the updates! Hope this posting is of help.

iPad or a bigger iPod touch

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Since half of the world and almost all of twitter was in a iPad/iSlate frenzy yesterday; I have decided to bank on the internet trend and get my blog a few hits today ;-)

To the uninitiated (really? You haven’t heard of the Apple iPad yet? Wake up!), an Apple iPad is a 9.7″x7″ touch device which is barely half-an-inch thick and allows you to play audio, watch TV, video, run applications off App Store and surf the internet on 3G, cellular networks and of course Wi Fi. It comes in capacities of 16GB, 32GB and 64GB and runs a 1 GB processor.

It also boasts of a finger print resistant coating (oh yeah, now i could kill someone with an iPad and not worry about those nasty prints for CSI) on the screen.

Well the price is pretty high $499 to $899

Honestly, I feel that my 16GB iPod touch is just a smaller iPad!! Features aren’t too different, maybe applications later would make all the difference! Carrying the device maybe a pain, afterall it isn’t a netbook and it can’t fit in your pocket.

On the marketing front, Apple got plenty of free Internet Buzz…lucky them! But naming could have been different iPad sounds like a sanitary pad!

Even though it doesn’t have a camera, is over priced, cannot multitask, is just a bigger iPod touch…i’d still want it ‘coz its cool and its from Apple (sigh! I can already head Admiral Ackabar screaming: It’s a  ’Marketing’ trap!)