If the Ramayan were on Facebook

In my earlier post, I did mention that Sreedharan is trying to re-tell Mahabharata on Twitter. Now, here is an imagination of Ramayana on Facebook. Kokonad. If the Ramayan were to have an status update like Facebook, how would it be like! He has used the appropriate icons and apps to come up with this.

Read If the Ramayan were on Facebook

The Ramayana: A Modern Retelling of the Great Indian Epic

Woof – When Twitter’s 140 Characters Aren’t Enough

Sometimes we find it bit tough to limit our tweets in 140 characters. Moreover, if I have to provide the reference to a link, I need to use a url shortening service. But, here you have Woofer which says you to be eloquent, use adverbs and DEA (don’t ever abbreviate). Can I say it as an anti-twitter “macro” blogging platform?

So Woof as opposed to Tweet.

The Woofer website looks similar to Twitter except that they limit the woof (yes, not tweet) to 1400 characters. And to mention it – that’s mandatory. It does not take anything less than 1400 characters.

The Twitter logo is replaced with the Woofer one and which indicates, you don’t have to tweet but “woof”.

The Twitter style search box simply re-directs to Google.

On clicking “Is this Twitter?” link on the top right will lead a giant letters “NO”.

But the bottom-line and the most important thing to know about the Woofer page is that it is mainly an interactive advertisement for Shuffeltime, suggesting that the website is simply a marketing stunt for Join the Company’s main website.

Google Reader Goodies

Here are the three Google Reader Goodies (or gadgets) I like to use. They are very easy and simple and save a lot of your time while reading the different posts or subscriptions. RSS Readers was itself a great tool to save time. Now, you have these gadgets to make it very simple and thus saving more time.

1. Reading Comments From Everywhere: gCreations (not from Google) is a very cool and free Firefox extension that allows you to read comments from all over the web to your posts, directly in Google Reader. For each post in your feed, it gets comments from Blogger, FriendFeed, Twitter, Facebook, Digg and more.

1. Send To Feature: Now send and share the posts directly from your Reader to Facebook, Twitter, Blog…more using the Send To feature in Google Reader. Just click on the Settings tab on the top-right corner and enable the services you want to use.



2. Google Reader on Google Desktop: Using this gadget, you can track your feeds and subscriptions directly from the desktop. The Google Reader gadget is designed to be familiar for existing Reader users, yet compact like our other Desktop gadgets. You need install Google Desktop gadget first and then you can download this gadget.

Do let me know if you know more Google Reader gadgets which can be added here. Please put them as comments below.

Basic Initial Compatibility Tests Before You Launch a Website

So, you have a new website and really do not know any HTML coding. And you are not sure the website delivered to you is up without any errors or bugs. Here are few basic initial compatibility tests which you can do, before the launch. These are just the basic ones.

1. Browser Compatibility: Check the website in different browsers. You do not need to install all the browsers. BrowserShots is an online tool where, you have to provide your website address / web page address and the tool gives the screenshot of the page as seen in different browsers. You can check the website for different versions of IE, Firefox, Opera, SeaMonkey and Chrome as well. When you submit your web address, it will be added to the job queue in BrowserShots. A number of distributed computers will open the website in their browser. Then they will make screenshots and upload them to the central server on BrowserShots.
2. Different Resolutions Compatibility: ViewLikeUS is an online tool which lets you view the way your website seems to look in different resolutions. Just submit the url and check how the page looks in different resolutions from 800 x 600 to 1280 x 800 and still more.
3. HTML Validation: Use W3C Validator to check the HTML conformance to the W3C standards.

These are just the basic compatibility tests for the website to use best practice HTML coding.

Facebook Going Lite on Twitter

According to TechCrunch, many social networkers who have been asked to try out Facebook Lite saying - Surprise, it is more Twitter-like.

The message sent out to beta testers reads, "You have been selected as a beta tester for Facebook Lite! We are building a faster, simpler version of Facebook that we call Facebook Lite. It's not finished yet and we have plenty of kinks to work out, but we would love to get your feedback on what we have built so far."

Check out Facebook Lite now at http://lite.facebook.com.

It has already purchased FriendFeed and according to some sources, Facebook earlier tried to buy Twitter for $500mn last year. And now, it has come up with Lite. What is next?

The Onion: Google's Opt-out Policy

For those who do not want Google to enter or know their personal details, your every thought, your every move, your every click and choice - there is a good news. Now, you can opt-out and Google will move you to a remote village and for those who opt-out are guranteed an enviroment free of Google products


Google Opt Out Feature Lets Users Protect Privacy By Moving To Remote Village

Caffeine Update: Google Asks Webmasters to Test the Next-Gen Search Infrastructure

Today in Google Webmaster Central blog, Google confirmed that for the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: next-generation architecture for Google's web search.

This process will help Google search with indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits "under the hood" of Google's search engine, which means that most users won't notice a difference in search results. But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences, so to get the feedback from web developers they are collecting the feedback.

The web developer preview of Google’s new infrastructure is available at - http://www2.sandbox.google.com/ . To provide feedback on the current search results and new one can be provided through the link at the bottom of the search results page that says “Dissatisfied? Help us to improve.”

I am yet to identify significant changes in the rankings but, few other experts did notice the changes as

1. This change has effected to rankings related to keywords used in social media
2. This will affect the long-tail keywords
3. Keyword suggestion is popping bit faster
4. Not indexing as many web pages as the normal one
5. Providing the search results faster – may be the load is too less on Caffeine
6. May impact SEO rankings and/or traffic
7. May impact PPC search strategy
8. Link structures will not be the only one to decide the ranking
9. Indexing of social media, news sites and micro-blogging sites as immediate as possible
10. Improving of accuracy of results

Do comment on this if you have noticed something important about this.

Mahabharata retold Tweet by Tweet

Chindu Sreedharan, a lecturer from UK is retelling the Mahabharata on Twitter (http://twitter.com/epicretold), hoping to get the attention and interest of the users. Just imagine the task he has on his hands now. He wants to re-tell the great epic in 140 characters every day, step-by-step? He needs to be creative and efficient to have the interest lured to the tweets.

In 1980s the epic on the television managed to empty the city streets, forced changes in power cuts and railway timings. Even the actors of the serial got elected as members of the parliament. Will Sreedharan be able to create such a situation of narrating the epic tweet by tweet? I do agree the epic itself is written so well that there is dramatic tension every minute.

The strategy that Sreedharan is using here is his narration of this epic as per the point of view of Bheema. Yes, this interested me as well to know how this epic was viewed Bheema and will let us understand his thoughts too.

Now, I can imagine… Hum Log, Buniyaad too on this media. And not to forget “Twitter Mey Sholay”…hmm reality shows?

Source: Reuters

Mahabharat 16 DVD Set

Choreographing the Google News Experience for 2034

Krishna Bharath, the principal scientist at Google Inc., talks about the future trends of how people would like to get news during an interview with TOI.

His envisage about the news after 25 years is, the news delivered will be more personalized which will match the individual’s lifestyle and interests. He also adds that the consumption of such news will be across various devices – laptop, palmtops, mobile phones and more… So, the news will be tailored made for each individual and you will get to read what you really want.

Secondly, news presentation will be more complicated and inter-linked. Readers will like to go deep into the article and would like to know more and gather as much knowledge as required. Moreover, the reader would like to comment and provide opinion on the same. He sees this as a challenge to deliver this functionality.

The third trend he says is public access. In future, the reader will have direct access to government documents, facts and figures and perhaps interact with people at the heart of the news.

News will not be just text. Multimedia and video will dominate here too. Multi-lingual channels can also be anticipated.

Customization is what Google will be looking at now. News has to be customized as per the person’s choices. What is on page 4 for one person will be page 1 for another. When you want to keep the interest of the reader on to the subject, customization and automation of news selection comes into play.

So, the questions which are to be answered are:

• How to give the reader what he/she wants?
• How to give the reader something else in future which he/she will be interested in?
• How to provide good content which drills deep into the area and makes it a rich experience with related information and links?
• How to provide interactivity and sharing of such subject with like-minded people?

Do you think for the media, this is a challenge to choreograph the news experience for the reader?

Source: TOI