Phishing targets HDFC

Hey, i just got an email from "Service@hdfcbank.com".

The subject-line was really persuasive - "Urgent Notification! Your Account is Suspended". Though "urgent" is considered as a spam word but this subject-line must have got them a good open rate.

It said that my account has been accessed from some foreign IP and as a precautionary measure they want me to login to my account. The content really enticed me to login to my account but then I remembered that I don't have an HDFC account ;-)

The landing URL of this email is

http://www.mycareerchange.com/chat/nick_image/page.html
( note that is not on https :-)

whereas the original HDFC URL is

https://netbanking.hdfcbank.com/netbanking/

So be careful and never share your account details on such emails.

I am attaching the email below.

-------------------------------

Dear Hdfc Customer,


We recently noticed one or more attempts to log in to your
Hdfc Bank account from a foreign IP address.

If you recently accessed your account while traveling,
the unusual log in attempts may have been initiated by you.
However if you are the rightful holder of the account.
Click on the link below to re-activate your membership and
follow the instructions carefully.

*Re-Activate My Hdfc Account*

If you choose not to complete the request, you give us
no choice but to suspend your account temporary.

It takes at least 72 hours for the investigation in this
case and we strongly recommend you to verify your account at that time.


Hdfc Bank Email ID hdfc9eh9

HDFC BANK LIMITED �2007. All rights reserved Terms of Use | Privacy Policy.

Gartner’s top 10 technologies for 2008

Gartner has outlined its top 10 Strategic Technology Areas for 2008:




Here is the snap short of the technologies and what David Cearley and Carl Claunch said Gartner's Symposium ITxpo 2007.

Green IT is the application of environmental consciousness to the computer and information technology industries. Green IT companies are changing the way technology is used to cut down on waste, eliminate unnecessary energy use and help the environment.

The technologies for green IT practices–multicore chips, power supplies, fans and power management software–are all mature, says Carl Claunch, an analyst at Gartner. So what’s new about green IT for 2008?

Claunch argues that there may be limits put on data center choices, regulations may become more prominent and then there’s the cost savings to your electric bill. “Green really matters and there’s a lot of work coming from the technology vendor sphere,” says Claunch.

Cearley notes that he has talked with many technology managers that haven’t been prodded for green IT practices. His advice: Plan ahead because “at some point someone will knock on your door about it and it’ll be easier if you plan ahead.”

Unified Communications is a commonly used term for the integration of disparate communications systems and media, desktop computers, applications and mobility. This potentially includes the integration of voice both fixed and mobility , e-mail, instant messaging, desktop and advanced business applications, Internet Protocol (IP)-PBX, voice over IP (VoIP), presence, voice-mail, fax, audio video and web conferencing, unified messaging, unified voicemail, and whiteboarding into a single environment offering the user a more complete but simpler experience.

Claunch says converging things like Web services, contact centers, email and phone services will lead to combinations with storage networks, video from security cameras and sensors. “All sorts of potential applications emerge,” says Claunch. Timeline: 2010.

Business Process Modeling (also known as Business Process Discovery, BPD) is the activity of representing both the current and future ("to be") processes of an enterprise, so that the current process may be analyzed and improved. BPM is typically performed by business analysts and managers who are seeking to improve process efficiency and quality. The process improvements identified by BPM may or may not require IT involvement, although that is a common driver for the need to model a business process, by creating a process master.

Meta-data Management involves storing information about other information. With different types of media being used references to the location of the data can allow management of diverse repositories. URLs, images, video etc. may be referenced from a triples table of object, attribute and value.

Mashup is a web application that combines data from more than one source into a single integrated tool; a typical example is the use of cartographic data from Google Maps to add location information to real-estate data from Craigslist, thereby creating a new and distinct web service that was not originally envisaged by either source.

Composite Application expresses a perspective of software engineering that defines an application built by combining multiple services. People often compare composite applications to mashups. However, composite applications leverage enterprise and enterprise-ready sources (e.g., commercial web services) of information, while mashups usually rely on web-based, and often free, sources.

The composite application consists of functionality drawn from several different sources within a service oriented architecture (SOA). The components may be individual web services, selected functions from within other applications, or entire systems whose outputs have been packaged as web services (often legacy systems).

Computing fabrics: Claunch says blade servers are just an intermediate stage. A fabric will allow several blades to be merged. “Blades are not the final step,” says Clough. His description:

The fabric based server of the future will treat memory, processors and I/O cards are components in a pool, combining and recombining them into particular arrangements to suit the owner’s needs. That is, a large server can be created by combining 32 processors and a number of memory modules from the pool, operating together over the fabric to appear to an operating system as a single fixed server. Any combination of the components can be configured, as they will not longer be defined as blades.

Virtualization is a broad term that refers to the abstraction of computer resources. One useful definition is "a technique for hiding the physical characteristics of computing resources from the way in which other systems, applications, or end users interact with those resources. This includes making a single physical resource (such as a server, an operating system, an application, or storage device) appear to function as multiple logical resources; or it can include making multiple physical resources (such as storage devices or servers) appear as a single logical resource."

Virtualization is more than just consolidation of hardware. Claunch argues that virtualization is all about flexibility and the ability to adapt. These advantages go beyond mere hardware savings.

Here’s a chart outlining what Gartner calls Virtualization 2.0:

Web platforms (also known as SaaS today). Software as a service (SaaS) is a software application delivery model where a software vendor develops a web-native software application and hosts and operates (either independently or through a third-party) the application for use by its customers over the Internet. Customers do not pay for owning the software itself but rather for using it. They use it through an API accessible over the Web and often written using Web Services or REST. The term SaaS has become the industry preferred term, generally replacing the earlier terms Application Service Provider (ASP), On-Demand and "Utility computing".

Cearley says that 25 percent of Gartner customers have some form of SaaS already. Cearley advises that IT managers build in SaaS providers into their sourcing strategies.

Longer term, however, Web platforms will be the model for the future. Ultimately everything –infrastructure, information, widgets and business processes–will be delivered as a service. All of these intertwined APIs will give us a acronym: WOA (Web oriented architecture.) “Put this on your radar screen and start with some ‘what if’ models,” says Cearley. These Web platforms will also make mashups more common in the enterprise. In fact, Cearley argues that enterprises will need an architecture just to manage mashups.

Real World Web: Claunch defines the Real World Web as one where all devices–wireless devices, cameras, PCs etc.–combine to analyze location, intent and even emotions over a network. This will augment reality, says Claunch. Many verticals–military, healthcare, travel and retail–are expected to adopt applications for the Real World Web.

Social software is normally applied to a range of web-enabled software programs. The programs usually allow users to interact, share, and meet other users. This computer-mediated communication has become very popular with sites like MySpace and YouTube and has resulted in large user bases and billion dollar purchases of the software and their communities by large corporations (News Corp purchased MySpace and Google purchased YouTube).

Steve Jobs Stanford Commencement Speech 2005

This is an Amazing Speech given by Steve Jobs in Stanford University.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

Internet Explorer Inside Firefox

I know many of you must be aware of this (since the first version was launched in October 2005) but I am writing this for the benefit of all the Linux users and Firefox lovers (like me) who are still not aware of this cool tool.

Though the number of Firefox users is growing but still there are many websites (including popular utility website like IRCTC) that do not fully support Firefox. But now, neither you have to switch to Windows nor you have to open a new browser because “IE Tab” is here to save your day.

With help of this great Firefox Add-on you can easily see how the web page is displayed in IE and then switch back to Firefox. Developed by PCMan this tool enables you to use the embedded IE engine in Mozilla/Firefox environment.

You can just right click and select “view page in IE Tab” option or just click on the small icon to change the environment.

I hope this information was helpful.

Click here to download the IE Tab.

The definition of Being Competitive

Though it doesn't fit in the category of World Wild Web but I could not resist putting it here. Picture quality is not very great because I have taken it with my Razr.




Any Comments ??

Why Networking?

You must have noticed that Networking has become a new trend in this world wild web (that’s what I call it). It all started in 1995 with Classmates.com and then came Friendster, MySpace, Yahoo! 360° and many more. But the success of Orkut, Linkedin, FaceBook, MySpace etc has shaken the entire internet industry including India. And Bigadda, Connexions, Brijj, Techtribe, is just a beginning.

But have you ever wondered, what is the reason the behind overnight growth of these websites and what is adding fuel to all referral models?

I would say “Reducing Degrees of Separation”

Its wasn’t too long ago when we said that if on an average everyone know 42 people around them, then the entire 6 billion population of this world is just 6 degrees away (6th root of 6,000,000,000 = 42.628)

Use this formula:
(average number of friends per person) ^ (degrees of separation) = total population

With faster & cheaper means of communication this number (42) seems to be too small, especially for the online world. Forget about friends and family, even if you look at your phone book, outlook address book, Orkut friends this number will easily reach to 500.

If there are 32 million internet users in India and very pessimistically, even if we know 75 people around us, the maximum degree of separation for internet users will be just 4 for India and 5 for the entire world.

It isn’t too far when you'll see a sign on all the profiles on Linkedin.

BlogDay2007

What is Emotional Ergonomics?

Emotional ergonomics can be perceived in two ways

1) It is commonly thought of as how companies design tasks and work areas to maximize the efficiency and quality of their employees’ work. International Ergonomics Association has divided ergonomics broadly into three domains: Physical ergonomics Cognitive Ergonomics and Organizational Ergonomics.

2) It is also perceived as a field concerned with the emotional aspects of peoples’ interactions with products, services or systems.

Being from a Product Management background, I will try to elaborate more on the Product Design aspect of Emotional Ergonomics.

It is said that we respond to an object according to how we feel, not how we think. Often consumers perceive an object to be emotionally better even if your body or society doesn't. Thus it is recognized as the study of perceived comfort or convince. An example is slouching. This is common in everyone's sitting at some part in the day, we know it’s not good for posture yet it’s emotionally satisfying.

We as human before we think anything, we feel it, even if it is an online shopping site. Thus how a product engages with us emotionally is as important as how well it performs mechanically, otherwise all our choices would be based strictly on price and functional efficiency, rather than emotional resonance and visceral appeal.

Product functionality is crucial for product success, the appearance, use of materials; shape and form provide the most immediate product data for the user. But less tangible issues such as emotional bonding of users with products, cultural perceptions and social value systems, provide valuable insights for the product developer to help expand knowledge and understanding of the users' need beyond the functional requirements. Knowledge of emotional ergonomics is important if you want to build customer loyalty and charge premium prices.

Simple methodologies such as watching people use products, organizing focus group sessions, and focusing on the application rather than the delivery method, would ultimately produce objects more relevant to users’ needs.

Is the Alexa Ranking correct?

Alexa's traffic rankings are based on the usage patterns of Alexa Toolbar users over a rolling 3 month period. A site's ranking is based on a combined measure of reach & pageviews. Reach is determined by the number of unique Alexa users who visit a site on a given day. Pageviews are the total number of Alexa user URL requests for a site. The site with the highest combination of users and pageviews is ranked #1.

But is this the correct way to judge or rank a website.

Apart from the biased that it is based on the sample of Alexa tool bar users, it is browser specific and it can be easily manipulated, the formula itself is debatable.

We started off by quoting the number of “Hits” for determining traffic of a website. But eventually, we moved away from the term "hit" because everyone realized it was pretty meaningless. A hit was often counted not just for a page load, but for every element included on the page, as well. So if a site was less graphical and had equal usage would register half the hits.

And then came Reach and Pageviews.

As such, it would not be fair to compare two websites that belong to different categories. But measuring reach (number of unique visitors) is important because mainstream advertisers want to reach a lot of people but not just the same people over and over. It also gives an idea of popularity and growth of a website.

Pageviews became the primary metric not because they were more meaningful but because they helped in closing Ads deals since Ads were sold primarily on a CPM basis and its counts are as susceptible as hit counts to site design decisions that have nothing to do with actual usage.

Someone has brilliantly analyzed that the part of the reason MySpace drives such an amazing number of pageviews is because their site design is so terrible.

As the way we interact with the web is changing, and technology makes it easier for users to have access to multimedia content on a single web page, are page views still relevant? AJAX, RSS, Feeds, Widgets. Streaming etc. are making things worse.

So what's a better way for comparison? Good question.

As I have mentioned earlier also, it is not fair to compare two websites that belong to different categories. The measurement of success also varies from website to website. So it could be registered users, files uploaded/downloaded, posts, hits, searches, revenue, and it may even be pageviews. But internal metrics aren't enough, since we want to compare ourselves to other players in the market. So we also need some apples-to-apples comparison.

If I had to pick one, in addition to unique visitors (reach), I'd say time spent would be much more useful than pageviews.
Time spent interacting with a site is a much better basis on which to compare sites' relative ability to capture attention/value than pageviews is. Especially when it comes to media like audio or video, an increasing percentage of the web consumption, time obviously means a great deal more than a pageview.

However, time is a bit harder to measure.

HTTP doesn't actually have a concept of time spent. So if you read this whole post and then click off to another site, my web server won't know whether you were here for five minutes or five seconds. I don’t even know whether you have been reading this post for last 10 mins or you are having a coffee with this page open in your browser.

Finally, there's a big argument against time as a measure:

People don't spend much time on Google search, because it gives them what they want so fast, and they go away (which is obviously good for them and for users). But the average time spent per visit will be very low.

And just as pageviews can be gamed, you can slow your users down unnecessarily (or accidentally because your servers are too slow) and increase time spent.
In short, there's no easy solution but there's a BIG opportunity (though very tough job) for someone to come up with a meaningful metric that weighs a bunch of factors.

Can you suggest any?

Search: Finding or Understanding

Many of the researches have shown the increasing trend in the usage of web search. Since more and more people are using search to find various web addresses, the expenditure on SEO and SEM has also increased many folds. Even the Non IT Companies are trying hard to make them easily searchable on the popular search engines.

But have we ever thought that does the search engine understand what we want? The answer will be “No” in almost all the cases. Most of the search engines will just simply do a match of your query in their database and will give you all the documents matching your search criteria. But what differentiates a good search engine from an ordinary one, is the ordering of those results. Thus the main expertise (apart from having a big database) lies in how to show the most relevant results first to the user, out of thousands of matching results.

So all the googles in this world started focusing more and more on how can they improve the ordering of the results and came up with various complex algorithms. But still all they can do is “finding” and not “understanding”. For them, what you are looking for are merely “keywords” and nothing more than that. I think I will be able to explain it better by this example.

Let’s say you are in love with your fishes and you are looking for some healthy food for them. Someone suggested “just Google it”. So you wrote healthy food for fish on the magical text box and pressed go, expecting that it will tell the best possible food for your fishes. But you don’t know that “for” can be a stop word in Google and using its world famous page rank algorithm it will search for “healthy”, “food” and “fish”. So you will get nearly 3,230,000 results and but you will be disappointed to see that most of them are of “healthy fish food” and not “healthy food for fish”. And after going through all the URLs, I won’t be surprised if you end up eating all the fishes in you aquarium .

But it’s good to know that some people are working on various concepts like web2.0, web3.0, semantic web and so on, to improve the relevance of their search results. Some of them have started using the user himself to build intelligent algorithms. But still I don’t know when will they be able to “understand” what the user really expects of them?

Death of Emails

I still remember getting my first email id on Hotmail 10 years ago. It was a great feeling, having your own space on web. Suddenly the world was looking much smaller. I was able to stay in touch with my friends and relatives across the globe at virtually zero cost.

And then a time came when people started flaunting their email id on all possible domains and there were few lucky ones who could get their names@domain.com. But those who could not, ended up in name_yearofbirth/age@domain.com. I still feel pride owner of satyajeet.singh@gmail.com :-)

And then came Chat, Yahoo Groups, Social Networking Sites, Blogs and what not. Cheaper mobile prices and tariff have also played a major role in making emails less popular.

Emails are still trying to find a way out for its survival. Those who were planning to charge money for email space have started giving unlimited space for free. Because of stringent spam laws and increasing awareness, the revenue models of these companies are going for a ride. They are not able to create differentiation and the result of which, usability of emails is going down consistently. Chat, SMS, Scraps, Blogs are eating up the making share.

Late entrants like Zapak mail and AOL will face tough time in luring registrations. I don't even remember writing a personal email in last few months and what I receive is mostly chain mails, forwards, mailer, alerts etc. The only thing which makes me maintain my email id is that it has become a compulsion for registering on most websites.

Let’s wait to see how long they can survive without being killed by newer technology. I say 2-3 years.

What I hate about Google !

Why will you visit Blogger, Orkut, or even Google Adsense? The obvious answers would be , to write a post, check scraps, or account status etc. And for all these activities, you are required to login by entering your username & password.

But why do Google thinks that we visit Blogger to find out the new features launched or Orkut, to look at the Pics of those bunch morons because that is what they load first. I mean to say, if you are on a slow connection and want to access Orkut, they will first show the header, then some text followed by the group picture and in the end the box to enter your username & password.

So you have to wait for the entire page to download before you can login, which can be easily avoided if they set the order by the priority of the activity on the page.

I hope someone from their team can hear this.

Best Website for Search

Which is the best web search engine...... Google or Yahoo or ...... ?

I did a small experiment to find out that which is the best search engine and who could tell us better than these sites themselves. So I took votes from Google, MSN (live), Yahoo, Altavista, Ask and Lycos. You must be thinking, what waste of time, everyone one will say that I am the best but the results were surprising.

Methodology:

To take the votes, I asked each of them by typing the word “search” in their keyword boxes. And the first result they that they throw will be the best site that can be associated by this word (as per them) or their recommendation.

And the results were:

Site --------- Recommendation

Google ------ search.live.com

Live (MSN) --- search.com

Yahoo -------- search.yahoo.com

Altavista------ search.yahoo.com

Ask ----------- ask.com

Lycos --------- ask.com

So there is a tie between Yahoo & Ask.

I don’t say that these two are the best sites for searching web, others sincerely need to work on their own search engine optimisation :)

Google is getting CREEPY

If you get a call from your HR manager that he has seen you in a cafe during work hours, or your wife catches you with your secretary outside a Multiplex. Don't be surprised, because the next level of Google Maps is here.

The new Google Maps offers a 360-degree view of many streets in the San Francisco Bay Area, New York, Las Vegas, Denver and Miami, with other cities to roll out later, John Hanke, director of Google Maps and Google Earth, said in a session at the 2.0 Conference.



It may have many repercussions, but to me it sounds really creepy. I may have exaggerated it a bit but at some point of time we have to decide, till what level can we allow Google or anyone else to intrude our privacy. Whether it’s putting up of cameras on Traffic Signals or Satellites, we have to say NO at some level. At least I can not live my life like “ The Trueman Show”.

Google's shopping list

Google thinks big these days. Here are the top 50 web properties according to ComScore, in order of importance (comscore.com/press/release.asp):

1. Yahoo (probably too expensive)
2. Time Warner
3. Google [x]
4. Microsoft (may lead to monopoly issues)
5. Fox
6. eBay (expensive but can be considered)
7. Wikipedia [Wikipedia founder says "no" to this deal)
8. Amazon (can be considered)
9. Ask Network (not interested)
10. New York Times (Nice option, though news has always been a neglected child)
11. Weather Channel (can be clubbed with news)
12. Viacom
13. Apple
14. CNET (same as NYT above)
15. Adobe (why not)
16. Gorilla Nation
17. Wal-Mart
18. AT&T
19. Target Corporation
20. Expedia
21. United Online, Inc.
22. Facebook (extension to orkut)
23. Lycos
24. Monster Worldwide (may make a sense)
25. CBS Corporation
26. Verizon Communications Corporation
27. Bank of America
28. CareerBuilder
29. Gannett Sites
30. Idearc Media
31. Disney Online
32. Shopzilla.com Sites
33. Photobucket.com
34. CraigsList.org
35. Real.com Network
36. Travelport
37. Comcast Corporation
38. Yellowpages.com Network
39. ESPN (already bought cricinfo)
40. iVillage.com women's network
41. ArtistDirect network
42. WebMD Health
43. WhitePages
44. Cox Enterprises Inc.
45. Weatherbug Property
46. Citysearch
47. NBC Universal
48. USPS.com
49. JPMorgan Chase Property
50. Ticketmaster

So what’s next in the shopping list for Google?

My picks will be NYT, Amazon, Monster.com (instead of simplyhired) and i would love to see a Gaming Site in the list too.

What Say??

Web 2.0 - Some thoughts

Search for "Search Engine"

Knowing what you want to search in not enough now days, you should also know where to search. And that does not restricts only to the website but also to the different search engines available there. Because if your are searching for some information, you have a choice of searching through Book Search or Scholars or Blog Search or Product Search or Image Search or Video Search or News Search or Code Search or **??? Search or you can create your own search engine using Google Co-op. Still not satisfied, try the new Voice Search, Accessible Search or the latest Experimental Search. And if that to is not enough try Google Suggest, Google Set or Know more about trends through Google Trends. With so many option available, i think Google itself might also get confused one day :-).

I don't how many of the users are aware of all such option but for those who know, it may sound like a nightmare. It is good that Google has created so many specialized search engines but it would be better that if it gives one search box (like the original Google) and then clusters the results found in specialized search engines. Though it has already started working on the same (because i can see images, videos etc on the same page) but a lot of work needs to be done on the clustering end. They should get some inspiration from Ask.com, they have done some cool UI stuff for clustering search results.

Hope i haven't hurt Google's sentiments yet again ;-)