I was looking for new ways to promote our Sai Baba Videos and Album of “Antha Sai” and I ran into the facebook application developers section somehow.

I decided to give it a shot and man.. it is such a drudgery!

First of all, you get all your options right on this real long form with a real small font, then you need atleast 5 people to even submit the application to the directory to make it work !!

Then, at that precise point of time when you think its all through and you are going to see your results, they will put you on hold for eternity to review your application and make it active!!

Till then, you have to pray and hope that 5 of your friends would be blind to the “application not working ” errors, trust you with their data even though the application itself not working and add it to their list of ever-growing applications!!

I clearly think this process of adding applications to facebook can me improved to provide much better services to coders and developers.

Alley insider published its list of what it thinks are some of the most happening companies in the Valley. Techcrunch covered it here.

Though the SAI admits that it is just mojo currency, it does make some for some fun conversation like Eric suggested on his TC article.

The WSJ did a great piece on Suzlon, the leading producer of Wind Energy in India, and its parvenu founder Tulsi.

The article here.

Michael Parekh, who happens to be from the hometown of Tulsi covered it here. The whole story of its birth sounds rather interesting from a ‘Find a need, fill a need’ perspective.

Thanks to Suzlon, India is now the 4th largest producer of Wind Power in the world even though it started only fairly recently. Our polity deserves some praise for its pro-wind policies as well. However, as is mostly the case, we have still got some distance as mentioned on this potential production stats page here.

Take the case of Andhra Pradesh - we produced 121 MW of wind power in 2007 when our estimated potential is around 8275 MW.

It looks like sky is the limit for Suzlon. They are even bagging orders from China to generate power for them.

Suzlon stock anyone?

our bot for twitter got listed on twitter help page ! but infortunately we are unable to run the bot ! any one ready to accomodate us ? or can help me get along with mediatemple servers ?http://help.twitter.com/index.php?pg=kb.page&id=112

Here is a funny pitch for a startup that Guy blogged about.

Apparently, he received an email from a recent mother with a subject line that read: “Everything you should know about me as an entrepreneur you could learn from my OB/GYN”?

Turns out it was a pitch for her startup

All I can say is:
when what is at stake is all yours (and so very selfishly felt), all bets are off and all odds are turned around.

Njoy !

Taggy says:
a pretty interesting and import weekend coming up . What happens if the deal is struck ?

Uday says:
I see this as a viable competitor for Google’s Adsense/Adwords machine. Both Yahoo’s Overture based Ad machine and Microsoft’s AdCentral lack the killer technology blow that Google delivers with its keyword targetted ads.

I still believe that there is room to grow however. In-text advertisements are still catching up. They have a far way to go to be non-intrusive. Post-Video rollouts are another segment that Google could not work its magic with.

Also, user feedback based Ad technology used by the likes of Adpinion have not been absorbed into mainstream products. Truth be told, I feel that Google’s campaign management tools within Adwords suck. Then there is the facebook beacon idea which backfired for now but could be resourceful if done in a more open way.

There is so much to grow and do in this segment ! We just gotta wait and watch !

After my previous attempt at making a twitter bot resulted with a decent liking from people ,i thought i would hack up another one .

Some of my friends are addicted to yahoo and they r on it most of the days so why not a bot to help you twitter from yahoo messenger ?

However there were some fundamental problems,one of them was to maintain sessions . There was virtually no way i could keep a user logged in without having to store his/her password which i absolutely hated ! and asking on the twitter mailing lists only told me that i would have to wait until twitter adopts OAuth .

But still myself and Doniv ,making a yahoo bot for twitter was worth a try for two reasons .

• We <3 twitter
• Making a bot for yahoo was going to be a little more challenging than making ajabber bot since yahoo messenger protocol was not open like the jabber .

But thanks to Philips Tellis and his Libyahoo2 ,life was going to be much easier .

And we started with it . First we setup a page tocheck for user credentials and update his yahooid in to out database.We only store their twitter and yahoo username .

Then set about writing the bot in C/Python .

Here is how its going to be started ,its not the bot you want to use everyday because it does have a few flaws but if you are out without Gmail then you could as well use it .

After registering with the website here http://theyagar.com/twitter ,add twitterme as your friend at yahoo.

Now the most important part ,the tweet sending part .As i mentioned earlier ,we could virtually find no way of having users logging in without raw text passwords and so this ugly looking way (honestly) .

twitter_username twitter_password twiter_message is the format .for eg,

myusername mypassword hey test message to twitter

Now what happens next is it goes in to our DB and tries to match your followers with registered users and if it does then the yahooid is sent a tweet .

So while you can always send a tweet from out client ,you can recieve it only if your friends send it from yahoo bot too .

Twitter i dont think has any hook to be notified when there is a tweet although we could poll but all that for later .

This works from Gaim/Pidgin ,Meebo and Yahoo messenger Windows .Iam not sure about the other clients since all these client send out html messages and parsing out them was a headache .

Let me show you some screenshots of how this works

Sending the message from Pidgin

A follower recieving his friends tweet on his yahoo account

I will put the code up for download ,i understand if some people have problems in giving out the passwords as plain text in the IM window but we couldnt find a way out . If you know a better way to do it then please leave back a comment or mail from the contact form i would love to hear back from you .

Again as it started this bot was made purely for learning and for the fun of it .You can use it trusting us .

I will put up the source code in sometime after cleaning up the mess . Or if you dont mind having a code that can be a little difficult to understand then mail me and i would send it to you .

So please go ahead ,use out bot and tell us why it sucks .

http://theyagar.com/twitter

And yes the bot is now running from a adhoc server and it wont run on the mediatemple servers gives me a error . Is anyone willing to host our bot ? it certainly doesnt require root( I run it completely on a non root) .We would love to have it hosted in a place it can run freely .

It requires gcc and python 2.4 installed anyone willing ?

or any ideas/sugegstion/improvements ? please feel free to comment

Lesson i learnt : Necessity is the mother of all inventions