Twitter was always fun and now iam starting to do some things with it .

Inspired from Myles ,but his work was in ruby and i dont know much of it and iam lot comfortable with python .

so here is how you can get all the cricket updates of india matches right on your mobile when you are out roaming or on your gtalk while the cricket sites are banned in office .

• Login to your twitter account at http://twitter.com
• go to http://twitter.com/meninblue and choose the follow option
• or if you are logged in to your gmail,gtalk then give ” Follow meninbue” command and you should be receiving my updates
• And yes if you want to have the scores on your mob ,then dont forget to give out the phone details in the account section

And i must warn you ,this script runs every 2 min so incase you dont want to be spammed ,follow only when you are comfortable with it !

http://twitter.com/meninblue

and thanks to sp2hari for helping out with html parsing and 2s for telling me about XPATH ,i figured out html parsing is lot tougher than XPATH and would definitely recommend it more than html parsers !.

And yes ,dont be surprised if some posts are truncated ,twitter allows only 140 chars and so i had to truncate the commentary else, it wont get posted !

PS:the libraries used are twitter,urllib,urllib2,sgmlib and XPATH ,source code will be up here soon,or if u want it then mail me at theyaga@gmail.com. will mail u the code

I have been mucking around this portal called Moola for sometime today and it makes perfect sense to me - as a revenue model and as a business model. Check it out! you might be in for a surprise !

You play in a death match mode, pitted against another player of similar level and the woo is doubling your cash reserves everytime you win ! Lose though, and you lose it all !

Essentially, that means moola needs to give away only a penny per user from its cash reserves. Unless, ofcourse, you lose your penny like I did and chose to invite friends or tell them where you live!

Given today’s CTR of 1-2%, I would say this model has a pretty good chance of being successful. The flash interface is pretty cool too! (tuh-da-da, Moola makes me lose control…:| )

Amazon launched Kindle, its version of the electronic book reader yesterday in a fancy NY setup that reminds us of the recent Apple Keynote where the iPhone was launched. Jeff Bezos seems to have done a good job explaining the features of the Kindle, if the blogosphere is some indication. It may lack the glamor of a Steve Jobs keynote but that is an entirely different conversation.

In the first day of the launch, there were some very strong,polarized opinions on the future of the Kindle. Some thought it was cool because of the seamless Amazon service and the sprint EVODO connection that it was bundled with. Some thought it looked like the next generation etch-a-sketch.

Some authors and publishers wanted to be in it and some say ‘no way Jose’ (or is it Jezos? J Bezos? Jeff Bezos? Get it? … ).

Regardless, I think the Kindle is the start of the digitization era for the last bastion of analog technology - books and print media. I like how the EVODO service was bundled into the device but donot like how you would have to pay to read blogs that you would otherwise get on the Internet for free.

All in all, from the reviews and press notes, I think the Kindle scored well in terms of screen readability and seamless uploads through the Sprint EVODO connection. It lost a few marks on User interface design and may lose big time on trying to make people pay for free content.

Most of all, I think it will create a market long forgotten till the Sony e-reader came out - the digital reader segment. Hopefully, this will push the iPhone and other portable devices into creating a better reader experience. To Kindle and beyond !

It has been a few days since I posted. I was just busy with things at work and then mixing some sound tracks on my new toy, a mac mini :). I know, I know it is old as 06 (05? 06?) but I just had to get my hands on a real one :)…and let me tell you, ever since I got my hands on one, I got busier and busier. Nothing in particular, just a million

At first, it was how do you get a stable gcc to work on the Mac OS X without downloading a gigabyte of XCode binaries. That proved to be the easy one. Then it was how do I make Apache work on the Mini. Trust me, that was by far the longest time consuming thing for me on a Mini, the brainless geek that I am. All I had to do was look at the manual and figure out that it is already installed and all I have to do is just turn on the Personal Web Sharing, more like ..(umm., click on a check box?)..duh ?!

Then, I spent a couple of hours downloading the MacFuse and installing sshfs and ntfs-3g so I could mount remote file systems (through ssh) and NTFS partitioned disks in a READ/WRITE mode on my cute little mac mini. That proved to be an interesting challenge and I got it up after struggling with it for a few days.

Ok, now that all that is behind me and I have working mini that doubles as a media center (hooked to my TV) and a file storage system, the geek in moi cudnt b happ-E-yaa !

What is more, I got to play with GarageBand all day yesterday and mix some groovy tracks using the built-in library of loops and sound bytes. A liked my mixes a lot. I hope to post them on the blog soon. I hope you will give me a good feedback .

It is a monster, this Garage Band. It lets you mix pretty much any live instrument and add some nice punch using some existing beats to quickly create a soundtrack of your tastes and impose it on a video of your choice. The tuney looney that I am, I love this new toy.

I think I will start posting music tracks once in a while to see what you guys think. Let me know if you are interested in sharing them, putting them on your blog etc.

How long before we can pause the TV channel we are watching, check out what the people on screen are wearing in our favorite stores, blog about the part of a TV episode that we really loved and effortlessly chat real-time with a friend who shares the same interest as ours but is miles apart ?

Well. Joost may not have realized the full potential but it is certainly a step in the right direction. To see what I am talking about, check out the link to this piece of programming on a Joost Channel.

Needless to say, it is a link to some arcane part of a hindi movie I was watching

!

I think Retail me not is a great idea in the world of online shopping.

The basic concept is simple - remember all those “Enter your coupon code here” text boxes when you shop online ? Well, I always wanted to but could never knew how to find a code or what promotions were current and active for a given online shopping portal at present.

RetailMeNot.com solves this problem in a brilliant fashion - by deploying a community ! Avid shoppers post and exchange information related to coupon codes for each website and even vote on each posted coupon code to tell others what coupon codes worked for them !

Also, I like the home page with a tag cloud. It looks like a one-stop shop to find out all the hot online deals ! Needless to say, the three most used tags are - Clothing, Computers and Business

VentureBeat did a story on how the early bird advantage with Facebook apps is helping out Slide, RockYou and HotOrNot to steadily increase their traffic. Although, like the article suggests, the data may not reflect the actual contributions that facebook has made to the traffic growth for these young startups - primarily because they have been on a growth mode and gobbling up every opportunity to grow for sometime now.

I personally like the Facebook (fb, if you may) idea of opening up their portal to create a Virtual OS base for third-party applications but still think there is distance to go for them.

Couple of things :

- Facebook does not seem to have a targeted advertisement strategy woven deeply into Individual User profiles. The Only viable creative thing they did with campaigns was “Facebook Flyers” - if we ignore the fact that I could as well walk up to the bulletin boards of nearby Schools to avoid shelling big bucks to a campaign with so-so conversion tracking tools. Even their banner ads just donot cut it for me. The closest relevant thing that I clicked on was an electronics provider. That might sound pretty good if I did not tell you the rest - Hilton Hotels while looking at friends (just in case I felt the rush to visit one, ummm…), KnowHow2Go on my profile page (In case I felt like going back to college, ignoring the fact that I graduated 4 years ago) and Hairspray Ringtones on my new friend, Michael Parekh’s page (I mean …come onnn, every guy with good-looking hair does not use a hairspray !?!).

- Facebook throttled the viral growth potential for third party application providers by limiting the number of people a user could invite to try out an application at a time. I totally understand the performance concerns (not to mention the ‘Thunder stealer’ factor) that led to this decision but I feel the chop down from ALL to 10 is too much.

- Facebook does not seem to have a great video sharing strategy , atleast not an obvious one, either as a self-built application or a third party tie-up with YouTube, Meta cafe, Bright Cove or any of those hordes of video sites of there. I personally would like to see if Facebook can make it easy for their College going core audience to develop a quick video introduction (atleast an audio, may be ?) to their profile or resume - and make it easy and convincing enough for most people to try it out. Now, THAT is something no social network has done so far !