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 !

Alpine and dottie

and now tell me what is so special about these two words ?

sure you can google up but knowing these two words *really* tells how quick you are to grab the latest from tech world

Yeah ! i remember one of my friend shagan telling me about this sometime ago.Every major company tries to be at least the second ranked in their field and that too only because they can’t buy out the first ranked.
It was always important to keep that leadership to survive .Google has always bought out bright startups and their founders loved it .But somehow now i feel skeptic about this whole process .
What is google trying to do by buying out so many startups ?
Bring their technology in to google perhaps but most of the products they have bought are in direct competition to their home products .
another question ,if they had similar products ,what is it that google was buying from the startups ?

their product or people. If its just people then isn’t it a bad news for the people who have fought so much for creating that product which so many have liked ?

I’m sure people will remember what happened with dodgeball founders.They opined that google killed their products.I fear the same might happen with feedburner and doubleclick.Both of which are in direct competition to google’s own advertising platform adsense.
Will google kill these products by not allocating time and resources to them ? so as to keep adsense the only and the leader in web advertising now that Yahoo’s panama hasn’t been a great success .

Google today is a huge brand and their ” Do no Evil ” is still true for most part of theirs but this fear just doesn’t go .

Its only time that can answer and i leave it upon it .

yeah ! i am just done with the implementation of openid for my blog

first ,what is an openid ?

OpenID is a URL based identity system. An OpenID identity is simply a URL, and all the OpenID specification does is provide a way to securely prove that you own that URL.


Unlike most identity systems, OpenID is completely decentralized. The end-user may choose whichever server they are most comfortable with, and may even run their own if they choose.

how does it help ?

It helps a lot especially if you use a lot of websites and try and comment on many ,openid ensures you have to use just one login across all those servers provided they

After the microblogging that twitter brought in now its micro services . You can maintain a TODO list from your GTalk/gaim ,you update your blog through GTalk/gaim and you can even issue commands like ping and whois from your gtalk/gaim .

Just add imified@imified.com  and you will see how much it can

Google launched a few interesting products as well as feature upgrades in the last few weeks. First of all, Google Gears was launced officially at the Google DevDay 2007. Google Gears is an open source technology for creating offline web applications and it accomplishes this by installing a local database store that can communicate with the applications running on our local browsers. Second of all, it looks like Google may have silently slipped in facial recognition features into its image search, as a logical extension to the recent upgrades it made to Picasa after purchasing Neven Vision.

Google Gears uses Javascript APIs to store and serve application resources locally through a fully-searchable relational database. The API includes, beyond other things, support for asynchronous Javascript calls which might make the synchronization and the toggle between offline and online states a lot less painful to the end user of the application. Right now, Google Gears is being supported for Firefox 1.5+ and Internet Explorer 6.0+ under the Windows XP/Vista, Mac OS X 10.2+ as well as the