Krishwords

This is great for people on the move. Now you can read your RSS feeds offline using Google Reader. When I logged into my Google Reader, I saw this option on the top which said that I can read upto 2000 feeds offline. It makes use of Google Gears, which is an open source browser extension that enables web applications to provide offline functionality using following JavaScript APIs. I am pretty sure Google is going to allow you to use all your Google Apps offline. You can see some screenshots below.

Mike Arrington has this rant about what is happening in the valley

Times are good, money is flowing, and Silicon Valley sucks.

I don’t know what it is, but the same thing happened in the late nineties before the bubble burst. Lots of startups got funded that made no sense but people got excited anyway. A unique, beautiful and well executed idea was not a story worth talking about until that first round of big, eye-popping capital. People become more anxious, and more likely to snap at someone in anger or jealousy. Rumor mongering spikes, and a crucial balance is lost. It’s no longer about beautiful products and genius developers. It’s about the money and the status, and hot PR chicks and marketing departments.

I have to agree with him. Silicon Valley does look like how it was before the great dot com bust. Every dude next door has a “Web 2.0″ company churning out a product with whatever coding skills he/she has. The PR hype and parties everywhere reminds me of whatever we saw in the late 90s boom. Things need to cool down sometime pretty soon. Too much cacophony kills real innovation. We got Google, Amazon, etc out of the last bust. At that time, Silicon Valley got rid of “my boyfriend has got a dot com company syndrome” and started seeing real and consolidated innovation. It is time again for a slowdown so that we can absorb the “innovations” of the last couple of years into the mainstream and then get into a new cycle, again in a few years.

Youtube has joined hands with Eros Entertainment to offer Bollywood Channel. You can watch trailers of new Hindi movies here. Youtube already has thousands of Bollywood movie clips illegally uploaded by users. This is the first time Youtube has officially forayed into Indian cinema. The terms of the agreement is not known yet. It is not the first time Bollywood movies are streamed on the web. Rajshri films offers Bollywood movies on its website. Users can watch streaming movies for free and download it for a low price. They also offer various documentaries and TV shows. Similarly, Indya.com (Division of Star India Pvt. Ltd.) also offer streaming movies and television shows online at their broadband portal. However, with an abysmal broadband adoption rate in India, I am really not sure whether these companies can monetize successfully at present.

Update: Youtube and Tips Music has joined to offer another Bollywood Channel.

Thanks to Mashable for the Twitter tip.

Nicholas Carr wrote an article on Guardian Unlimited about how more and more internet traffic is being sent to fewer and fewer sites. He compares data from 2001 to 2006 to argue his point. I think it is not right to make such a simplistic comparison and argue in favor of web consolidation among big players. The reasons for my argument against Carr’s thesis are

• 2001 was the so called Web 1.0 era and 2006 is Web 2.0 era. We have RSS aggregations, mashups, social bookmarks, etc playing a role than the erstwhile URL based system.
• In 2001, Google was a baby and now Google is a possible monopoly. The growth of Google was also a result of people’s habit changing from “using URL to visit a site” to “Googling a site”
• Myspace is not a single site. In a way, it represents millions of individual sites. It is like representing all sites hosted on a big hosting provider like “The Planet” to just a single site. Every individual’s site in Myspace is represents an individual and hence it should be counted as a private site of that individual than considering it as a component of single site called Myspace. These are individual “domains” hosted without an unique domain name. For this kinda analysis, you should consider the concept of Myspace as a backend to these individual sites than considering these individuals to be part of a single Myspace ecosystem
• Add to this other smaller issues like the general reluctance of people to click on unknown domain names for the fear of having a visit by FBI or other Federal agents, issues like website blocking in many countries like China, etc.

Taking all these factors into account, I wouldn’t say that we are moving into consolidation of web traffic to few big players. In fact, most of the top ten websites, mentioned in the Read/Write blog’s analysis, are just “facilitators or front door” for other smaller “individual sites”. It is premature to say that the Long Tail of the internet is shrinking.

Mike Arrington is telling us that tomorrow Yahoo will announce the closure of Yahoo photos in favor of Flickr. Right now, Flickr offers a rudimentary free account and a pro account for $25 a year. Yahoo photos, though from the previous Web 1.0 era, offers unlimited storage of photos. If they are going to shut down Yahoo photos, are they going to make the Flickr pro version free of charge? Keep in mind that Yahoo is planning to offer unlimited storage space through Yahoo mail. Under such a scenario, it only makes sense to make Flickr Pro account free of charge. We have to wait and see what they are going to announce tomorrow.

When talking about the Amazon-Statsaholic standoff, O’Reilly Radar > Tim O’Reilly says the following

Meanwhile, Ron should have been more flexible and respectful. It is, after all, Alexa’s data that he’s using — and only that data. He’s trading off their name and the service that they built. The value that he added was in user interface and usability (the ability to compare multiple sites, rather than the simple pairwise comparison that Alexa itself provided.) When they made him a nice offer, he should have taken it. And he should have worked harder to build out differentiated value in the site, so it isn’t just direct competition for Alexa’s own offerings.

This explanation puzzles me. I may be missing something here but I would like to have a reasonable explanation to a question that arises in my mind after reading Tim’s post. He says Statsaholic is wrong because it is feeding off Alexa’s data. Isn’t Alexa taking the data of every other website in the world to build their business. If Alexa can do it, why not Statsaholic? Alexa didn’t ask my permission before acquiring data about my website. If I have to take a stance like Amazon, I would consider Alexa’s action as a clear violation of my privacy. I could even consider Alexa to be a stalker. When they have their business model based on the data of other’s website, I find the Amazon’s lawsuit just greedy. Can someone explain me if I am missing something here?

Mary Jo Foley writes about the new tool that is brewing inside our “friends” at Redmond.

That tool — now code-named “Springfield,” according to one source — is similar in concept to the recently introduced Yahoo Pipes composite-mashup tool introduced by Yahoo in February. Pipes provides a graphical-user-interace-based interface for building applications that aggregate Web feeds and other Web services.

While talking about the importance of metadata in Joost, Janko Roettgers quotes a comment explaining how meta data will reshape the way we watch television

“Imagine watching a show like Heroes once, and then watching it again with comments turned on to see what other people caught that you missed.”

He also offers some insights about what a meta data driven television programming can offer

Imagine a personalized TV channel that only serves you shows your friends are literally talking about. Or think about the way this could transform programming itself. What if the Lost folks didn’t do their next Alternative Reality Game on the web, but in Joost itself, allowing you to collaborate with your friends and collect clues while watching the show?

Nitesh Dhanjani writes about the Twitter and Jott vulnerability

Both Twitter and Jott authenticate users by their phone number. Twitter does this by validating users based upon the source of SMS messages sent to the phone number 40404 (US), and Jott does this by trusting the incoming Caller ID when someone calls 877-568-848. From a security perspective this means the following:

* Anyone who knows your phone number can update your Twitter page by spoofing a SMS message, i.e. post a Twitter entry as you.
* Anyone who knows your phone number can spoof his or her caller ID to send a Jott message as you.

Ed Kohler writes about how Digg users don’t click on the site ads.

When Digg users come flying in, clicks drop. This isn’t to say that revenue drops, because some do click, but the percentage who click is significantly less than that of the average visitor. In this case, while traffic increased dramatically (3-5x), the click through rate percentages dropped off as much as 75%.

Digg users don’t click ads. Why does this matter? Because Digg users are sophisticated web users.

If you are a non-A list blogger and if you have a “digg this” button on all posts with the hope that your post might get digged, think again. A sudden surge of digg users might get you the “ten minutes of fame” but you will finally end up losing money. Ed’s research clearly shows that Digg users don’t click on Google ads or any other ad network you use. The extra cash from the Digg effect is negligible. But you will end up paying quite a lot for the extra bandwidth and resource usage. Your host might even make you pay for any downtime they incur due to Digg effect. I have also read somewhere that the retention rate of Digg users is also very small. With such negligible retention rate and ad income, getting “digg”ed is not not an economically viable option.

PS: This argument doesn’t mean much if you have a blogspot.com or wordpress.com account. I am talking about people who host their own hosted blogs