Swaroop C H is 27 years of age. He graduated in B.E. (Computer Science) from PESIT, Bangalore, India. He has previously worked at Yahoo! and Adobe.
Email: swaroop (at) swaroopch.com
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After recommendations in the comments of my previous posts, I used Picasa to brighten up the Ranga Shankara images (see previous post) using the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button. It works so well!
It even created collages for me:
That is so neat. I can’t understand why they’re giving away that thing for free!
Charlene Li (of Forrester Research) claims that Y! Mail has upped the storage to 1 GB to match GMail and combining that observation with the recent increase of invites count to 50 for all GMail users, it is a sign that GMail is soon coming out of beta!
Holy smokes, that is tempting – a non-beta stable GMail. I can think of a few things I’d like to see in GMail:
If they can implement these things, I’m hooked!
Also, I’m waiting to see a face-lift to Yahoo! Mail as well. Whatever happened to the supposed Oddpost integration? Sigh.
P.S. If you are wondering why I seemed to rant about the ‘innovative’ part in my previous post… well, it’s just that I’m tired of the Google orgasm that the world is in today. Yes, Google rocks and does great stuff. Let’s not forget other companies do great stuff as well. For example, MSN Image Search seems to be better than the competitors out there.
Update: Will GMessenger come out on April 1st (like GMail last year) ?
I just did the Google Code Jam thing. This was the first time ever that I used TopCoder, so I had to spend the first ten minutes just trying to figure out the interface. The first problem for 300 points was something to do with decibels. I took heck of a lot longer to solve this problem than I should.
The second problem was for 600 points and the problem mentioned something about ‘topography’ but I have no idea what it had got to do with the actual problem. It was an easy problem which is why I am wondering whether I solved it correctly or not! I did get the correct answers for all the 3 examples, though.
I scored 496.11 points and TopCoder says that I am in the 25th position in Division 1.
Update : Looks like I made it to the next round.
Should Yahoo! open up its messenger protocol? Does Google really follow its ‘Do no evil’ philosophy? Should government and public data be allowed to be handled by proprietary software? Is open source the solution always? Is using non-freedom software detrimental? The big debate is here.
I seem to be on a string of Google and Yahoo related posts lately, so here’s continuing the trend…
Amazing what we can learn on the web…
I got to know from the grapevine that Google has offered hosting for Wikimedia projects. See the discussion page for user views and add your own thoughts if you like.
In case, you already didn’t know, Wikipedia is a free excellent community-driven encyclopedia. It isn’t surprising that Wikipedia has replaced most of my searches. I recently wanted to know more about the saxophone, so I directly entered http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saxophone in my browser and read all about it. No search, no fuss. Maybe that’s why Google got interested in it…
As somebody pointed out in the discussion page:
Google undoubtly sees itself as the main – if not sole – dealer of information, in the forthcoming age of information trafficing. If this is the case (and only those who have seen the actual offer can say that), I’d say wikimedia should resist the offer.
Its great that Google has offerred hosting to Wikipedia and I don’t think I have a reason to be have any negative thoughts about it, but in a world of takeovers, I just hope they don’t have any other plans about it. This is a sincere wish of a Wikipedia user and contributor.
Sidenote : I am listening to SmoothJazz online radio, they play real good instrumental music.
Have you seen the Google Maps! The UI is really cool. Left click, hold and drag the mouse, the map actually moves! Google keeps obliterating the assumption that the web is not about just HTML, dynamism is the in-thing.
I am really surprised that others have not done such Web UIs before. Or maybe I’ve missed something.
Update : Just got to know there is a Google India Code Jam 2005 competition. The first prize is 3 lakh rupees! Wow.
Update : Simon Willison explores how Google Maps is working.
After quite a while, I was reading again, Battelle’s posts on Yahoo and Google and their role in media and technology . Its an interesting read.
It got me thinking on how the cultures of Yahoo and Google are so different, yet they are so similar in what they do – the media and technology fields. Its like this – Yahoo is a media-focused technology company. Google is a technology-focused media company. Heh. They are working in the same areas but looking at it from different angles. More precisely, Google creates technology and then wonders how to make money out of it. Yahoo creates technology but with a business plan already in mind. This is a huge difference and this is what stands out most in a comparison between them. The way I look at it, Google has more ways of doing interesting stuff and can do more innovation but with the caveat that it may not lead anywhere ; Yahoo has more stricter ways of developing something but has more chances of making it happen. In my view, I prefer the Yahoo way because its been there and survived. I find Google’s business model scary to say the least. I hope I’m wrong about Google and I still think they’re much smarter than me and have more things up their sleeve.
One example is how Google created the amazing Google Suggest but then what are they going to do with it? Another thing worth noting is that Google states that Google does search. And we do it really really well. but its clearing moving away from that position. After all, there is Blogger, Orkut, Picasa, Keyhole, Google Print and of course, GMail. That’s clearly a wide range of stuff, but they don’t work together much, if at all. Blogger works well. Orkut is good when it works but I get the ‘bad bad server. no donut for you’ page too many times. I haven’t tried Picasa myself but I’ve heard great reviews about it. GMail is simply fantastic. What I am really wondering about is their future plans for all of these. Is Technology+Adwords simply enough? I tend to ignore most ads simply because they are USA-centric. If I don’t click, Google doesn’t get paid, yet I use their services. So how are they going to keep making money? (Of course, you could argue the same for Yahoo, but I’m coming to that…)
Another thing is Google gets to do more since most of their stuff are labeled ‘beta’ for prolonged times – they can change things at will and not get shouted at if anything is broken. However, this is exactly the same reason which makes me worry about relying on their services. This makes sense in the case of GMail and not Google. Call me paranoid but if I am waiting for an important reply from someone, I worry about using the beta GMail.
Yahoo, on the other hand, has a lot of stuff and many premium services. The key to Yahoo’s amazing success is integration. Everything works well together, from Messenger to Mail, Addresses, Calendar, Greetings to Search and Groups and lots lots more. On the other hand, I don’t even know half of the services that Yahoo provides! For example, did you know about the Yahoo Picks of the Day where Yahoo showcases an interesting website for each day? Also, did you know about the Yahoo! Message Boards ?
The downside to all this is that Yahoo has lots of stuff running and its very difficult to change it. It must have been really difficult to add RSS features to My Yahoo! and Yahoo Groups. The same is true in the case of the awesome GMail UI vs Yahoo Mail. I simply love the GMail UI and how the conversations, labels and filters work, its simply irresistable for me. Yahoo recently bought Oddpost and it looks like it will be upgrading its UI in the coming months. Also, its difficult to add cool new features to Yahoo products unless it makes business sense. This is a double-edged sword and a stumbling block ; but in the real world, thats how it is going to be.
Regarding the I-love-Yahoo and especially I-love-Google fanatics, I feel it is simply a matter of personal preference. I have noticed that when I use Yahoo Mail, I tend to use the Yahoo search engine and when I use GMail, I tend to use the Google search engine. I have no idea why I do that, but my guess is that since my eyes are adjusted to the UI, I tend to prefer the same UI – after all, GMail and Google Search have familiar UI and the same goes for Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Search. Also, Yahoo Search works pretty well most of the time for me even though I confess that I prefer Google search engine because Google gives slightly better results for ‘techie stuff’.
Continuing the different-yet-similar tone, Google Video Search was launched (beta, of course) just as Yahoo Video Search was integrated to the front page. More details on this at the unofficial yahoo weblog and Battelle’s Searchblog.
To sum it all up, Google is a swashbuckling cool guy who makes money through gambling on his coolness whereas Yahoo is a smart businessman who takes only calculated risks and is slow to change. Just to make it more complete, a friend once said: Microsoft was once a cool guy who’s now trying to figure out how to handle middle age and the round tummy.
What I really ponder about is the direction that these companies will take in the next 2-3 years or even this year alone!
I thought I’d take some time out and read up on Python metaclasses, so I entered "python metaclasses" in the google (yeah, google) search bar in Firefox and pressed go and guess what I was looking at – my own blog post! :-O
Marcie Robillard was running a contest where the most creative requests would get GMail invites! I sent one of my ‘dynamically typed’ poems praising her ;-0 … but I was disappointed to not get any GMail Invites from Marcie.
But when she got more GMail invites, she sent them to the runners-up of the contest, which apparently I am also. 
GMail rocks!! I like it already, especially the conversations.. I’m looking forward to blog more about my GMail experiences.