Kicks and Kisses

Came across this job site - called workosaur.com. It’s USP being, it has the most 7 figure salary jobs. Good but no great shakes. Another job site I thought.

But then I saw a link on the top corner which said, “Boss is Around? Look Busy”. When clicked lead to a page full of graphs and charts.

This minor thing made me look again at the site. It tells me that this is a startup where people love their work. That they understand their niche audience. So it tells me to take them seriously. Kudos for the sense of humor.
Earlier posts on sense of humor:here

Vizu provides customized poll widgets for Blogs and web. A publisher can set up a public question with desired no of options. The publisher can access the results from his Vizu account.  These poll widgets are best useful to get public opinion either to enhance your product / service or to conduct a survey. It shows current stats after voting. You get to know your opinion is public opinion or not. 

Vizu is best suited for casual opinion / survey. Recently I saw Vizu is being used to gauge public voting for a design competition. There was a prize for publicly voted entry. There were 8 participants and everybody was using their social networks to get ahead of others. Vizu was showing instant result and this was motivating them

The product is technically very sound. It does not allow you to make multiple votes from the same IP.  This also has cross browser linking. If one has done voting from Firefox, one can not make vote from IE. But in case of dialup connection there are programs through one can acquire dynamic IP. This can significantly change the results.

But a small feature would have made this product more useful. Providing an option to publisher whether he want to publish the results immediately after the poll or want to set a time line for the result. So it’s up to the publisher when he wants to publish the results. No body will get to know the stats till a deadline. Showing results after a poll can motivate people to make fraudulent votes. If the publisher is using this for casual survey he can show the stats immediately after the casting the vote. If its being used for some serious purpose than publisher can set up a deadline. This can significantly bring transparency in the result

There was a time when away, busy, available, idle type of default status message was popular. The possible goal behind this was to inform buddies about one’s state e.g.  “Please don’t ping me I am busy“, I am away leave off liners

Instant Messaging and status message has evolved over a period of time. The phenomena of media type and relevant ecosystem have taken IM status messages to a next level. Now it has become a media type like audio, video, news snippet. It has become a channel to communicate different type of information

Status message has become a new means of get to know about famous sayings/quotes. One gets to know interesting web links from buddies. It has become a personal marketing channel. Whether you want your buddies to read your new blog post or do electronic voting for you.  Sometime it lets other know the emotional state of the one’s buddy. IM users are becoming creative with their status messages. A new status message becomes a reason for starting a conversation.

Twitter, Kwippy types of application are revolving around IM status Messages. These applications are taking this media type to a next level where a social network revolve around it. A new means to broadcast information. I use kwippy to store one liners which brings a smile to me. This could be a part of conversation. An ad tag line. A movie dialogue and so on. I will read all these one liners when I will become old

Maintaining a Microblog would have never been so easy. One just has to IM the blog post to his twitter/ Kwippy buddy. One can easily find one liners instead of a big blog post.

What is a media type in context to the internet? I would say images, video, text, would be the basic ones. Now say someone wants to create a web application which supports uploading and display of images. On top of that also wants to create a social network which helps the uploader share and comment on images.

Now this is not a  new idea and many people have done this. The formost 3 which come to mind are Flickr, Picasa and jpgMag. All three support uploading of images. All three have support for comments on images. And in all three users have the ability to share with friends and other users. Then what makes them different? The basic mediatype is same and the basic features are also same.

Mediatype and basic features are the skeleton, what differentiates these applications are the outer details. And especially here the GOD is in the details.

If you compare the upload restrictions in flickr and in picasa(for the free version):flickr - 100MB per month , picasa - a nerdy 1024MB (which makes it exactly one GB). Now people with digital cameras and who shoot even on and off if they upload regularly will cross the 1024 Mb limit in picasa soon. Then they would either have to delete some images or stop using it. While in flickr theres a continues flow of fresh images even for a free user. That keeps a users page continously fresh. What I have personally seen is people use picasa to upload 200 pics from one trip, all the images to it. While in Flickr they might only upload the better ones, so that they don’t cross the 100 MB per month mark. This difference in itself changes the quality of the pictures in both the sites.

jpgMAg caters to an even niche audience. They have a voting feature which they use to select some pictures and then print them to make a magazine. So here the submissions are mostly based the the current running theme which they declare. And needless to say such serious business brings in the experts. The satisfaction (and the money) which the selection of your picture for print brings increases the quality of pictures manyfold. And their upload restriction is “only 10 a day” which makes the pages even fresher. So these and plenty more features determine what kind of social network these sites have.

The whole point of this post was that only a mediatype doesn’t make a web application. I have seen people saying kwippy, plurk, twitter in the same breath. As for kwippy just give it some time to work on those outer details which would set it apart.

kwippy pages are open now for your viewing pleasure. Check it out, if you like it add your email for an invite. And do get in touch if you have any suggestions/criticisms, etc.

i m here: http://www.kwippy.com/kaa/

I use two different computers. Both have Mozilla Firefox. I spend significant time over internet. When I am in office I make some bookmarks as I do at home. My search engine settings also differ based on requirements. Both might have different add on, preferences, settings. I always try to make settings same for both. This helps increasing my efficiency. Do I always need to customize browser to get seamless user experience

I was just thinking of sync mechanism of multiple browser settings. Can Mozilla assign me a log in / password. Once I log in to browser it stores all my setting including bookmarks, add on, search engine settings, and search history, browsing history, browser version at one central location. Once I log in to another PC and enter my user name password. It makes the browser exactly I have. I can do this sync once in a while based on need.

I will feel as always I am working on same browser. If I update something it should automatic update in all other browser once I log in, if I log in to that browser. Once I sign out the browser, it brings back to its normal settings.

The idea can be extended to thick client applications with a server in between. This server keeps track of settings, versions, additions, customization to a thick client application on particular machine. Consider IM Client.

Can this idea make both the browser function seamless?

I like nike sites. Though they are made in flash, which takes away some things I am quiet used to nowadays like permalinks. They have this emotional quality to their site which makes me feel to get up and go running. So I guess they have partially succeeded. Full success would have meant me running to their showroom and getting their sneakers.

One thing I absolutely hate about them is as soon as you type “nike.com” you get a splash page which asks which language you want to see the site. Which is okay for a site in multiple languages. When I click English. It shows me a list of countries. Now India (where I live) is’nt there. Also there is’nt anything called “Others” or “Other countries”. What do I do know? Why are they treating me so partially? Isn’t India worth their attention?

I have written earlier about sites in multiple languages here.

I realize that they might not support online purchases in India. And thats the only valid reason I can think of. But why can’t they at least have a “Other countries” where the less fortunate of people come and just window shop?

People love them not just for the torrents, but for their attitude as well. There are a vast number of other torrent trackers around, but Piratebay makes news most often. On their home page their is a link called Legal Threats on which they post the legal notices/emails they get. This one was really funny, in reply to an email from Linotype. They have composed the entire email with different pirated fonts of Linotype.

Based in Sweden they have somehow bypassed the copyright laws till now. Piratebay’s legal advisor Viborg claims. “Until the law is changed so that it is clear that the trackers are illegal, or until the Swedish Supreme Court rules that current Swedish copyright law actually outlaws trackers, we’ll continue our activities. Relentlessly,”

Whatever their legal stand maybe, I love the way they use the anarchist dissension to grow more popular.

Most site headers are a generic image which is common throughout the site. What if the header also serves a purpose. I really liked how opensourcefood uses the food images as header background.