Wednesday, May 11, 2005

Gmail..Never delete a message!

What makes Gmail different?

Well everyone's first answer would be it was the first to offer an enormous amount of storage way above the previous offerings. A not so less obvious answer would be that "Google really knows how to make people impossible to switch". Email should presumably be one of the most sticky applications EVER!. Yet, when gmail arrived I was just able to forward my few messages in my 2 MB hotmail inbox to a new gmail account and redirect all my incoming mails at my hotmail address to gmail and there I was distributing gmail as my primary address, thereby having no reason left to visit the hotmail page again. How much time did the switch take..Less than 5 minutes give or take.

One of the most interesting ulterior motive Google had at the time of offering such a behemoth email space and "Google's infinity plus one storage plan" offering the capability to never delete a message or in other words.."Even if you decide to make a switch someday you will have to come back several times a week to gmail to access your several GB's of previous mails and attachments which I have safely secured for you" i.e. making a switch virtually impossible.


To create a high barrier to switch from a service, things like the following would play a role

1: Make sure to keep what a user thinks is most personal and very important to him i.e. things like ALL the messages from friends and family, clippings, messages marked important, anniversaries, birthday reminders etc. saved in the backend.

2: Provide an ability for user to access those anytime, anywhere in the most easiest manner possible.

3: Make sure the user gets what he needs and only what he needs at any time so that he cannot easily retrieve and export all the info in one go and start using other similar services.

PS: "Keep Innovating" and outbeating competition so that you don't need to rely on the above 3 :)

Monday, May 02, 2005

Tech Talk

Found a really interesting collection by Rajesh Jain about entrepreneurship

http://www.emergic.org/collections/tech_talk_from_employee_to_entrepreneur.html

M:Metrics: American Mobile Usage Stats - February 2005

Must note for need based segmentatation

http://www.russellbeattie.com/notebook/1008444.html

Yahoo Blogging Service Boosts Content

[via Yahoo.com]

John Ribeiro, IDG News ServiceMon May 2,10:00 AM ET

Yahoo plans to add the capability to import content, such as photos and music, from non-Yahoo applications to its new Yahoo 360 social networking and blogging service, according to an executive of the company.

"Some of the things that people very much want to do is to share content from other sources outside of Yahoo," says Paul Brody, director of community products at Yahoo. "[Yahoo] 360 right now does a great job of allowing you to share the content you might have already on Yahoo."

The Yahoo 360 service entered a limited beta period in late March and is available to users invited by Yahoo to try it out. The service lets them publish blogs, share content, and post pictures, and also control who can visit the site. It currently allows users to include content from other Yahoo services such as Yahoo Photos and Yahoo Music, Brody says.

To expand that capability, Yahoo 360 initially will allow users to include RSS feeds from other sources, according to Brody, who says Yahoo wants its Yahoo 360 service to be an "open" product. "If you have content anywhere on the Internet, you should be able to share it with friends and family through Yahoo 360," he says.
Widely Available

Yahoo 360 will be made widely available to the public in the next few weeks, at which time the capability to share non-Yahoo content will also be included, Brody says.

The beta period is designed to help Yahoo gather feedback from users to improve the service. For example, as a result of the feedback, Yahoo is working to give bloggers greater flexibility in customizing their blogs, and also to give them features such as "trackback," Brody says.

Early users also said they are interested in working with non-Yahoo applications, such as third-party instant messaging services, from within Yahoo 360, Brody says. That may take sometime, however. In cases in which application interfaces are not published openly, Yahoo may have to arrange sharing deals with companies offering the applications, he says.

Localized versions of Yahoo 360 will be launched soon in some countries in Asia and Europe, according to Brody. The Yahoo blog service is already available in some countries like Japan and Korea.

'Tags' Ease Sifting of Digital Data

[via yahoo.com Associated press]

By ANICK JESDANUN, AP Internet WriterMon May 2, 7:27 AM ET

Here's how we tend to organize our digital photos: We stick them into a folder on our computer and label it "Hawaii trip," or whatever. Here's a new way: Forget folders or albums. Just "tag" the photos based on what's actually in each frame. Now, extrapolate this concept to the ideas, images, videos — and people — you meet or wish to find online. If they're properly tagged, they're far easier to find.

That's "tagging," and it's currently all the rage among the digerati.

Tagging has the potential to change how we keep track of and discover things digital — even whom we meet online. Several startups are banking their futures on it.

It could be our salvation as we attempt to sift through the growing clutter of data we're amassing on our hard drives and on that growing digital repository that is the Internet.

"People are awash in an overwhelming sea of stuff," said Joshua Schachter, founder of del.icio.us, a service for tag-enabled online bookmarks. "Our ability to produce content far outstrips the ability to sort and consume it."

And with the growing production of photos, sound and video clips — material not easily searchable — tags become ever more important.

Take photos. You may have an album for your beach trip, another for a son's birthday party. But how do you find photos of your wife?

Before, you had to scan through albums one at a time. With tags, you simply label photos individually when you first store them — with descriptive words such as "birthday," "vacation," "fall 2004" and with the names of the people in each picture. You can then search for your wife's tag.

Flickr, which Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO - news) bought in March, takes that approach — and more. Your friends can tag your photos, too. So while you might have neglected to tag your friend's daughter, your friend can do so.

"Tags enable you to slice through all the photographs that you've got in whatever way you want to find them," said Caterina Fake, Flickr's co-founder.

At del.icio.us, as in "tastes good," people tag and share Web links. Keepers of Web journals tag their entries to make them easier to find through a blog search engine called Technorati. Consumating.com lets you — and others — tag your dating profile.

Though many Web sites have long embedded search keywords, or metadata, tagging has a social component that gives it its power.

"Tagging is something selfishly useful. It helps you understand and categorize something for yourself," Technorati founder David Sifry said. "But I can take advantage of the fact that you and hundreds and thousands of people have also tagged the things" for themselves.

Tagging is fundamentally about tapping the collective human wisdom, rather than relying on a computer algorithm, for search, said Ben Shneiderman, who teaches human-computer interaction at the University of Maryland.

And that human wisdom is bound to help you discover information a computer might not otherwise know to retrieve.

Noah Brier regularly looks for bookmarks tagged "lifehacks" — for everyday productivity tips — and recently ran across an article on better ways to shave.

"I'm sure the author of this never imagined this was a lifehack, but a del.icio.us user decided this falls into that tag," Brier said.

Brian Dear adopted tagging for EVDB, an events listing service he launched a month ago, so people can find things they might never know to seek. View a listing, and you see a list of tags it uses. Click on one to get events just like it.

"You start being able to have other people discover things for you without you knowing you wanted to look for them," said Clay Shirky, professor at New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program.

Tagging saves labor costs, too. Dear would otherwise have to pay a whole staff to categorize and annotate listings.

Entire communities have formed around tagging.

Nearly 2,000 Flickr users are part of a "squared circle" group, all sharing a desire to crop into squares photographs of circular objects.

Other users tag satellite images of their childhood neighborhood "memorymaps" and annotate them with stories about growing up.

At 43 Things, where visitors list their goals, those inspired by the book "Getting Things Done" have tagged their goals "GTD." The tag helps users find what like-minded people want to accomplish and perhaps adopt those goals, too.

Conference-goers are frequent taggers.

Organizers of a blogging conference in Paris last week encouraged participants to tag their entries "lesblogs." Italian blogger Luca Lizzeri did just that and got hundreds of additional visitors.

Sites like Technorati not only let you search its own indexes, but also pull items from other sites. So a search for "tsunami" brings together Flickr photos and del.icio.us links besides blog entries — creating a mini-magazine of sorts on the fly.

Unlike hierarchical classification systems, taggers create categories spontaneously. There are no rules to craft on what categories to include and what falls under each.

Hierarchies "are more accurate, but they move less quickly," said David Galbraith, founder of a tag-based wish list called Wists. "It takes a long time for people to sit down and agree on them."

Matthew Haughey, founder of the community blog MetaFilter, considered a taxonomy to organize archival posts but "it's hard to make perfect categories and sub-subcategories." If you wanted to paint a fence, should you look under "home and garden" or "household"?

So he went for tagging.

The blogging site LiveJournal plans to introduce tags in the next few months as an alternative to categories, and Rojo Networks Inc. launched a service last month for tagging news stories, so no longer are you limited to sorting items by publisher.

Of course, tagging has its drawbacks, and some Webophiles aren't quite convinced it will evolve into the Next Big Thing.

Consider classifications for a common pet.

"If one group decides we're going to call them `canine,' another `dog,' another `puppies,' ... when someone goes to search for what they call the dog, they are not going to pick up everybody's tagged instances," said Geneva Henry, executive director of the Digital Library Initiative at Rice University.

Engineers recognize the shortcomings and are working on better tools.

Search for "automobiles" of Flickr, and you're given "cars," "car" and "porsche" as related options. Enough people tag photos both "automobiles" and "cars" that clustering software can tell they are related.

Another drawback lacks an easy solution, though. Once tagging takes off, marketers are bound to add irrelevant tags to hijack you to the latest Viagra ad.

Warns Danny Sullivan, editor of the online newsletter Search Engine Watch: "The noise and deliberate manipulation will probably just bring the system into a crashing halt."