Dil boltha hai

In the last few days, there were so many who asked if I were on facebook. Well, I was so tired answering to people that I am not.

To speak out my heart loudly and to tell about my perception towards facebook/orkut, I hate being on any of those social networking website. I like the concept of social networking site in terms of technology but I am simply not the kind of person who can be on it and share my likes/dislikes with the entire world. To me, it is more like allowing people to invade my space. I cannot be into something just because everyone else is. But I respect LinkedIn which is the other form of social networking site. I analyzed thoroughly before getting on to it. LinkedIn is so nice and so easy to be in touch with people professionally. There is no need to share one’s likes/dislikes, photos, scrapping others and I am glad there is no such thing on it. I love the fact that the top news allows us to be on top of tech news.

I have hand full of friends and I am in touch with them. I really don’t care about others whom I do not want to be in touch with. That is ME. There is no way I am going to change just because some body asks me to join one such site. I do things that my heart tells me to do and I cannot do anything different than that. When I do otherwise, that’s when I can’t be in peace and get irritated. Being a true fan of all the google products, I am still not convinced to be on google+ despite of getting several invitations. All the features are very interesting and the fact that this product came out so soon under Vic gundotra’s leadership is very inspiring. But the concept of creating a public profile and showing all the products the user is into is something I am not happy about. Why can’t uniting on a portal feature and revealing to world be an option? Creating a profile is ok, but a public profile is not ok according to me.

There is this very close friend of mine who always teases me that I am not in touch with lot other people and I am not in one of the snc. I keep quite because this person is a very close friend of mine. There are times when I just get irritated and talk back to him saying that I cannot be like him and do all that he does. To me there is nothing called as right or wrong and nothing called as one should do this/ not do this. I always thought some things are purely one's perception and no one should be forced.

Someday if I am on one such site, then I would have had a very strong or compelling reason to be on it. I wish no such compelling reasons arise rather I wish it needs to be convincing.

Doodle winner 2010

Makenzie MeltonAge 9, Grade 3El Dorado Springs, R-2 SchoolsEl Dorado Springs, Missouri

Doodle 4 google theme for this year was :
If I Could Do Anything, I Would…..

Makenzie chose this doodle because the rainforest is in danger and it is not fair to the plants and animals. She loves everything except spiders and snakes, but would still save them :)

Enjoy the pics from:

http://picasaweb.google.com/lambmegan/D40GRegionalFinalistEvents#

Change in Homepage?

The look and feel of the Google homepage has been changed since yesterday. Did you notice the elongated search box and the keywords that we enter are in bigger font size?

When I first saw the page, it appeared as though it had a UI defect. I was under the impression that some developer had missed to apply style sheet and deployed it into production server when he was half asleep.

Later I realized that it was a ‘CHANGE’.

I don’t like it. :(

Google Profile?

Web 2.0 refers to what is perceived as a second generation of web development and web design. It is characterized as facilitating communication, information sharing, interoperability, User-centered design and collaboration on the World Wide Web. It has led to the development and evolution of web-based communities, hosted services, and web applications. Examples include social-networking sites, video-sharing sites, wikis, blogs, mashups and folksonomies.

Although the term suggests a new version of WWW, it does not have any up gradations to technical specifications whereas gives a new tilt to the way end users utilize the web.

Got to Wiki for more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0

Now, do you wonder why am I writing a post on web 2.0 here? The answer is pretty simple. As usual I was exploring one of the features of Google. As a google adherent, I thought of sharing information about Google Profile.

In the current day, we have so many social networking sites bumping each other. LinkedIn is one such site with a different outlook to the SNS .Its a “Professional SNS”.
It’s a place where one can put their professional information there by floating ones information in the WWW.

Orkut on the other hand is a “Personal SNS” with a similar motive.

Today majority of the people ranging from school going kids to elderly people have got them registered in Orkut, LinkedIn, youtube, Picassa, reader, blogger, facebook & so on..

We know most of these products are under the very big umbrella called Google. Now what is different about Google Profile then?

Google Profile can be logged in with the usual gmail account and is built on the “Web 2.0” concept. It’s basically a place where one can register to have public presence. If someone wants to track a person on the web and the person being tracked has a google profile created, everything becomes pretty simple. It has link to all the google products and shows all of those where the logged in member has registered with.

Most of us log into any google related products with the same id. We don’t maintain different ids for different products when they always popularize the product with the fact that one can login if h/she has a gmail account. Thus the web 2.0 concept emerges.

For example, when a person logs into google profile with the gmail id, it shows their blog links, you tube membership details, presence in picassa, any journal membership, orkut, facebook and twitter and so on.


In the past when you did a “Vanity Search” ( if you wanted to be listed in search results for your own name), it would not have showed up the results as expected and often you needed your own website. However in April, Google has started giving Profiles a prominent placement in search results. If you set up an online profile with Google, a person looking for you online will be able to find you more easily. Google will let you know if they need more information before having your profile listed in search results.

Do you want to take a look to see a profile looks like? Search for Tim O'Reilly( web 2.0 guru) on the web.

Read for more details:
http://seodenver.com/2009/05/20/how-to-create-a-google-profile-and-manage-your-online-reputation/

I was very excited to learn about web 2.0 a year and a half back. But when I realized the concept in real-time, I have my own thoughts reserved for this.

I was analyzing the pros and cons of Google profile. I don’t want to discuss about it here as it might be a very good topic in a technical forum.

Although I jotted out many points, my question is still open.” Is Profile a boon or a bane?”

Doodle Winner 2009

Doodle 4 Google contest was held this year around the intriguing theme "What I Wish for the World."
Christin Engelberth, a sixth grader at Bernard Harris Middle School in San Antonio, Texas has won the Doodle 4 Google contest this year. She titled her doodle “A New Beginning”.
I remember voting for this title. Did I???
I think yes. Because when I first saw this doodle, it reminded me Darwin’s “Theory of Evolution”.
But christin created this doodle to express her wish that "out of the current crisis, discoveries will be found to help the Earth prosper once more."

When I read the title, the child in me had this thought …..Hey I have drawn enough on this slate…
Ok..lemme erase everything and make fresh drawings..:)
Isn't it nice?

I was listening to kishore’s numbers. I adore you tube for a chain of
songs they publish on the site when we get into a song. I was listening to a
song from Aandhi. From there on the list goes ..
Tere bina zindagi me koi shikwa - Aandhi
Mere bheegi bheegi si palkon me rah gaye - Anamika
Neele neele ambar par
Chookar mere man ko
Ham bewafa hargiz na the
Pal pal dil ke pas
Mere sapnon ki rani
O sathi re- Moquaddar ka Sikandar
And the list goes on………………..

I am mesmerized by kishore’s voice whenever I listen to it…More over you tube is like a gift. No wonder it’s a google product.

Google – V’day Logo

I am so interested in admiring the Google logo daily. Dennis Hwang is brilliant in depicting the importance of a day in terms of logo itself.

Today is a V’day special. I was quite impressed by the logo. It meant so much for me.
Oldies walking together with a walking stick and a rose in hand.

The idea of depicting old people together meant the depth of love. Walking together to enjoy the lovely sky depicts the happiness they must be having.

Don't you feel so?

Smilie smiles:)

What's in Google????????????

I remember search engines like Alta vista was rocking few years back. But slowly I could see how Google gained its popularity. Google is not merely moving towards “owning” the Internet but has also created a crazy dependency. But I truly feel it’s worth such dependency. I have wondered many times about various aspects of Google. At the same time, the little professor in me has raised so many technical questions.

Presently I am in the process of developing a website that more or less works like a search engine, but all together for a different purpose. I have found many practical difficulties while developing it. Like each time when I look up a huge repository, the Remote Method Invocation Interface that I use is pretty costly for every single hit .I wonder how efficiently the Google team would have worked to make it so fast and give us results in fraction of seconds. I was once discussing about this with my coworkers and happened to gather little information on the pigeon Algorithm that Google adopts for such adoring efficiency.

http://www.google.com/technology/pigeonrank.html

I am quite not convinced with the pagination aspect of it. As far as I have learnt so far, pagination is a concept of dividing the entire contents into several buckets where each bucket holds a defined set of contents. This means, Imagine I have 15 contents; I would prefer paginating it as 5 contents per page leading to 3 pages.

Observation from Google:

Imagine I get search results as 1-10 of 1,50,000 records in (0.03) seconds. Any layman would understand that he/she would land up with 1,50,000 links. But once I tried to traverse and found pagination gets stopped after 50 such pages. Assuming each page displays around 50 occurrences, a max of only 2500 records are shown to the user at a given search. I don’t question why it gets stopped there. I assume its not quite user friendly to provide till that last one and also as a matter of fact that the user would not have enough patience to look till the last search. Psychologically, after few page navigations, one would eventually start to use better combination of keywords to narrow down the search.

But the little professor in me raised these questions.

Does Google give the top frequently visited links? If so, does it have any metadata information for each such link regarding its number of hits based on which it decides the priority? Because for a keyword search, at any arbitrary amount of hits, it gives the same sequence of search results.

The other aspect of Google that I am fascinated about is, its refresh part. I read Google adopts AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) for this.

For those of you who are new to AJAX, it is a web development technique used for creating interactive web applications. The intent is to make web pages feel more responsive by exchanging small amounts of data with the server behind the scenes, so that the entire web page does not have to be reloaded each time the user requests a change. This is intended to increase the web page's interactivity, speed, functionality, and usability.
(Description courtesy: wikipedia)

AJAX is nothing new. Though the name was coined in 2005, the technology that enabled AJAX started a decade earlier.
I once had a requirement of auto refresh functionality where in a particular action would be constantly called in a specific interval of time. I used java script in JSF initially. But then it was very costly and behaved little crazy too. Later I found AJAX is trendy in its very kind providing tags like JSF, struts and also its easier to use AJAX tags with JSF with any web/application server. My job was pretty simple just to configure AJAX and just use the tags. It has polling feature as part of the tag itself and helps refresh a specific part of the page.

Google has of late got tie ups with many web sites and they are buying up the best really

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_acquisitions

). As far as I have learnt so far, I know they are linked to bloggers, orkut and may be some more. Apart from that, is its wide variety of add on like maps, Google news, earth, mail. I realize single sign on is implemented as soon as a user logs into a Google related site or any of its associated sites.

This means when I log into the blogger site, a method of access control enables a user to authenticate once and gain access to the resources of multiple software systems. In plain terms when I hit the gmail in a different browser in my system, I am straight away taken to the inbox page since I have already logged into the blogegr site. If I logout from my maibox, I am also thrown out from the blogger site.

Single sign on is an excellent authentication mechanism that’s implemented in any giant organizations where a system is dedicated to a user. But this concept does not hold good and is not effective when a personal computer is meant for a whole family. Imagine I log into the blogger site to post something, quite sometime later when a new user happens to check his/her gmail , the user eventually lands up to my mailbox.
The security is ultimately lost and the very purpose of it is defeated in the first place.

I just wrote all that striked me when I think of Google. I would welcome anyone to share any ideas on the questions I have raised.