A naughty little Twitter trick

In the absence of anything sane going on in my head, I've been doing some insane stuff. Result? I've discovered quite a few naughty things! *evil laugh*

How many times have you found that the person you followed back on Twitter suddenly decided to unfollow you. (Yeah, thats what causes the drop in the followers count) Well, fear no more. www.friendorfollow.com is here. Enter your username (no password required, I hope that will appease those privacy freaks, err that includes me as well I guess) and they tell you who are the naughty people who have decided to unfollow you. Trust me, even if you think this is useless stuff, in time you will find this an indispensable tool!

Let me know who those naughty folks are, if I'm following any one of them, I'd be more than happy to do the honours.

Google Buzz

Another Google product! Grrr....

Wait, only this time, its about...hold your breath Social Networking! Erm...do we need any more social networking sites? Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Digg, Stumble Upon, MySpace, the list goes on and on. Hasnt the networking bubble already burst? I mean, havent we 'networked' enough already?

Apparently Google thinks we havent. And so it endeavours to set foot on the only territory on the web which it hasnt been able to conquer so far. If you are from India, or from Brazil, you probably have used something called Orkut. For millions of others, Orkut is a social networking site created many years ago by Google. It became quite a huge hit in India and at some point, almost every net surfer had an Orkut account. It all changed when we discovered Facebook. Facebook, the most popular social networking site on the planet had so far remained completely oblivious to us, Indians (Or is it the other way round?).

Until recently, when all of a sudden Facebook and Twitter seemed to be the latest buzz word around. Everyone started shifting to facebook, partly because it offered more security, better features etc. and even more because it was a matter of keeping up with the Jones, although in India its more like keeping up with the Rams and the Shyams.

Okay, I'm getting completely lost here. Back to the point. So you see, Google really had to come up with something very unique in order to hold on to its subscriber base. Renovating Orkut didnt work, actually it backfired; for most Orkut users dont like the new Orkut (or lets say the facebook-wannabe-Orkut).

So now, Google reinvents Orkut in a way (which I'm sure many of you might've noticed) very intelligent indeed. Google integrates Google Buzz to their most popular offering, Gmail. Smart thinking, Google! Now every Gmail user logging in, will be asked the question, 'do you want to try out Google Buzz?'. 9/10 times a user will think, why not? And hence one gets to explore the 'buzz'.

So what is it? Its basically a 'sharing' web app (if I may categorise it as such) which allows you to share your favourite links, photos and videos, and share it with the world. I'm quite surprised as to how much it resembles Google Wave. Google Buzz in my opinion is Google Wave with more options.

It has no separate interface since it integrates with your Gmail account, which makes it quite boring to be honest. As of now its not exactly lightning fast, which really doesnt contribute to the wow-factor anyway. It allows you to comment on anything and everything posted and even 'Like' a post (No 'Un-like' option here, unfortunately, as Google has vowed to copy facebook feature by feature and not add anything else)!

However Buzz automatically adds all your Gmail contacts (who have signed up for Buzz) to your Buzz followers (have I heard that word somewhere else?). Hence you are not exactly alone (like most of us who have used Google Wave when it launched were).

Its neither facebook, its not twitter and its not anything relevant. To me, its just another failed attempt at replicating the magic of facebook.

Is Blogging Passe?

I wish I never had to post this. But when regular bloggers start talking about shutting down their blog it is indeed a cause of worry.

The reason why people are talking about blogs becoming passe is mainly because of the advent of microblogging services. Oh well, the microblogging service, aka Twitter.

Okay, I'm on twitter as well. But I dont find any competition from Twitter to blogging sites such as Wordpress or Blogger. Both are very different at the outset. Twitter is more of a slow chatting sort of a thing. And a fad as well, considering the number of celebs who tweet. Blogging in my opinion is more of an articulate thing, and it requires a dedication. You cant just blog for a month and get tired of it. These are the differences I have perceived.

Blogs have certainly becomes more commercial these days, and that perhaps this has caused the creative type blogs to take a backseat. Most of the "featured" blogs on Wordpress are the ones belonging to big corporate houses or news studios/services. But the thing is, even when a blog is unpopular it just means its being read by fewer people, but being read all right! Personally I would prefer my work being read by few people than not being read at all.

Finally, I sincerely hope blogs live on. This is a way of expression which is unique. Let us not kill it.

You could check out this link I found while browsing: my 2 cents: Is blogging passe?

Flock, the "social browser"

Flock, a new Mozilla Firefox based browser has caught the attention of many coz of its innovative features, especially the ones for social networking sites.

I decided to give the Flock a try. Well, firefox was getting a bit boring. :P Anyway, so after googling "flock", I was directed to the official site which had the download link. The file size is around 12.6MB for the latest version, and have to say, compared to firefox, this was almost double the size of any standard browser. After downloading, the installation was a breeze. No stupid customization questions, simple express setup and youre done.

Next came the task of figuring out how the thing worked. First up, the interface looks damn cool! But to be frank, its not really simple. One needs time to get accustomed to it. If you're a newbie, chances are you wont really like this stuff much. Anyway, once you've got the "adaptation" thing sorted out, the next part is about signing in to various sites. Easy enough? Wrong! No matter how many times I signed in, the Flock would show that I wasnt actually signed in. This is really a pain in the arse!

Now the best part of flock is that you can acess all the social networking sites and various other sites, just by cling on the "people sidebar". And you're logged in to all those sites simultaneously, which is really really cool! The other awesome feature of flock is the fact that no matter what site you visit and even if you havent logged in to facebook, you will be able to see and edit your status as well as chat with your friends in the status bar of the browser itself! Also, the fact you can post on your blogs right from the browser itself is another innovative feature. Now if that isnt mind blowing, I dont know what is! :)

However I do miss some customisation options of firefox. Say for example, the fact that you could add a keyword to every bookmark of yours (unavailabe in flock) is something you wont find in many browsers.

To sum it all up, flock is a cool browser which introduces a completely new genre of "social browsing", something which I hope the rival companies like IE or Opera will pick up soon. But the program as of now is very much in beta and isnt really something which I would call "error free". However its a start and thats what's important.

New to Twitter?

Image via CrunchBaseTwitter. A strange name which has taken the world by storm. Has it? Oh well, we'll see.

The thing is I had never even heard of twitter just till just a few months back. I still clearly remember that day. I was watching Larry King Live on CNN and Ashton Kutcher was on the show. Kutcher kept mentioning about this new social networking phenomenon called twitter.

I checked out the site that day itself. Signing up was suprisingly easy and to be frank the really user friendly interface got me hooked immediately. Now that I had signed up, my next task was getting to know how all of it worked.

So what I was supposed to do was answer a simple question 'what are you doing?' Cool enough? Absolutely! Next you follow others whose updates aka tweets you would like to receive. And if that person isnt a total moron or a celeb youre likely to get followed in return. So your follower count rises and so does your popularity. It is true that unless you have gathered a substantial number of followers you wont really get the essence of twitter. In other words, you will need time to get yourself accustomed to this new medium. But once you get used to it, it'll take over your life in every possible way.