Schumi won again!

I am tired of saying this. This is becoming a one horse race. Especially this race, with what, just 8 cars finishing the race and Schumi and Ferrari far far ahead of the rest. In fact, its kinda become boring watching F1. The match between spain and portugal was much more interesting.

Rediff offers 1GB

Have just noticed that a lot of web mails are beginning to offer 1GB of space, the latest being rediff. But as I thought earlier, the point is not the storage. I was wondering, whats the point having 1 GB of e-mail in your mailbox, if you can search through it, unless of course you have taken the pains to organize all the mail. Even then, if you cant have good enough search to find an e-mail, God save you with all that 1 GB of e-mail. That said, I dont think its all that tough for these providers to provide a search function. Searching through 1GB of data should be a problem. Hopefully, they realize soon enough and add the search feature.

Orkut and Social Networking

I got an invite to orkut and registered there today. first impression: disappointing. I did not like the registration process. Like all other similar sites, there are simply too many questions during registration. One of the challenges in implementing social networking, I feel, is the way you collect information about someone's profile, interests etc. Asking a 100 questions during registration not only tires out the user but the fatigue factor will mean the responses need not be 100% accurate. Building intuitiveness into the process of interest collection by scanning the user's behaviour is a challenge. For example, if Verizon were to implement social networking, it could scan someone's call logs, cross check with superpages and see if he or she has been calling a particular type of numbers frequently, like pizza, chinese restaurants etc. That gives a hint that he likes chinese food for example and may want to network with other such people to share reviews, find new chinese restaurants etc. If Microsoft were to implement the same, scanning e-mail content (ala gmail) could be a way to build intuition. Of course, there are privacy issues that have to be tackled but building in the consent of the user in a non-obstrusive way will help handle that. Interestingly microsoft has been doing a lot of research in social networking. The microsoft research scientist who heads social computing research was at the Microsoft Summit in bombay making a presentation. Their work is very interesting. Check, http://research.microsoft.com/scg

Three links that evaluate social networks, that I think are absolutely excellent are these: (A must read for anyone interested in social networks)
http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2004/02/my_advice_to_so.html
http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2004/01/insecurity_at_o.html
http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2003/12/evaluating_soci.html

I have become very interested in social networking. If anyone has any links/research papers/books that talk about the mathematical analysis of social networks, (complicated math is no problem), please forward. Will be eternally grateful.

Pablo and Rahul, you are in queue :) Its already quite long now. So you will have to wait for some time.

Google snippets

just in case a software engineer did not have enough incentive to want to work for google... check, http://www.google.com/jobs/lunar_job.html

Google's own blog!
http://www.google.com/googleblog/

Of gmail and e-mail wars...

For those who still do not have gmail, there is some good news. I got a very early invite to gmail thanks to this blog. Of late I find that google is allowing me to invite more and more people to open an account with gmail. So much so that, I am beginning to have spare invites for more than a day before someone asks me for an account. I am not going to review gmail because a lot has been written about it, but I can certainly say that it has spoilt me from someone who organized my mail diligently to someone who doesnt care about the tons of email I get. I am beginning to search for the mail I want. I don't like it, but I am addicted to it already.

Talking about e-mail wars, just read that yahoo is planning to offer 100 MB free, going up to 2 GB for paid users. This is getting interesting. But, my hunch is that, this is not all about space. One look at anyone who has used gmail and you will notice that this is more about the email experience than anything else. What gmail is attempting to do is to change your email habits that you have developed over years. I for example have always been diligent enough to classify my e-mail in folders, delete unwanted email on the spot, keep a clean trash folder every week and even classify my sent items. Whenever I have used outlook, my .pst file has never ever crossed 300 MB. But, gmail is attempting something different. From what I was, I now have forgotten to delete my email. I delete irrelevant conversations (that's how ur mail is automatically classified by gmail) once in a while, but again, it goes into trash and I don't clean my trash folder. In fact, I search through it for some mail I may have deleted. There have been times in previous life when I have mistakenly deleted important mail in my eagerness to maintain my email, never to be able to recover them. But now, I am comfortable with having it all in my trash, so that even if by mistake, I deleted an important mail, "I can search through the rubble" so to say.

To be frank, it took time for my habits to change. In fact, when I started using gmail, I continued to follow my old habits, using a miniscule portion of my 1GB. Gradually, the laziness (which is why I don't like this transition) caught up with me. Gmail was involved in the process. Try cleaning your trash and it politely reminds you that you don't need to, that you have 1 GB space and that you can google search through your email! Gmail nudges you, slowly but surely, to change your habits, become lazy, don't care about organizing your email, but just google search when u need it and carry on doing more productive(?) work. It helps the process by automatically classifying your email into conversations. So when I search for an email, the whole thread is thrown up automatically. I like that! Which is why I changed. I still don't know if that's good, for I am hardly organized about other things in life! :)

Gmail has helped since I joined verizon as I have been busy with work and so, the little spare time has helped. Shifting gears (reminds me, schumi won AGAIN!), talking about work, its getting interesting and intriguing. Interesting as far as the technology goes, intriguing as far as the people management and group dynamics go. I realize that I have a long way to go...

In Bombay...

I was away for on thursday and friday in bombay at the Microsoft Executive Summit(MES) at the "Renaissance". Bombay is a city I love and it was great being there. As usual, my travel had its share of adventure. My hotel bookings were bungled up and I was stranded in the bombay airport around midnight. Had to call a sleeping friend to find a place to spend the night. The MES was primarily a hifi focussed sales pitch by MS. But it worked as a lot of the decision makers at the summit got the exposure needed about microsoft products. Some of the case studies were interesting and struck a chord with the work we are doing. We may end up doing more business with MS after this. The renaissance is an amazing place. The hospitality over the two days, needless to say, was very good. Two days away from work, with a little bit of networking and a little bit of fun thrown in.

The HCL beanstalk NEO PC, which was launched just a few days ago, was on display at the MES. What a PC. Seriously, I have never been a fan of MS or HCL, but the XP media center version on that PC was amazing. This one is a TV and a PC. It has a cable in, can record upto 30 minutes of TV programming (the closest we can get to TiVo in India), 120GB hdd, 256mb ddr ram and a 128 MB exclusive video ram on an agp card, p4 2.88 ghz with hyper threading and the works... at a lakh and 10 thousand, i think its a damn good deal. Atleast, its worth a look at one of these hcl frontline stores. Hot stuff.

Im not busy with work, but busy with shifting my house within chennai. Had no clue how tough that is, until it came down to it. Should have hired the professional packers and movers. Its good fun, but dont try this at home without expert help.