Techhawking

Am I the first one to figure out that google now has “customized driving directions” ? This is really cool… I always wanted to see how much longer or shorter a specific route is/can be. Now I can.

I tried google reader long time back and wasn’t impressed. I had been using rojo for a while since then. However after its relaunch and increase in traffic from Facebook I took notice of it again and liked it this time around. I don’t know how Scoble keeps up with 600 feeds… I have hard time keeping up with just over a hundres I follow. But grouping feeds helps me focus on feeds I really like and those which I can ignore for long time. I you are interested in find out what I’m reading check this out. [ My public Google reader feed]

Facebook is the latest app I’ve been looking at. After using Orkut, linkedin and plaxo it seems like Facebook’s Platform OS idea is what will differentiate it with other social networking sites. Plaxo’s feature, pulse, was a very interesting idea which notified me everytime someone’s flickr account gets updated. I also found out when my contacts were changing jobs, moved houses or changed phone numbers. Facebook had a similiar interface called “News feed” to keep friends/contact informed about what you are up to.

The next big thing on the internet has to be about simplicity. Internet has come to a point where its growth will become the cause of its own downfall without a dramatic change in the way it grows. Almost everyone I know has a yahoo mail, gmail and hotmail mail accounts. And now they are on linkedin, orkut and facebook too. Keeping track of your own logins,passwords, email addresses is difficult as it is, and now you have to keep up with all the new services your social network is plugged into.

I see 3 things happening in the next couple of years, some of which have already started.

• Consolidation of services - Google is slowly building a suite of applications like microsoft and yahoo. And others who don’t have a big war chest to build it themselves are getting others to build it for them (think facebook apps).
• Aggregation of services - Plaxo does a good job of syncing up multiple addressbooks and phone directories. We would be seeing a lot more of applications like these. This would also lead to more openness, and though its a little farfetched, it is possible to see microsoft,yahoo and google themselves providing an option to sync up with others. And while all this is going on, there are smaller services like symbaloo and IM aggregators like Trillian and meebo filling in the void.
• Information Summarization - This might sound new, but its already happening today. Aggregation of services by itself gives you a birds eye view of all the information flowing in, but without additional intelligence you still have to read through all your blogs and emails to understand what is going on. Using a combination of different mechanisms, like your preference settings , information clustering algorithms, NLP/NLG (Natural language processing/Generation) algorithms, it can help you cut through your daily feeds and emails swiftly.

The search, Web2.0, blogging, social networking and now online television.

There are two kinds of innovation happening on the internet today. The first kind are the ones which are redefining the internet, and the second kind build over the first kind. Unlike traditionally research and innovation, its not the idea but the implementation and execution which makes or breaks a production or service in todays world.

As a hobby for the last few years I’ve played around with quite a few ideas to understand the implementation and execution complications involved in bringing ideas to life. I wrote a internet feed crawler 2 years ago, created a personalized feed reader preference detection engine using bayesian algorithm, created a IP/networking debugging tool called huntip.net, a digg like social news publication site called zoppr… and the latest experiment I had with was a service called flagthis . In my other life (at my real job) I kicked off a search product based on lucene with a fullblown Ajax interface using GWT 3.0.

I’ll be on the lookout for the next interesting idea to implement… and experiment with. Let me know if you have something interesting to share.