Amit @ DI has an excellent Twitter guide for some very common Twitter tasks.
Seriously recommend adding it to your bookmarks.
Technology
23
Jul 08
India Mobile / Technology — 4 comments
Jul 08
Why pay when you can create your own ringtone ?
Ringtones are a big business in India, the worlds 2nd largest mobile market. They in fact make up for more than 35% of all mobile VAS revenues.
Isnt it time that companies stop charging for ringtones ? Why even pay the Rs. 7-15 for a ringtone ?
If you want to stop paying for ringtone downloads and want to create your own ringtones from your MP3 files, here’s a step by step guide for doing so (this is an old story – I recently came across it while doing housekeeping on my delicious links). The process involves installing a couple of open source softwares, so the inintial setup might take a bit longer. But once you have that in place and get a hang of the steps, creating subsequent ringtones should be darn easy.
So go ahead – create ringtones from your favorite Bollywood flicks – be it Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na or Kismat Konnection and share them with your friends.
India Mobile / Technology — 4 comments
14
Jul 08
Technology — 3 comments
Jul 08
Some interesting reading
Found some interesting reading stuff over the weekend. Take a peek:
1) Designing and Implementing Scalable Applications with Memcached and MySQL:
Very interesting technical presentation in PDF format.
2) Early YouTube engineer talks about scalability and outages:
via GigaOM
3) The audience for US websites is becoming increasingly international. Sites like Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn etc. not only get US visitors, but they also attract a significant share of international visitors also. This story from Wall Street Journal digs a little deeper into this scenario and how the sites need to gear ads targeted towards these international visitors as well.
Technology — 3 comments
8
Jul 08
Technology — No comments
Jul 08
Geek Alert – a good primer on GPS technology
I did a mini primer on Location Based Services and its state in India a couple of weeks back.
While I barely touched the surface, if you are looking for some serious technical knowhow, I came across an interesting story related to GPS technology – what its all about, how it works etc.
Check it out here. I’d definitely recommended bookmarking the article.
Technology — No comments
30
Jun 08
Technology — 3 comments
Jun 08
Will Twitter go the Friendster way ?
Twitter, who recently secured their second round of funding, has fueled the microblogging phenomenon. As more people caught on to the “What are you doing” culture, folks at Twitter have hardly kept up with the increased load. The site has faced several prolonged downtimes, which have gotten only worse over time. Not a week goes by without someone whining about Twitter’s downtime.
It makes you wonder about why frustrated users havent already switched over to other competitors ?
Well, truth be told, there werent any worthy alternatives out there to which people could switch to. Jaiku seemed a formidable foe, but new signups were closed after the service was acquired by Google. Pownce emerged as a likely alternative, but wonder why it was never able to take advantage of Twitter’s problems and cannibalize on that. Inspite of the problems, Twitter grew like crazy, while traffic to Pownce seems to have stagnated.
Lately though, it looks like Friendfeed has emerged as the most likely Twitter alternative. Several high profile users have already given up or are on the verge of giving up on Twitter and moving over to 
Friendfeed. Friendfeed may not be excatly the same as Twitter, but offers the same value as Twitter – the value of conversations. As soon as more conversations shift from Twitter over to Friendfeed, more people will make the jump.
Technology — 3 comments
18
Jun 08
Technology — 3 comments
Jun 08
Move over Digg clones, time has come for the Indian Reddit clones
When Pligg, a popular open source Digg clone, was launched, countless sites popped up on the map, wanting to be India’s Digg. With time, the most lame ones have gotten weeded out. But that still doesnt deter others from launching a Digg clone even today.
Now that Reddit is open sourcing their code, I’m hedging my bets to the possibility that within the next 1-3 months, we’ll see a lot of Reddit clones pop up for India related content as well. The only hindrance towards Reddit adoption and deployment is that it is Python based as opposed to the popular PHP.
None the less, keep a lookout and expect to hear about HumReddit, BharatNews, IndoNews, Indyanews or something similar in the next few months.
Technology — 3 comments
28
May 08
India Social Networking / Technology — 6 comments
May 08
The top open source social networking platforms
Here’s a list of some of the most promising open source social networking platforms for those of you who might be interested.
1) BuddyPress
BuddyPress was started by Andy Peatling as a series of plugins for WordPress MU that will turn it into a fully functional social network. It was acquired by AutoMattic, founders of WordPress, and has been launched as a standalone open source project. Features include extended profiles, personal blogs, messaging, friends, groups, albums etc. Few of these features have been launched already while several others are under active development.
While BuddyPress still has a long way to go, it definitely seems to be the most promising open source social networking platform out there. Not only do the founders have the success of WordPress under their belt, the total number of active WordPress installs provides a ready made base for BuddyPress installs as well.
2) Insoshi
Insoshi is a Ruby on Rails based, open source social networking project and has been incubated by YCombinator. Michael Hartl, the founder, is the author of Railspace: Building a Social Networking Website with RoR. While Insoshi is also under active development, current feature set includes activity feeds, extended profiles with comment walls, friends, forums, blogs, messaging etc.
While Insoshi is awesome, one of the aspects that probably may hamper public adoption is that the project is RoR based and there still arent enough folks with RoR skills (I speak relative to number of folks with PHP skills).
India Social Networking / Technology — 6 comments
12
May 08
Entrepreneurship / Technology — 14 comments
May 08
How should you plan for hardware while launching ?
Say you bootstrap your Internet startup and are on the verge of either making a public announcement or pitch media-bloggers about the impending launch of your startup.
My question is – how do you anticipate the traffic load and how do you plan accordingly for any contingency? Assuming that the pitch was successful and you get a moderate to sizeable amount of traffic, if you are on a shared hosting plan, chances are that the site may cripple under the load.That would be a nightmare for any Internet entrepreneur – getting all the coveted user traffic, but hardware resources fail to keep up.
On the flip side, you might be faced with the scenario that you opted for a dedicated hosting plan and the traffic just never came. And now the 100-300$ + monthly costs for the dedicated server are a strain on your pocket – at least till the traffic to the site builds up.
Probably, this isnt as big an issue –and more so, I’m just curious to find out what others think about the same. If you’ve already been through such a scenario, what decision did you finally opt for ? Did it work out to be the better decision ?
Entrepreneurship / Technology — 14 comments
6
May 08
India Mobile / Technology — No comments
May 08
Vodafone to launch iPhone in India this year
As per a release, Vodafone will be launching the iPhone in ten countries later this year, including India. Unlocked iPhones have been available in Indian gray market for some time now.
It’ll be interesting to see if these unlocked phones will get blocked now that Vodafone is officially bringing the iPhone to India.
India Mobile / Technology — No comments
25
Apr 08
Technology — 1 comment
Apr 08
Should you lead a double life on the Internet ?
After procrastinating for a looong time, I finally opened a Twitter account today. I’d put it off till now due to all the information overload I suffer on a day to day basis (ok..partly because I was lazy too).
Signing up for Twitter however got me thinking – with the rise and increasing popularity of so many distributed services today, what really happens to my privacy ? Thanks to my blog and my accounts on Orkut, delicious, Facebook, Twitter, LinkeIn, Digg, MyBlogLog,YouTube – I end up leading a pretty public life on the Internet. On most of these services, I have set up pretty lax privacy settings in the hope of networking with other folks, outside of my personal circle of friends.
It is a bit difficult to keep a disconnect between my personal and professional/blogging friends using a single account on most of these services. Yes – services like Facebook do have pretty good privacy controls – but setting a per object level privacy setting is often a pretty tedious task.
It makes me wonder – whether I should keep two user accounts for some of these services – one that revolves around the social graph of my friends & family while another, which revolves around the social graph of my professional and blogging friends.
What say you ?
Technology — 1 comment
