Google+ Pages: Can it map the real web with the social web?

One of the biggest differentiators between Google+ pages and Facebook pages is that +<BrandName> takes you to the Google+ page for the corresponding brand. Why, you do not have to actually search for your favourite product, it pops up on the Google Instant suggestions even before you've finished typing. You are not even given the time to look at the search results, which may not contain the Facebook page on the first 10 search results. (Angry Birds Facebook page appears on the second page of search results, at number 16, for instance).

Google+ Direct Connect in Action

This also means that Google connects the web to pages, Facebook does pages to web, which is consistent with the companies' core philosophies. Larry-Sergey brought all the websites at your disposal through search results on the web itself, and Mark has built a parallel web inside his website.

This is also evidently made easy by Google Badge, a way to link your website with your Google+ page. Once your website is linked, the +1 count on your actual website and Google+ page are synced. Direct Connect and Badges combined with a customizable +1 button and open APIs, Google+ provides much more traction to your website than the Facebook counterpart.

Like we earlier pointed out, Google+ is available for apps users too—an advantage Facebook does not have. With all the aforementioned features, Google+ pages can be a boon for Apps users.

As with everything Google, simplicity is what drives the creation of a Google+ page. Though Google asks for most the same kind of categories and subcategories to place your page in, a la Facebook, the form looks much cleaner on Google+, with the categories neatly tucked away in a left pane and the subcategories drop down remaining at the same place, unlike Facebook where the six available categories are sprawled across the entire page, and still does not have an 'Other' category. I had a tough time categorizing the Facebook page for Byte Channel. Categorizing is not the only pain point. Once you are done choosing a category and finding a suitable subcategory for your page, Facebook takes you through a three-step-old-school-wizard to add an image, invite friends, and suchlike. At Google+, you'd have pressed Create and your page is ready, you may edit those details later.

At the Facebook F8 conference 2011, Zuckerberg talked at length about removing friction from the entire Facebook experience, however, creating a page provides you all the friction you could imagine. Okay, Google+ was still an infant when F8 was held, and consequently pages were not paid attention to. Perhaps.

Google+ using the divide-and-rule policy in releasing features in installments rather than one complete product has been a major factor in sustaining its popularity and maintaining interests of users, critics, and industry pundits. You are about done marvelling at a new Google+ feature and just before you get used to it, Google suddenly announces another feature that brings it back to the headlines, evokes curiosities among its users, and creates interests among non-adopters. Interesting Intelligent strategy.

Pages was the most-awaited and most-wondered-about, if you will, feature of Google+ since the search-master's social product launch. Now with the launch, every product/business/organization is busy creating pages. Pages add another dimension to Google, another plus for Google Plus, can this be termed as Google++?

Rollback Google Reader using Reader Sharer

Yes, another post on Google Reader. After all, this is my most-used web-app and the source of 97% of tech and business news for me. (The other 3% comes from Yammer, Facebook, Twitter, and newspapers, in that order)

After Google's rollout of most cribbed-about and protested-against changes to its RSS-feed reading software, the entire reader world started showing their angst. Yours truly was no exception, and was quick to retort the announcement and implementation with Reader-Blogger-Plusser and New Google Reader Arrogantly Finds Its Way posts, which also mentioned a few people made unhappy by Google's decision. That did not include Brian Shih, ex-PM Google Reader (Sept 08—July 11), who criticized the changes and pointed out history of neglect (I felt the same once) in his blog post, which has gone viral amongst Readers.

Anyway, the point is, while everyone was busy complaining and wailing and cribbing and feeling helpless in the absence of a single better aggregator, this Shanghain young grad who goes by the pseudonym of Keakon, has developed a Chrome extension called Reader Sharer that rolls back the removal of social features of Reader, but retains the new look-and-feel and Plussing-one and other new features.

While this is an interesting extension, how long will this last would be interesting to watch for. Google had wanted to remove the Reader sharing to promote the Google Plus sharing, and may block, or completely remove the APIs that Keakon is using for his extension. Or, perhaps add the in-built sharing back.

If better sense prevails.

New Google Reader Arrogantly Finds Its Way

As reported in my last post, Google was up to overhaul its RSS-feed aggregator, and there were many unhappy readers out there, some of them leading to protests. Much to the dismay of RSS fans, the changes were rolled out last night, and reported on the Official Google Reader blog.

Though I have been impatiently waiting for the cross-app new look of Google Plus, I am not very happy with what has been done. It looks neat and clean undoubtedly, but there are many disturbing changes:

• I don't like the left panel, and definitely not the custom scrollbar on the left at all. Also, the small arrow to hide the left panel has vanished. You will have to use the keyboard shortcut 'f', which, unfortunately, does not appear in the list of keyboard shortcuts that comes up when you press '?'
• Items do not have any option to change the spacing between them, unlike the dense theme in Gmail and cozy and compact density settings in Google Docs.
• The Super Full Feed extension buttons, including the Super settings button, are still the old ones and misaligned badly.
• Shared items and commenting is the feature missed by millions and the most protested against. I am no exception.
• The "Keep as unread" option has been brutally removed, and the disposal is not even acknowledged. This used to come in very handy if I find a long feed interesting and could not complete it and wanted to read it later, maybe on a different computer.

The thing that irked me the most was not one of these, but the arrogant fashion with which Google announced this on the official blog post, quoting which: "If you decide to stay, then please do send us your feedback..." implying they could care less. Even the sweetener added at the end "Regardless where you go, we want to make sure you can take your data with you." smells of Google's give-a-damn attitude.



The only plus part to these changes is that you can now +1 a post that will appear on your Google Plus stream. Google is trying to develop a social network by stripping off other products of their social capabilities. With the inclusion of GTalk in Google Plus, I am half afraid GMail may see GTalk going out of its layout very soon.

The new interface is okay, people would get used to it in a couple of days or so, but this attitude may prove harmful in the long run. Not many people will quit using Google or even Google Reader, (the pain of changing and getting used to a new feed reader is more than getting used to a new UI and live with the few changes), but the overall experience creates a bitterness and brings about a loss of trust in Google. I think I was right when I deplored that Google Reader was the most neglected child; I may add to it that Google Reader readers, if you will, are the least cared for.

Update: The "keep unread" option as I mentioned as the last point in my list above has come back again. Another useful thing that has gone is the drop down list of folders and tags that doubled up as an input text box and you could type in your folder name. Now you have to choose from the dropdown using the mouse.

Reader-Blogger-Plusser

While I had previously mentioned about Blogger being the most neglected of all Google acquisitions, and lamented (here and here) over Google Reader not getting its due share of attention by its owners, looks like the Big G has finally paid heed.

This, however, comes at a price.

Last week, Google announced upcoming changes to Reader on the Official Google Reader Blog. Google Reader is finally ready for a makeover to match the metamorphosis Google started Q2 this year.

The sad part the same blog post announced, is the decision to discontinue friending, following, sharing posts, and commenting on them from within the Reader. Instead, you will be able to share your posts on your Reader-specific-circles on Google Plus.

For me, Google Reader is the most-used web app and Android app today, and links shared by friends and people I follow form a hand-picked, human-curated list of posts that are really interesting to read. Some of these posts would introduce me to new blogs I would later subscribe to. Subscriptions from links shared on Google+ has been rare, plus there is considerable friction involved in moving from one app to another if one were to do so.

For many subscribers to RSS feeds via the Reader, this news has been criticized and protested against. Here are a few photos of people doing so outside the Google's DC office, and here is a blog post by an Iranian explaining why does it matter for Iranians, and other similar countries where the government filters social websites.

Another announcement last week by Google was the integration of Google+ profiles with Blogger. This would mean your readers would now be able to access your publicly shared items on Google+.

Though not acknowledged by Google, there are speculations in the blogosphere about other integrations, like, publishing a post on blogger will automatically post it to your Google+ stream as well, and comments on your Google+ will be integrated with comments on your actual post, and the comments can be seen at one place. Blog commenting is one of the few places where Facebook is, and Google+ is not. Integration with their own blogging service may be the beginning.

While the Reader features have not been rolled out yet (though the official update last week said next week), the feature to replace your Blogger profile by Google+ profile is already available for Blogger in Draft, and will be migrated to the regular blogger in the upcoming weeks.

There have been no reported protests against this Blogger change, but since Google+ does not allow profiles with pseudonyms, this would affect bloggers who write under a pen-name, if you will. Google has acknowledged this, and therefore made this change optional, unlike the Reader changes that are forced upon helpless readers.

With Google Buzz going off the track, and now Reader and Blogger being integrated with Google+, looks like the search giant does have some plans to support its social networking app gradually establish a place on the web led by Facebook.

Android ICS Face Unlock can be Hacked Easily

The list of features in Ice Cream Sandwich excited me, especially the changes towards easing multitasking, the powerful in-camera functions like live editing, single-motion-panaroma, the NFC Android Beam, and a few more. However, the first thought that flashed my mind when I heard about the Face Unlock feature was if a photo could be used to unlock your phone.

Several people wondered this, and the only statement from someone at Google I could find was in this tweet from Tim Bray: "Nope. Give us some credit". A terse statement that does not explain much, but isn't brevity Twitter's USP?

Image sourced from here

Maybe Android 4.0 could distinguish if the face it is trying to identify is a real person or a photo by reading it a few times in quick succession to look for facial expressions, assuming a real person may not be able to remain exactly still like a photo. However, this is not difficult to hack into either. Perhaps a short video, or even an animated gif could help grant access to your phone.

Google says this is "a completely new approach to securing a device, making it even more personal". While it may make your device more personal, I do not see how does this make it more secure. Or how can it ever be more secure than the traditional password or pattern-drawing mechanisms, unless used in combination with one of these.

Unless, Ice Cream Sandwich does an iris scan while registering the user's face, which may need precise positioning of the eyes and may not instantly unlock your phone.

I shudder at the thought of someone using my photo/video to unlock my unattended phone and access/misuse data from my always-logged-in Google account or impersonate me on Facebook and Twitter. Think about Google's own Wallet.

Top 10 Android Apps in India

(This post appeared on Pluggd.in last week.)

With Android phones available for as low as Rs 6,000 now, their sales have been been always on the rise in India. The next step after one buys an Android phone is downloading Android apps. With the market buzzing with 300,000 apps already, and hundreds still getting created every day, there is an app for almost everything under the sun.



Indian companies and developers are also targetting Android apps now, which are more popular than the Apple apps because of the price-sensitive Indian market. Here is a list of top 10 Android Apps downloaded by Indian Android phone users, not in any particular order though:

Google Maps: With GPS-enabled smart phones getting popular by the day in Indian customers, and people using navigation on their Android phones, this one really comes in handy. It also gives you details about nearby restaurants, ATMs, and petrol pumps. With the recently launched offline cache support, you may find your way out even when you do not have a data plan.

Facebook: The most popular social networking platform of all times finds a place in the top apps downloaded by users to instantly share with friends.

Talking Tom Cat: Oh this fun app does find a mention in the top 10. A very simple app that just records your voice and repeats back in a high-pitched, funny voice, is not loved only by kids, it is a good accompaniment to any gathering of friends or family.

YouTube: This is one of the many apps that are much better than the original browser apps. YouTube app provides in-page playback, which means whenever you click on a YouTube link on your phone/tablet, it opens up the app, and plays the video in a full-screen mode, and this happens so seamlessly that you do not even know that you left the browser (or any other app) to the app and are back.

Angry Birds: The pigs are getting greedier and birds angrier. Perhaps the most-addictive phone game has now found a liking in the Indian users too after it was opened to the Android ecosystem and was made free.

Twitter: An ideal app for a phone because of a word limit synchronous with an SMS, and the kind of urgency with which people tweet, it is faster and easier to tweet from your phone from wherever you are, about whatever you feel like.

Advanced Task Killer: Just because Android apps have no close button doesn't mean they shut down when you return to the home page or move on to another app, and continue using up memory. This app lets you kill them and release memory, improving performance of you phone.

Book My Show: A very simple and clean up that allows you to book your favourite movie, play or event even when you are on the move, it also lists venues in the nearest-to-furthest order.

Times of India: This app from the country’s highest-read newspaper provides you breaking news from local, national, and international areas to your Android device. It also comes with movie reviews, live cricket scores, and photo galleries.

Moneycontrol: The Markets on Mobile app is your gateway to all critical real-time information about the Indian and global markets through your Android device. It provides real time stock quotes, and helps you manage and keep track of your investment portfolio, watch Live TV and get in-depth coverage & analysis of financial markets, economy and business.

A look at these apps conveys a mixed feeling. There is no one category Indians are downloading apps in. There is social networking, games, utility, entertainment, and news. The Android App market is a versatile one and supports apps for all kinds of uses. While GPS aids navigation and check-ins, accelerometers and gravitometers have taken gaming experience to the next level. Cheap data plans and fast 3G connections in India mean apps relying on the connectivity are becoming popular.

Free apps mean the revenue depends on advertisements, which depends on the popularity of the apps. Depending on how popular your app is, this may fetch in more moolah than a download fee. Angry Birds, for instance, was once a paid app at $1 per download. It was later made freely available in the market, and now makes $30 million a month on advertisements, which is far more than Rovio could have made on charging that fee. 30 million downloads a month is unconceivable even for a game as addictive as Angry Birds.

For utility apps like BookMyShow, the ROI of developing an app comes in the form of an increase in the number of users who pay through the app, if not for the app.

If you are a company that relies completely/partially on the Internet for business, what percentage of your development efforts (and $$) do you think should you spend on app development? For a company that is completely into app-development, what do you think will you develop? A utility app or a game? The first kind of company can outsource to the latter. There is another question for developers though, should you target Native or HTML5?

So long, Steve Jobs

Never has any tech news afflicted me so much as today's; I haven't had been so emotional ever at the demise of anyone I didn't know personally. Steven Paul Jobs, the great visionary behind Apple, the creative genius who changed the way the world computes, listens to music, and connects to people, passed away today. He was 56.

Steve was diagnosed in 2004 with neuroendocrine tumour, a rare form of pancreatic cancer, and though the tumour was successfully removed, he had to undergo a liver transplant in 2009. At both these occasions, he had to take months off from Apple, and his shoes were filled by Timothy Cook, who later took over when he finally resigned as the CEO in August this year.

I still find it hard to believe.

Though he had lost considerable weight and appeared thin during and after these surgeries, Jobs dealt with the disease very gracefully, and still delivered very energetic and passionate speeches. Just yesterday, a colleague commented that watching Steve Jobs present was like watching a movie.

Steve was the kid who dropped out of college and managed to assemble and sell his first computer when he was 16. He was the genius who laid the foundations of a company at the age of 21 that would later change the face of consumer electronics in particular and technology in general. He was the founder who was fired from his own brainchild at 30. He was the courageous, persistent fighter who then founded another company called NeXT, which was then bought back by Apple 11 years later and Steve was appointed the CEO the next year. This Act II changed the world, with innovative products like iPod, iPhone and iPad.

While Apple has replaced the home page on their website with an obituary and created an email id to share thoughts, memories, and condolences, a statement from his family reads "Steve died peacefully today surrounded by his family".

Even though I am an open-source proponent and was never an Apple fanboy, I must admit there was a certain class imbibed in his products by Steven that no one else could ever match. The rare combination of genius, creativity and passion Steve Jobs had is awe-inspiring. You will be deeply missed by billions of people.

The world is at a loss.

Here is a list of few inspirational reads about Steve Jobs. Please feel free to add more in comments.

• One of the very impressive articles I read about Steve on TechCrunch: It Just Works.
• A detailed report about Steve's health issues, ultimately leading to his demise on LA Times.
• What Steve Jobs did when he was fired from Apple on DNA India.
• Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford Address video, and the transcript.

Google Reader Pushed Down

A few weeks back, I had written about the neglect their own feed reader received at the hands of Google. Last week, Google Reader was removed from the top navigation bar (yes, the new black one that was launched in preparation to Google+ release), proving it was not mere overlook and negligence as I had cribbed, but a well thought-after decision. Google Reader is still available from the More menu though, and Google Sites has taken its place on the navigation bar.

This change may be attributed to the declining popularity of Google Reader in the US as compared to Google Sites, which looks like on a rise from the following graph obtained from Google Trends:

Google Sites

  

Google Reader

  

Average traffic from United States in the last 12 months

However, the same graph for all regions shows that Reader is still used by more users than those using Sites, worldwide:

Average traffic from All Regions in the last 12 months

Flickr Photo Session

A decade back I had all my friends on the most popular messenger service at that time called the Yahoo Messenger. It was perfect, you could see all your friends who were online, and talk to them instantly. I was online 24 hours, even if I had to do with a 'slumber' mode for certain hours of the day. However, the craze came down as I got busier in life and also because call rates started a downward trend and handsets costs plunged, and everyone I knew started buying them. Also because there was competition from younger siblings like Google Talk and Rediff Bol (which was a crap product, IMHO) and Facebook, and I believe instant messengers, in general, became less popular as a means of communication with the oncoming of Facebook and Twitter.

Yahoo Messenger has been on an evolution since its 1998 launch. It now integrates Facebook chat as well, and you can directly post to Facebook and Twitter, and chat from within your Yahoo Mail on your browser, and chat from within your smartphone.

It also had a Winamp plugin in the early 2000's that put the track you were then playing as your current status, and all your online friends would know what were you listening to, which is very similar to what Spotify will do to your Facebook feed, as my last post on Facebook's integration and new features talks about. That also includes simultaneous streaming of music (and videos, via an integration with Hulu and Netflix).

One of the very good Yahoo Messenger features was photo sharing that allowed you to share a photo album with your friend from your hard disk on your computer, which was later extended to sharing from your Flickr album. Both you and your friend could add photos to the photos panel and browse through them together while discussing them over chat.

Yesterday, Yahoo announced a feature (similar to Spotify-Facebook/Netflix-Facebook) for photos called Flickr Photo Session that lets you flip through photos with your friends across the world, at the same time allowing you to chat and discuss via a small component at the bottom right of the screen. Features over the initial Yahoo Messenger photo sharing are that you can add up to 10 contacts, and draw over the photos with a marker that comes in 12 colours.

What bewilders me is why did they take so long to implement this on Flickr? This was a very good idea, implemented 8 years back. They just had to present it inside-out, from photo-sharing-within-chat to chat-within-photo-sharing.

Anyway, while that is an interesting feature to help budding photographers discuss photos and exchange photography notes, it may not be a very useful tool for all of the 51 million Flickr users. Also, the feature is currently available only on the web version or the iPhone/iPad app.



In other Flickr news, they also introduced an official Android App (finally) earlier this week, though there already were around 1300 apps for Flickr out there in the market. Let us hope it starts allowing Photo Sessions sometime soon.

The Fresh Face of Facebook

The biggest news in the tech world last week was the fifth Facebook f8 conference. Well, it had full rights to be the most discussed event; after all, Facebook is the most popular social network today, and with its longest and most promising feature list announced last Thursday creating the biggest change ever in the history of social networking, it is headed towards gaining control over its 800 million users’ deeds on the internet and becoming the most important part of the internet.

While a few of the new features seem like responses to Google+ features or inspired from them, some of the bigger ones have a lot of effort and time put in, and one would assume they were being worked upon for quite some months, maybe years.



At the risk of being banal, let me quickly list down the new Facebook features, including the ones already (quietly) launched just before the f8, in no particular order:

• The news ticker.: This is the vertical ticker on the right side that shows a continuous stream of all the non-important updates—someone was tagged in somebody’s photo, a third person liked the same, a fourth reshared it, and other similar kind of activities. The ticker comes in two sizes, one, with resizeable height sharing space with the list of most contacted friends and chat, and second, a less conspicuous half-screen mode above the ads, when the chat sidebar is hidden, or the screen is not wide enough. Hovering/clicking over a ticker item opens a small popup overlay containing the complete share, and you can like, comment, or share from within.
• Fixed header.: The original blue Facebook bar now remains fixed on the top of the page even as you scroll down. Contains only the search bar, your profile photo and name, and a menu for settings and to log out. This is clearly inspired by the Google’s black bar that appears on all Google products but remains fixed only on Google+. Another static component on the new design is the ticker talked about in 1 above.
• Top stories and Recent stories.: The news feed is divided into two parts: the top stories that comprise of status updates and photos from your family and closest friends (ones you interact with the most on FB), and a recent stories section that contains all the other stuff from other friends. The top stories are also decided on how frequently do you visit Facebook. (I had expected Twitter-like behaviour, but the number of top and recent stories 'since your last visit' does not reset to 0 when you see them, and does not change if you frequently visit Facebook.)
• The timeline.: This is, by far, the biggest change in your Facebook profile. Till now, the wall contained all your activity on Facebook, but the important things slip off the page. The timeline algorithmically weeds off the unimportant stuff and sews up the important ones into a colourful life history. You can increase/decrease attention to your stories or add new/delete old stuff from your timeline, and even add your apps to your timeline. Quoting the official blog, the timeline is an "easy way to rediscover the things you shared, and collect all your best moments in a single place". Timeline is in beta mode now, and you need to be a developer to create one for yourself. (Create a sample app following these steps on TechCrunch or Mashable.)
• Bigger photos.: Picture sharing has been improved. Photo size is increased from 720px to 960px, and the black background is changed to a white one in the theatre mode. Also, an album that appears in your timeline shows three thumbnails, one large (267px) and two small (125px each). Another feature that reminds of Google+.
• Subscribers.: Another major change, this introduces asymmetric sharing in Facebook. You may subscribe to someone's public posts even if they don't subscribe/befriend you. Also, you may choose what type of content (all/most/important updates) you see. With Twitter and Google+ allowing this, Facebook had to finally implement the feature, though it is more polished than both Twitter and Google+. On the flip side, you have two different kinds of connections now: friends and subscribers.
• Improved Friend Lists.: A direct rip-off from Google+ Circles, you can now limit your shares to only a certain list(s) of friends, and even view updates selectively from lists that now list on the left panel. A feather in the cap is the smart lists, that create automatically for your work, school, family, city, and close friends based on your friends' profiles and the friend suggestions for lists. (Smart lists worked very well with me; gave me pretty accurate suggestions.
• Birthday reminders.: Albeit a minor feature, a useful one. All your birthday reminders are shown at the right, above the ads, below the ticker, and let you wish them with a single click—a small overlay similar to one on ticker opens up containing all your friends whose birthday falls today, and you can write individual messages to each of them.
• Read. Yahoo News, Washington Post Social Reader: Yahoo News has tied up with Facebook to let people discover and share news and information on Yahoo through updates on Facebook. Yahoo News has added a Facebar on the top that shows all friends that are connected using FB; clicking on their faces takes you to what they are reading. Washington Post also launched its Social Reader that has the Facebook bar on the top, friends using the Social Reader and what they are reading on the left, and an app ticker on the right that shows only the app activities of your friends, in addition to news content sourced from different media companies.
• Listen. Spotify: Spotify announced its integration with Facebook in f8, and now onwards whenever you listen to music on Spotify shows up in the ticker. Your friends can click on the co-located play button and listen to the same music with you in sync! Eventually, all music activity would come in a music dashboard towards the left on your page, that will contain feeds from all music partners.
• Watch. Hulu and Netflix: In addition to Spotify CEO Daniel Ek, the f8 also saw Netflix CEO Reed Hastings talking about Facebook integration. You will be able to see what TV shows or movies your friends have been watching on Netflix, and click on the movie to watch it right there, within Facebook. Hulu's new canvass app provides a similar functionality to videos, and lets friends discover videos, watch them simultaneously, and discuss them without ever leaving—you guessed it right—Facebook.
• Open Graph. Read. Listen. Watch.: The new Open Graph is going to enable apps that primarily focus on two types of things. The first is help you create your timeline, and the second is helping you discover new things with your friends. The discovery is done in three ways, with frictionless experiences, realtime serendipity, and finding patterns in your friends' activities. Building an Open Graph app gives you the opportunity to deeply integrate into the core Facebook experience, including Timeline, News Feed, and Ticker. This is exactly what the aforementioned Yahoo, Spotify, and Neftlix are doing. Another important feature the Open Graph will provide developers is the use of any verb to for an action button, and not only the ubiquitous Like button.
• Slow Poke and I am not really friends with these people: A slow poke reaches the receiver in 24 hours so you could withdraw it in case you changed minds. While this was a fictitious feature Andy Samberg made up at the opening of f8, the not-really-friends is possible by creating a circle list by that name for those people. Who are not really friends.

Ha! With those many new features, and a few implemented from Google Plus—the Facebook PRD—Zuck Dawg with rock-solid, cut and greased abs, is all set to rule the internet. Even though I was extremely happy with Google+ at its launch, and maintained a month post-release that Google+ could never outrun Facebook, and established another month later that Google was late by half a decade. This post corroborates that belief. Google+ is competing with the Facebook of yore.

PS: Here is the 01 hour 41 minutes long f8 conference (with captions), in case you want to Read/Watch/Listen:

Mobile Apps: Native vs HTML5

(A slightly edited version of this post appeared on Pluggd.in last week.)

Mobile Apps have been there much before the advent of smartphones and tablets, even if they were factory installed. The phone book, calendar, and alarm on those half-pound phones with monochrome screens were all apps. However, ‘app’ became a buzz word only after Apple inaugurated the App Store in July 2008 and Google launched the Android Market in October the same year. Nokia joined the bandwagon by launching its Ovi Store in May 2009.

Within the past three years, app communities are building up, software developers around the world are developing mobile apps, companies are providing downloadable apps to access their websites and services, and of late, a new fancy adjective was added to app and ‘native’ apps are being compared to HTML5.

From a user’s perspective, any piece of downloadable software is an app, be it a game, a compass, or a mail client. He is not bothered if it is a native app or an HTML app.

For an app developer or a provider company though, the difference between developing a native app and an HTML-based webapp is huge, both from the cost angle and the features they provide. At least now. HTML5, though still a work in progress, promises capabilities that can improve the language with support for the latest multimedia while keeping it easily readable by humans and consistently understood by computers and devices.

Native apps are considered more responsive and functional than their web-based counterparts. One of the primary reasons is that they have direct access to not only the basic hardware like the microphone and speakers but also hardware sensors like the camera, gyroscope, accelerometer and the GPS. A compass, for example, is therefore highly suitable to be developed as a native app.

The development of native apps is slower and more expensive. Since it is written in Objective C or Java, it requires a higher technical expertise and more effort and time, thereby increasing the cost. Since native apps are installed on the OS, and the market today is shared by many platforms, iOS, Android, Windows, Symbian, Blackberry OS, the cost is multiplied.

Another disavantage for native apps is software update. Though most native apps designed for smart devices these days talk to the internet and regularly check for updates, the user still has to download and install it. Products keep evolving, and the manufacturer has to develop new features and fix old bugs for both a web app and a native one, but they have the extra job of releasing them for all platforms supported. Also, since there would be some non-tech savvy users who do not keep their software up-to-date, the provider has to support multiple versions of the same app.

Web apps on the contrary, are easy and faster to develop, are platform-independent, and an update requires as much as refreshing the page or restarting the browser. The developer provides a new version and redeploys it at their servers, though there is an extra cost of storing data and maintaining servers.

Since a user couldn’t care less with the underlying technology used for their apps, there can be download-and-install apps written partly in HTML, providing the best of both worlds. A pure-HTML downloadable app is slightly difficult, since the app should also know how to render HTML and CSS, and have a JS engine to interpret Javascript, the browsers do that best already. An intelligent app may internally use the browser to display its interface in HTML5 and to connect to the internet, and while providing an Indistinguishable interface as a native one.

For most of the open-source applications, like Google Maps, it is also possible for a third-party developer to create their own HTML5 apps and access web services from within. A native app makes no sense for such applications.

However, when it comes to games, native apps rule the front. You possibly cannot have graphic-intensive games like Angry Birds in HTML5. Flash could have supported that, but Apple does not support that on its iOS. Neither would Windows8 in its new IE10. So unless you are writing an app exclusively for Android Honeycomb, Flash-based games wouldn’t work.

Until HTML5 proves itself capable enough to provide the same functionality as Flash and give Adobe a run for its money. Okay, only the Macromedia part of Adobe.

Native Apps have been there on desktop and laptop computers since ever, even before the Internet was born. As networks became faster, computing evolved, and people started using multiple devices and collaborating (remotely at times) with fellow users, there has been a paradigm shift towards web apps. There was a time when the browser was used only for browsing, but today, you can create spreadsheets and presentations and edit pictures from within the browser using Google Docs. Email apps like Yahoo’s are rich-clients that give almost the same UX and speed as the native desktop clients. Heck, you can even build up an entire J2EE application inside a browser. HTML5 can be of assistance to maintain an offline version of your data on these web apps, thus giving developers the best of both worlds. Google Chromebooks rely entirely on web apps, and that has made possible a high performance and low cost, though they have not been adopted yet by many people.

The major problem with phones in using web apps is the small screen. Most of the web apps are first designed for the 14/17/20 inch screens and then re-written for the smaller 4 incher, and deployed separately as a mobile site. Since companies have to anyway re-write, and also because apps are in vogue, they rather build an app for the website and make it available in the various app stores out there.

Another disadvantage of downloadble apps is that too many apps are difficult to manage on a small screen even though most phones support five or seven home screens. It is easier and faster to type a url, which the browser can remember for you, and auto fill the next time.

The current specification version of HTML was standardized in May 2000, 11 years ago, at a time when phones and tables did not have browsers. The in-progress specification, HTML 5, shall take into account all those new developments in hardware, software, and processing and network speeds, and shall be designed to provide optimum UX.

For developers and companies, it makes more sense to streamline their efforts towards HTML5, on nature of it being cost effective and fast at the same time. There will still be certain apps that will require native coding. Developers need to choose an intelligent ratio between the two only on a need-basis and not just because one is ‘cooler’ than the other.

Godparents.in

Of the many startups that try to build up a social network in one form or another, this one is different. It does not have games, apps, or sharing in circles, but has profiles and pages, and has an asymmetric sharing. Pages are for organizations and can be linked from profile pages of children, which can be followed by the second kind of members, the Godparents.

Godparents.in is not just another internet startup. It is a platform that brings together thousands of underprivileged children in need of money for basic necessities like nutrition and education to willing donors. You would say there are numerous other organizations that do that, like CRY, Akshaya Patra, Smile Foundation et cetera. Godparents is different because it goes a step ahead and establishes a connection between the donor and the person.

By giving the child a name, a face, and a background story. And allowing you in making informed decisions on your donations, track where your money goes, how it is used, and most importantly how it impacts the lives of children that you choose to support, making Godparents.in a data-rich, transparent social-service-network specifically focussed at facilitating one-to-one financial support to underprivileged children.

Sample Preeti Upadhyay, who is a 10 year old girl studying in VII standard. She is good in studies and likes drawing, singing and reading stories. Her father is a daily wage labourer and mother a domestic help. She has two sisters and their parents meagre income is insufficient to meet her educational expenses. She requires a sum of Rs 8,600 per annum to take care of her school fees, uniform, books, and commute to school.

In addition to the above details, Preeti's profile page has a photo of hers, a list of her grandparents who have contributed towards her needs along with their contributions, and the NGO (with a link to the NGO page) that takes care for her.

So, Godparents.in establishes a three-way relationship between needy children, patrons, and NGOs.

A donor can go through the entire list of children's profiles and choose one or more of them to god parent. Every child has a total requirement and the amount left to raise. You may help a part or full of the remaining amount required. Godparents.in collects the money on behalf of the connected NGO, on which they have already had a due diligence done. The fund transactions are quite transparent with the incoming and outgoing funds listed on the site, including breakups of funds raised by NGO. Also accessible are regular updates on your Godchild's progress (through updates on child's profile) and the annual reports on the activities of recepient NGOs.

You can also connect to other godparents through their profile pages that have their brief bios with email ids and phone numbers If you feel good deeds should not be boasted, you can remain an anonymous Godparent. However, a public contribution adds to the transparency of the process. Your choice..

The novel idea was innovated by Shubham Shrivastava and Shivam Shrivastava. The creation and maintenance team for Godparents.in consists of a total of 17 volunteers, many of them IIT graduates and working in corporates in India and abroad. Apart from individuals, the effort has support from a few organizations as well. Microsoft supports Godparents.in under their 'BizSpark Global Startup Program', and Flipkart provides free publicity by distributing Godparents.in bookmarks along with the books that they sell online. As of today, the site has 15 NGOs and 415 godparents.

All the best Godparents.in. This will make a difference. I am signing up for a god parent right away.

Google Reader: another neglected child

A couple of months ago, I had lamented about Blogger being the most uncared for of all Google's acquisitions, and at the same had expressed gladness that it gained some attention in the momentum established with the metamorphosis in Google's look and feel in May this year. The blogger's interface was changed too, initially only for volunteers using Blogger in Draft, a couple months later which was extended to all users.

Google Reader, the search giant's own feed aggregator , has snatched the title of the 'most neglected product', if I may. Not only the UX that makes it look alien to the Google family of products, but it looks like there has been no development on Google Reader at all.