Google Maps: +1 equals +11K?

Pursuant to the goal of making their +1 button ubiquitous on the internet, Google launched the +1 button for custom Google Maps earlier this week.

Interesting and useful feature, I am admit. However, it is broken. It also exposes a major bug in +1'ing, if I may (use the gerund form of the verb Google is trying to make out of +1). Let us see how.

As soon as I read this post on the official blog by the Google Earth and Maps team I jumped into my maps to have a first-hand experience of the +1 button.

I went to My Maps under My Places, and picked up the public Bangalore to Goa route map I had created before I was driving to Goa. I was pleasantly surprised to see 11K people had +1'd it. Believing Bangalore-Goa to be a highly sought-after route map, I tried Bangalore-Ooty, 11K again. This could not be true. Another random map, still 11 thousand. There was definitely something wrong.

11 thousand people +1'd this

I +1 one of the maps and visit the +1's listed on my Google+ profile. I have maps.google.com as one of my +1's, but that link takes me to the Google Maps home page! My custom map is nowhere in sight.

Only when I go back to my maps, get the link of my shared map, open that link in a new browser tab, and +1 it, that I get to see my custom map in my +1 list. And the map now shows the true count of +1's, which is actually only +1. I am the only one who liked my map yet. I should have suspected that anyway, a route map could be that popular in two days only if it showed directions from the White House to the three-story mansion in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Also, my map had only 9 views and 11,000 people had already liked it!

Maps +1's are based on urls

There were two +1's in my list pointing to the Google Maps homepage. They had two different urls: one was http://maps.google.com and the other http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&tab=ll, with a few extra parameters, which were anyway the default values.

This means when you +1 a map, you actually +1 the url, and not the map. So if you arrived at this custom map from a link that the creator, or a +1'er forwarded, you may see the correct +1 count. If you arrived at the map in-page after you reached maps.google.com, there are high chances that you may not see the correct number of people who +1'd it.

If Google cannot properly integrate the +1 button with one of their core applications, how can they expect other sites to do so. And this is not the first time Google had a sub-standard testing before launching out a feature. I am highly disappointed.

That's a -1 for Google. -11K actually.

Philately, e-post-office, and Speed Post

Unlike the last, highly critical, post at this space about the Government of India's e-ventures, this one talks about an e-service from the GOI that highly impressed me.

Welcome to the Indiapost Web Site. The so titled official website of the Indian Postal Department provides almost everything that you expect from the postal department, and features I had not expected the Indian Govt would have at their site—and it works, unlike others—and not many people would be aware of.

The site in general is cluttered, with a vertical news ticker (I wonder why is the government obsessed with vertical tickers) on the top part, lot of links on the left panel that could be moved to a sitemap, and a section at the bottom for internal use. The remainder of the page that lists 'some of their services' and displays a couple of newest stamps launched, and a few links to the different kinds of posts encircling the India Post logo are interesting and useful.

A few impressive features available are:

• Track your speed post: The most unexpected online feature from India Post. The movement tracking gives you a list of all the stops your article has made, the means of transport (air/train/road) from stop to stop, the id of the bag which contained your post, and the departure time from that post office. This is similar to the tracking services by DHL and FedEx, and better than BlueDart's.
  
  Not only does it allow you to track the movement of your speed post, it also sends you an email confirming the delivery, if you had registered your email id while tracking it. You may also query the current position via an sms and receive the info back as another sms.
• Pinsearch: Highly usefule feature, allows you to search by address (city, area) or Pin Code from a common search bar. It also displays a few nearest search results if the searched string is not found. Searching by district and state can give you details of all post offices in the district/state.
  
• Instant/Electronic Money Order: These can be accessed from ePost Office, a plain, sleek, and sexy site that looks like will replace the current drab one at some point in future. It currently lets you send moneyorders online to your folks who still use MOs, especially rural folk whose villages have a Post office instead of a bank. Connecting people, I must say.
• Philately: A service targetted at philatelists, who can now buy their favourite stamps online, even though I wonder how many people are still into stamp-collection. The feature is available at the aforementioned alternative site, and stamps are priced starting Rs 5, but an order has to be minimum Rs 200.
• Postage Calculator: Well, not really that useful but a good-to-have feature nevertheless. Just in case you want to compare the Indian Post and your favourite courier company.
• RTI: This page lets you access information about the department online, without having to file an RTI applicaiton and/or visiting the nearest post office.

There are a few bummers as well: The new site's security certificate is not trusted, gives VB errors on a few links and spews out the stack trace on your browser, and the linked Hindi web site is still under construction. But overall, a very good attempt by the Department of Posts. With millions of people still using the post offices for postage and banking in the rural India, in addition to post offices doubling up as registrars to 'Aadhaar' UIDAI, the online services can be a good step to promote post offices in urban India. There is need for a little marketing.

We have a heeeroh

That's the refrain of the new TVC that has been airing on all channels starting today. "Hum mein hai heeroooh", composed by A R Rehmann (they have him in a few shots) spans 2:03 minutes. The first time I saw the video, I didn't quite get what the ad was for, even though it showed a few frames of a couple of bikes, and thought it was one of the Independence Day short-songs by the Government in honour of our army/air force/navy. Being a non-working day, the TV was working all day, and at the end of it, I can swear I would have switched channels forty of the fifty-odd times I heard hum-mein-hai-heeroooh, even though it is a brilliant ad pulling together a good story.

It is only at the end of two minutes of suspense that the message comes across: "Desh ki dhadkan" has a new name: Hero MotoCorp.

Earlier this month, Hero and Honda split ways after a partnership of 27 years. This expensive (2 minutes of airtime every half an hour on all major channels, plus the Academy Award winner A R Rehman's services don't come cheap) stunt looks like the first attempt by the restored Indian company to re-establish its image in the Indian market.

PS: I was not at all exaggerating when I said I saw the TVC 50 times over; I found it on the same channel twice during the time I was composing this post.

New Gmail Sign in Page

The launch of Google Plus triggered a massive movement in Google that led to a product-wide transformation of the UX. It all began with the black bar that started appearing on the top of all Google products, and was later propagated to Gmail and Blogger and Maps.

The latest addition to the metamorphosis is the Gmail sign in page.

The feature is available in preview now, the way Gmail was updated, by means of a 'Coming Soon' notice and a preview link at the bottom of the page. The sign in page can be reverted back to the old one if you don't like it, but the changes will become permanent over time.

Group Off to On to Table

An sms this morning advertising GroupTable.in brought a smile to my face. Come Thursday, me and the missus start looking out for restaurant deals for the weekend. GroupTable looks like a one-stop-shop for us, that will save us searching koovs, Snapdeal, SoSasta, and the few other deal sites that feature restaurant deals, if at all.

GroupTable welcomed me with a sleek, clutter-free UI, offering deals for 'fine dining at affordable prices'. However, I was in for a surprise when I went in to register and was told both my number and email were already taken!

Since I use the same password across all such random sites, I was quickly able to get in, but it took me a while to decipher that Group Table is the same as GroupOn.in, the same company that started off as Group Off and had later bought the Groupon.in domain, which prevented the real Group On to have groupon.in as the domain name.for their Indian operations. I believe it was the same reason behind Groupon buying the rather cheap sosasta.com. (And So Sasta had to include "Sasta" in Sanskrit means "cheap" in their About Us section.

So Group Off became Group On (They used the tipping point as the turning of the Group from 'off' to 'on'), but perhaps the company couldn't compete with the other biggies in the Indian market, planting the seed for a niche deal site for restaurants. This is where most of the other daily deal sites started with, but later digressed to provide deals in all possible areas, most turning into partial e-commerce sites with discounts on. And now Group On has given way to Group Table. Both groupoff.in and groupon.in redirect to Group Table.

I wonder what is the rechristening of Group On to Group Table heading to now. There are few possibilities I can think of now:

1. Either Group Off has agreed to be, or planning to be, acquired by Group On. Grouptables.in can function as a subsidiary of groupon.in, which in turn can run under the bigger conglomerate Group On.
2. Group On made an offer Group Off could not refuse, and all this domain-name shuffling is a part of reorganization.
3. Group Off refused the offer to be bought, but agreed to sell the domain name for an obscenely high price.

If Group On is involved, as in options 2 and 3, it may be yet another small step by the unprofitable company which is otherwise all set to go public, to enter and compete in the Indian market which already has 50-odd daily deal sites.

Whichever way it goes, it would be interesting to see how Group Off Table grows and competes with Group On.

Appendix: The following domain names now redirect to Group Table:

• groupoff.com
• groupoff.in
• groupon.in
• grouptable.in
• grouptables.in

Indian Railways E-ticketing stopped

I have a draft post in my blogger congratulating Indian Railways of the new e-ticketing service 'Honorable' Mamta Bannerjee had launched on the 7th of July, 2011. In addition to lamenting over the lame javascript/ajax calls the developers wrote that were unpassably slow, I had wanted to talk about the utility of the advanced search that let you search using a stopover, and the futility of the vertical ticker that advertised 'Honorable' Ms Bannerjee.

I am glad I did not post that.

The site does not work any more.

The same vertical ticker that praised the Railways minister now declares "E-ticketing facility has been temporarily stopped. Inconvenience caused is deeply regretted."

Hoping the promised faster speed, lesser booking charges, no hogging up resources by agents, I had created an account, for which, I had to enter two different codes that were emailed and smsed to me. Unnecessary security more than my banks' websites provide. I also read that you could use an SMS as the ticket.

I am glad I did not use it to book tickets.

There were passengers whose could not book a ticket even after the ticket amount was deducted.

There are travellers who booked tickets through the new portal, and now want to cancel it. Since it is an e-ticket, they cannot cancel it over the counter. IRCTC has a different database and hence their tickets do not show up there. indianrailways.gov.in does not let them log in.

I saw poor (read stupid) passengers posting on blogs that covered the launch of this new venture by Indian Railways, asking them to help them out cancel tickets. Sample this on such a blog: "Please tell me how to cancel a ETICKET booked through this portal as you have disabled the portal.". Another advantage of not publishing my post.

The organization with the largest number of employers does not provide a reason for the 'temporarily stopping' of the e-ticketing facility. Neither do they mention anything about tickets already booked. I wonder if they are valid. The site or Indian Railways do not tell you when would the site be functional again, if at all.

So much for gov.in.

Update(22nd Aug, 2011): Some respite at last. People who had already booked tickets using the new railways service can at least get in touch with someone, as per the new notice on the defunct site: For any queries related to tickets already booked on this website, please Contact Helpdesk on 011-24107464, 011-26886540 or customercare@indianrailways.gov.in.

SMS from Gmail not in India?

When Google launched the ability to post updates to Google+ using SMS, I had happily bragged about India being the only other country other than US to have that feature, and believed it was because Google+ had the most number of users in India after US.

Opposite to this feature, Google also provides the option texting from Gmail to phones. To do so, all you have to do is enable text messaging in the Chat tab and you can send SMS to any contact that you have in the chat list.

This feature is, however, available in only a few countries through a limited number of service providers, barring US where all service providers allow that.

I was surprised that India does not feature in the list of 23 countries that allow this, even though more than half of the countries include third-world African nations:

• Angola
• Bahrain
• Cameroon
• Ghana
• Indonesia

• Iraq
• Israel
• Jordan
• Kenya
• Kuwait

• Liberia
• Malawi
• Mozambique
• Nigeria
• Palestine

• Philippines
• Saudi Arabia
• Senegal
• Tanzania
• Tunisia

• Uganda
• United States
• Zambia

Or maybe it is the Indian service providers that do not integrate with Google. On the other hand, it is noteworthy that Indian telecom giant Airtel accepts smses in Ghana, Kenya, Malawi and Zambia.

Why was India left out? Is it Airtel or is it Google?

J K Scrolling

Gmail Labs keyboard shortcuts include an important set of keys to navigate between conversations: J and K, to navigate to older and newer conversations respectively. Keyboard shortcuts originated as a labs feature for Gmail but its youngest sibling Google+ has shortcuts, albeit very few, enabled by default: The first ones talked everywhere are J and K. This was expected, and shared and reshared through posts, where else but on Google+.

I was in for a surprise when I tried the same on Twitter. And Yammer. And realised they too use the J and K keys to scroll through messages. Google (search) tells me Tumblr also lets its users scroll up and down by pressing J and K; I could never catch up on Tumblr.

.			Yammer	Twitter	Google Plus	Gmail	Google Reader
.		Selected item pointer	Blue arrow	Blue background	Darker blue left border	Black arrow	Expands the post
.		Behaviour for new messages	Pointer shifts to top	Retains last position	Retains last position	Retains last position	Retains last position
.		Selection alignment	Center	Center	Top	None	Top
.	Sync with scrolling	Mouse	No	No	Yes	No	No
.		Arrow keys, Page Up/Dn	No	No	No	No	No
.		Home/End	No	No	Yes	No	No

The above table summarises J K Scrolling for the popular services that support it, and properties of the pointer and the this mode of scrolling in general. Facebook has a few useless shortcuts, but does not support J K. LinkedIn does not have keyboard shortcuts at all. Google Plus wins here as well, because it syncs your pointer to the currently selected message even if you scroll using your browser scrollbar, or navigate to the beginning of the stream using the Home key.

The use of J and K to scroll down or up can be dated back to 1976, when the vi editor was created, which also used the H and L keys to move left and right.

If you are wondering why were these keys chosen to scroll, the reason lies in the ADM-3A terminal, one of the first computer terminals, manufactured in 1975. The keyboard did not have a separate numpad in the right, but had multi-functional keys, and H, J, K, and L were aptly placed to be used as navigation keys.

The cost of one of these terminals 36 years ago was $1195! And had no processing/storage. Imagine what processing speeds and storage will that much money buy you today, even if you do not adjust for inflation.

*Images of the keyboard and the terminal are from Wikipedia from here and here, used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.