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.