Lens

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This is a software very close to my heart. Because this is the very type of program I wished I had or I wished I wrote/developed for my own use¹ There is a personal reason for this.

My father has, many say, the best memory and knowledge about the relatives in our entire circle of relatives that I have encountered. He not only remembers who is related to whom, his brain has, most often than not, other details like their names, their order in the children’s queue, their education, their occupation and in some cases their history of places lived. This is huge and complex data considering that he would not have met/seen them at all - for me, unless there is a face I can not associate a name to it and remember it. And when he talks with his father-in-law (my grand father) another power house of information of his generation, the observers of the conversation not only struggle to keep pace connecting the dots but gasp in awe at the knowledge present and ease with which that is recalled. Many times it has so happened that a person meeting my father for the first time would introduce himself & within minutes from my father he would be enlightened with new knowledge of his family tree and how they are related to someone else.

As for me, I struggle to recall the name and the way they are related even though I would have met them in a function just an year ago. And those I haven’t met are hardly remembered by me. Memory, visualization and ability to recall - I am average, if not bad, at all the three.
So I had this plan of making my father fill out the tree for my reference. And the best way to do it would be on computer so that it would be easy to search, distribute, add/edit contents and most importantly to visualize. I tried using freemind, a mindmapping software, but I alone doing everything would be hugely time consuming and I dropped the idea.

Now comes Geni - a super cool application - with a very easy user interface and features. Since it is a web application, now I can get my other relatives to contribute and finally realize my wish.

Geni promises to be more than just building family tree and few social-networking features are quite fun. And that makes it sort of family-networking site. There are few issues but I hope they get resolved over time. Very prompt and helpful team responds to queries. They have an option to export the content ( which might come handy if they wish to shut down or if they wish to stop free usage - I wish neither happens), printing option - both of which I have not tried out. They have even won Webware 100 awards. Some of the improvements that are almost necessary are - making it work offline with the help of google-gears or suchlike, easy merging of two people, mail-to-all email holders/ mail to those who are editing the trees, import of the tree etc

If you are interested check the site out and let me know what do you think.

And by the way, in their forums, there is a fun topic to list which celebrity are they related to and I found one related to Ralph Waldo Emerson!! Hi there! And another topic tries to find out about the biggest family tree owner and one replies 1800 and 33000 to go !! I was pleasantly surprised to know they were researching from 1990, and that many like them are interested in family tree and archiving that in software. And I had thought there would be no takers for my program and only I had such interests!

[1] I had started doing a stand alone app but what I am going to talk is revolutionary compared to my idea. I even tried to use freemindmap for family tree purpose!

Yahoo! pipes was announced back in Feb but somehow I had not tried it. Desperate to mix and play around with feeds, I tried few services like FeedBlender, rssmix and finally with much resistance tried out Pipes. But soon I liked it so much that I spent lot of time trying out various things and had fun. The interface itself is artistic/aesthetic, before even thinking about the use. Rss mixing, I am sure, is just one of its functionalities and looking at it only as an rssmix alternative tool is injustice to its power.

I have put together almost all feeds related to my online activity (blog, cocomments,twitter,picasa,delicious) here. I was feeling proud about my brilliant idea of redirecting my blog’s feed to the above feed, but it is somewhat stupid. Any guesses why ? It may not serve any major purpose now apart from the fun of experimentation and having things at one place.

Here is what visionaries say about Pipes:
Tim O’Reilly :

Yahoo!’s new Pipes service is a milestone in the history of the internet. It’s a service that generalizes the idea of the mashup, providing a drag and drop editor that allows you to connect internet data sources, process them, and redirect the output.[..]This is something I’ve been waiting nearly ten years for.[..]hey allow developers to use two websites in a way that their creators didn’t quite intend, which extends them and makes them more useful. But mashups have generally been limited in their scope, pairwise combinations with their output typically being simply another web site. That is, the pipes and filter mechanism had not been generalized.

But perhaps more significantly, to develop a mashup, you already needed to be a programmer. Yahoo! Pipes is a first step towards changing all that, creating a programmable web for everyone.

Using the Pipes editor, you can fetch any data source via its RSS, Atom or other XML feed, extract the data you want, combine it with data from another source, apply various built-in filters (sort, unique (with the “ue” this time:-), count, truncate, union, join, as well as user-defined filters), and apply simple programming tools like for loops. In short, it’s a good start on the Unix shell for mashups.[..]Pipes can simply be used as a kind of “power browser.” [..] For example, you can build a custom mashup to search for traffic along your own routes every morning, or a news aggregator that searches multiple sites for subjects you care about. All you have to do is start with one of the existing modules

Anil:

There’s also another key accomodation of social functionality: Pipes is pretty.[..]Is Pipes going to be a success? In many ways it already is. It lets Yahoo unequivocally be first at something, and if you count the broader market of web-based application development tools, it lets Yahoo be best at something, too. It’s innovative, exciting, and well-done.

TechCrunch

It takes effort to explain the significance of a new product when the immediate benefit to consumers may not be so obvious, and the awkwardly named “pipes” from Yahoo! is no exception.[...] It works like a visual procedural programming language with the output of the process dropping out at the bottom, in the form of text output, RSS, SMS alerts of even JSON. You can use feeds, user input or other pipes as input.

The beauty of the application is with its simplicity - a user can take any sources, user input requests or the above mentioned module and drag+drop them into place and then connect the pipes. Within minutes I had built an application

And Library clips has few links :

More than just RSS mixing, it allows you to manipulate the data at a granular level, eg. translate data, scan for location metadata within the feed source, limit items in the feed, sort the items in the feed.

Once again, my experiment’d pipe is here. (Click edit source / clone )
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Talking of mashups, google mashup is the latest on the block. Spent sometime at it Here are few links related to google mashups and looking at the samples , I can think of some similar mashups that could be cooked like

• hotels/eatouts in bangalore
• cricket team’s matches , dates, venues, news, message board

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And oh yes, Ajax Slideshow from my picasa album is running on the sidebar. Tried in vain, to include it in the post

I had registered for twitter way back in December. For the unknown, it constantly asks you to answer one simple question “what are you doing” either at the site or from IM. It allows you to follow/subscribe to see what your friends are doing. Thats all, no big deal. In short it is like the status message shown on gtalk. Or say orkut self scraps + friends scraps at one place.

But after hanging around a little (2 minutes), I had no idea why it would make sense or how it was supposed to work or any clue why one would use it. I have my blog for my updates and twitter was like self-scrapping in orkut ¹ . And then there is always orkut itself. And I did not want to give one more url related to me to others when the subscribers on this blog itself is 31 ² — hey thats a good news by the way. Hello every thirtyone !!

Distractions, I say! Back to topic.

But twitter saw a huge increase in numbers during SxSw , later they had scaling problems, analysis of increase in numbers showed it increasing at a rate higher than blogs. And now it or its cousins have become a hit. See this site to visually see the updates to twitter acorss the globe - TwitterVision ⁴. There is one with a photo messaging. . And digg+twitter = truemors.

Kept hearing a lot about it but I kept ignoring it but finally, recently understood one key factor which I think makes it work (more than any other reason) : its sms alerts in US - to send or recieve twits - which will instantly deliver the updates to “what are you doing” to those who follow you. Suddenly it makes sense to me⁵ :). Call it mobile-blogging or mundane updates or whatever, its success is quite huge !

In India, alternatives are present like Webaroo [via] but none are offering free sms I know thats too much to ask for but I somehow feel, if such a service comes up ⁶, it would be a hit like orkut, among my peers - some of who are lazy to read/write blog.

Here is my twitter page, twitter feed. You might have observed the pretty thingy on the sidebar too. Once I upgrade the WP, using Twitter tools plugin I will think of integrating in some other way.

Lots of support sites to twitter have born of which - email to twitter and firefox plugin twitbin are my favorites. Other firefox twitter tools.

I guess none of you are on twitter, add me as friend when you join To help you start with, here is starter guide. Huge resource list/help here. Thats it for those with short attention span. Rest can continue reading.

I don’t think in recent times anything has generated as much discussion as the twitter - especially the opinions being diagonally opposite to each other- one swearing this has been the most stupidest and other saying this was being waited for. One saying most unproductive, time wasting-distracting tool to another explaining how it could be put to use

Twitter can be distracting, but it can be useful. It’s up to you.

to explaining how you could be industry expert to how smart men use it.
One swearing its death is around the corner (208 comments) and its just hyped up and other claiming this will long last -(or that twitter to this decade is what email/sms/blog was for previous decade). There will be either an article or an application (either useful or just for fun or “most bizzare app for twitter”) every week or other. ( Even those that I have not linked to are on web, too lazy to search and link)

What I personally think is that - its a damn good integration of various features and it is different for each one depending on how you want to use them. Its like digg for some, its like blogging for some, its just social networking with its connectivity being instant - sms/im. Or for some it could be a combination of all these.

Social networking like orkut, for me now is huge time wasting - unless you are using it while in office! - in the sense that there is no value gain, but among my friends attitude like mine is rare. Even generally, orkut has not died! Today you might understand orkut but I remember when it came about, most of my friends did not join for almost an year - there was “whats orkut?” from everyone (or probably it was totally due to different reason). But today everyone gets the idea with orkut. There is no reason twitter can be any different. In fact it could be more catchy since there are different ways to use it, you need not always log in, the plugins will still operate from office even in twitter is blocked, sms/im interface will let you be in touch even when not using office internet.

Coming to blogging, again, I know lot of people who are lazy to read blogs. For them since all their friends updates is available at one place, it helps. Those of you who are too lazy to have a blog or those of you who are clueless what to update on the blog, this still will work for you.
from here

1. Twitter is easier to use than Blogger was and had a lower barrier to entry.
2. Twitter has more ways to update (web, phone, IM, Twitterific) than did Blogger.
3. Blogger’s growth was limited by a lack of funding.
4. Twitter had a larger pool of potential users to draw on.
5. Twitter has a built-in social aspect that Blogger did not.
6. Twitter’s 140-character limit encourages more messages.
7. More people are using Twitter for conversations than was the case with Blogger.

Here are links to twitter tips and tricks , twitter-blog integration tools.
And here is a description to micro blogging and twitter

Media companies such as the BBC , The New York Times and Al Jazeera are trying out Twitter as a way to send headlines and links to stories. The campaigns for presidential candidates John Edwards and Barack Obama also have Twitter profiles, with thousands of “friends” and “followers” who check out updates.

On a post that says how twitter is a hot cake to be bought over now, Scoble points to the immense advertising oppurtunity

You’re missing the even bigger opportunity for marketers: people are telling us WHAT THEY USE and WHAT THEY LIKE. If you can listen and learn to engage people on Twitter you’ll find a marketing goldmine here. If I were really smart, I’d hire a team to categorize each Twitterer 24-hours-a-day. I’d start building a database of behaviors shared. Someone say “changing the diapers.” Well, now we know they have a newborn at home. What could marketers do with THAT? TONS!

Those who are still reading, here is some more info. One of the people behind twitter is the same who created blogger.

Ev jumpstarted the blogging revolution and tried to do the same with podcasting until Apple jumped into the ring and squashed all the competition. Twitter is his well deserved second home run.

From

There are several cousins of twitter on the same model like dodgeball,(acquired by Google), groovr but a little more famous is jaiku which came a little late than twitter but it includes lot of other things including an important difference - allows feeding to be imported on mainstream. ⁷
Jaiku is like blog posts+Twitter stream+Flickr photos (hey, thats what my yahoo pipe is also!) . Here are differenceexplaining links.

Jaiku is more of who you are than what are you doing which is twitter..[..]Where Twitter has evolved into almost a chat room, Jaiku has evolved into a Lifestream.What’s the difference? Well what you chat about and ‘do’ is only part of the picture. There are also photos, bookmarks, blog posts, music selections and more - each of which are not found on your Twitter stream. In fact I have seen many argue that they should NEVER be found in Twitter. Twitter is for human updates about human things.
“

Blogging is like putting up stalls in an exhibition and speaking the mind blindfolded. Some people enter the room, listen to you and/or converse with you. Chatting is exactly like chatting over a cup of coffee. Orkut scrapping is like, peeking into neighbour’s house to see if he is there and to talk to him, if he isn’t there to leave a note. Emailing is posting a mail to someone. Twitter is somewhat a combination of some of these in the sense it allows multi way communication cum broadcasting plus more.⁸

My final take:
As with any social communication tool, this tends to be addictive, time wasting, interfering, distracting but again as with other services, its quite fun, could be put to use, great way to keep in touch, neat microblogging utility, an unbelievable good combination or orkut+sms+blog+digg, and if you follow me on twitter, I shall follow you
Right now I am twittering in vaccum, come join and hear me
And this is my jaiku lifestream.

Ps: Ah!, this is the length of posts that would do justice to Talkr ! But you can’t follow the links then. Lots of useful links there, let me know how many you clicked.

Footnotes:
[1] I always wondered why did they not plugin the blogs within orkut - either create a new one or to link to the existing blogpost, rest of the footnote grew enough to be a post!
[2] according to Feedburner ³ - which again I had an account long ago but never used it until Google announced to buy it over. Feedburner, I guess that time did not provide email alerts or something, due to which I used Feedster -which gave lot of options. Now feedburner lets me connect feedster for email alerts and after google buying it I thought I can remember one less uname/pwd and logged in now. Now this blog’s feed is redirected to Feedburner feed (via the plugin) and fed to you!! So there, all for you, my dear 31 readers . Now click that ad there or at least leave a comment for my this selfless act!
[3] I know there is some noise there, I should not have tried various feed services with my own feed. Now there is no way to delete it.
[4]Have you seen FlickrVision?
[5]also, as you know I am a huge fan of sms
[6] Inactiv in Karnataka gave such a service but one thing lacking is a web user interface
[7]there is twitku which integrates to look up to updates from both accounts.
[8]Who would have thought The Trueman Show could get real and practical ?

Recently Orkut has been doubling up as feed reader. But the real meat is getting scrap book updates through feeds. It might not make sense to some of you but for a feed junkie like me, it is super stuff¹ . I feel one of the prime differences between other leading Social Networking sites and orkut is the absense of Feed support in orkut. And no one has real clue why Google does not give as much as importance orkut deserved, from the beginning. It took a loooong time to be able to use Google login to orkut accounts and the no donut problem was a surprise when it came from Google!

Coming to the main topic, here is how you can get the rss feed of your orkut scrapbook. [via TechBuzz]

Use the URL given below, but replace {uid} with your Orkut user ID

http://www.indian-tv.com/orkut.php?uid={uid}

Your Orkut User ID can be obtained by logging into Orkut and clicking on the profile button on the left.

.
And here is how you can get Rss feed for the communities in orkut.

http://www.indian-tv.com/orkut.php?cmm={community id}

Super stuff, thanks dude !

1. Also orkut is blocked in office but reader isn’t:D [back]

Playing chess the virtual way.

More videos here. Bill Gates shows Surface. Official site with demos

More than the touch screen (which we had already seen earlier) what impressed me was the way the devices interact. Placing a credit card would enable to make payment from it, placing a camera would get those pictures, communicating with phones/music player - that was super cool.