I had written about the online DVD rental service Seventymm last year and how I came away rather disappointed. In the year since, they’ve been periodically contacting me about their latest offers. I always told them to call me back when they had a better offer, i.e, without a deposit, registration fee etc. They finally have a new offer now which costs Rs 995 for 6 months and 4 movies a month. I’ve signed up and have been using the service for a couple of months now. Expectedly, there are good and bad aspects to the service.

First the good -

1. The convenience – The USP of Seventymm and similar services is that the movies are delivered and picked up from your home, and they’ve completely lived up to this. I just have to add movies to my queue on their site and call them up whenever I want a pickup/delivery.
2. Customer service - Whenever I request a delivery somebody drops by at the promised time. They’ve been very punctual about this in the 3-4 times I’ve had movies delivered. They once mistakenly delivered a VCD of a movie when I had requested a DVD, and when I pointed out the mistake, offered an extra delivery without any additional charges. On a related note, I recommend that you always call them and not use the SMS or web modes of requesting a pickup/delivery. On the phone, you can specify what you want exactly and that prevents mistakes.
3. They provide multiple ways for you to reach them, and though I haven’t tried it, you can ask them to deliver movies to your home or office.
4. There have been no issues with the quality of the DVDs. I was initially apprehensive about unusable, scratched discs, but that hasn’t been a problem. Perhaps because they’re still a new service?
5. They’ve taken care of some of the no-brainer things I had mentioned in my previous post, like providing RSS feeds of latest movies added, better search and discovery etc.

Now the bad -

1. Reliability - This is a serious problem. Their site just throws up an ugly error page very often. It’s pretty much impossible to browse the site for titles for any decent amount of time without encountering a big “Runtime Error” page. Time to ditch ASP and use some proven technology?
2. Size of collection – Pretty good blockbuster movie coverage, but not many niche movies. I guess this will improve with time.
3. Broken rating system – As you’re browsing the site, every movie has a rating below the cover image denoting what I think is the average rating of the movie by other Seventymm users. The same interface allows you to specify your rating of the movie too which is displayed next to the average rating, and I think they use this information in their recommendation system. The big problem here is that I see many of those little numbers next to the average ratings of movies that I haven’t even watched. Surely some bug. I don’t know how good their recommendation system is, but this bug will surely be messing up all their data.
4. Usability – Never a strength of Indian websites, Seventymm doesn’t do too well here too. A simple example is the movie queue. How do you re-order the list to change your delivery priority? There’s a text box next to each movie with the current position in the queue. If you want to change the order, you have to manually change the number in all the textboxes to make it reflect your choice, which is a big pain if you have many movies in your queue. How difficult is it to provide a simple drag and drop interface when there are multiple Javascript libraries which make adding the feature very simple?

But, at the end of the day Seventymm is a useful service to me. It’s literally impossible to watch a movie in Bangalore on weekends unless you’ve planned it well in advance, and I’m finally catching up on all the movies I’ve missed!

I just read a post on Web Worker Daily about how trustworthy the many sites we hand over our personal and important details like credit card numbers, bank account details etc. really are. That reminded me to check some transaction details in my ICICI Bank account. Here’s what I got…

I’ve been using Last.fm on and off for many months now. They recently released a new version of their client software which takes the service to a whole new level. This is the way internet radio should work. My usage of the service has shot up since I watched an Andrea Bocelli show on Star World recently. I’ve been listening to similar music since then, and found some wonderful artists I wouldn’t have known about otherwise.
Last.fm also includes a whole social aspect to it which I’m yet to explore. Also, it’s fun to see a list of the songs you’ve been listening to with all the stats of the most played artists, songs etc. They also have a recommendation feature based on collaborative filtering which lets you listen to a personalised channel.
The thing I like most about Last.fm is that it just works. Install the application and you can start listening to music immediately. You’re no longer subjected to the one complaint I have about traditional radio, the mostly intolerable RJs. But, the MP3 stream is encoded at 128 kbits/s. So, a sufficiently fast connection is required.
The only drawback is the lack of Indian music. Hopefully once the number of users from India increase, they’ll add that too.
I guess all music is going to be streamed in the future. Right now, traditional broadcast radio rules the airwaves because of a lack of connectivity at home and on the road. But, ubiquitous connectivity, wired or wireless, should really improve the experience of listening to music with services like Last.fm. The value of being connected never ceases to amaze me.

Links
History of Last.fm and more information at Wikipedia.
Pandora, a service similar to Last.fm
If you start using Last.fm, I’m here.

Share your OPML a fairly new project founded by Dave Winer is a nice aggregator of reading lists in the form of OPML files. Mike Arrington has some ideas on how this could be really useful. I dropped by today and unforunately caught it at a bad time… (click on the image for a larger version)

It has either been spammed or there’s a bug in the system. How much is that by the way? Eighteen thousand trillion?

In case it’s spam, it’s just another reminder of how big a problem spam can be on sites which depend on content from users.

Sun recently released its Grid compute utility to the public. It’s a service that allows people to access computing power through the internet for $1/CPU-hour. A comment on Slashdot asked if botnet operators could do something similar. The simple answer is that legitimate applications won’t find their way to computers taken over without the owner’s consent. But something else did cross my mind.
Recently, Sir Arthur C. Clarke sent an e-mail to all members of the SETI@home project asking for donations in light of reduced sponsorship. The e-mail also provided some very interesting statistics..

We want you to know we appreciate your efforts and the efforts of the other 5.4 million volunteers who have donated over 2.4 million years of processing time.

Since then the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing or BOINC has been developed to give volunteers the option of sharing processing power with other projects. That is, a platform which enables different projects to share the processing power of 5.4 million volunteers is now available. Even if the BOINC project asked all volunteers to mandatorily allow 10% of their processing power to be used by commercial or amateur projects which paid for the service, they should be able to raise enough money to fund the project. I’m sure the volunteers won’t mind.
Hope there aren’t any laws which prevent raising money that way. I’m sure many companies, especially in the media space will need a lot of processing power. Riya, the photo sharing site say they have already pushed a lot of the computing to the desktop application, but with growth of broadband, the number of companies which need to do some serious number crunching will only grow.
Also, it’s very interesting to see how the basic resources like computing and storage space are now utilities on the web.

It’s almost impossible to watch a movie on a weekend in Bangalore unless one has booked the ticket well in advance. Renting movies from the neighbourhood rental shop is almost useless. It’s obvious that they haven’t grasped the concept of a DVD (Just like VCD, but with four movies on one disc!). So, I was happy to read that a new online rental service, Seventymm has started operating in Bangalore. I’ve read a lot about Netflix and was hoping someone would start such a service here. The entire idea is very appealing and sounds convenient. But, once I actually signed up for an account on their site, I’ve decided not to pay for Seventymm’s service and complete the transaction. Here’s why…

• Our “no late fees, no due dates” online movie rental model eliminates the hassles involved in choosing, renting and returning movies… says their site. All the messages on the site indicate that you can keep the movie for as long as you wish, but the real deal is hidden in the Terms of Service. Provided you continue to be a paying subscriber of our service, you may keep the DVD/VCDs delivered to you as long as you like but up to a maximum of two weeks. You will not be charged any late fees as long as you return it within two weeks. As long as you like, but not more than two weeks. What does that mean? Why try to hide stuff unnecessarily from your customers? They’ve now lost my trust, but there’s more…
• The prices are advertised all over the site as Rs. 199 and Rs. 549 for the two plans that they offer. The Rs. 199 plan offers four movies a month and I figured that would be enough. But, after filling the forms and giving them all my personal information, when it’s time to pay, I’m told that I now have to pay Rs. 199 as the subscription fee, Rs. 499 as a registration fee and Rs. 2000 as a refundable security deposit. Are you kidding me? Why wasn’t I told this earlier…before I went to the trouble of registering?

Though I won’t be subscribing to their service, here are a few suggestions to improve it. They are very new and may be working on some of them, but still…

• There is absolutely no way to help the user choose a movie apart from the genre information. It’s a chore on the user’s part to find something that he may like. Syndicate content from sites like MetaCritic and Rotten Tomatoes to let the users know which movies are actually good.
• Add a feedback mechanism where users can rate and comment on the movies they’ve watched.
• Allow users to suggest movies to friends.
• Get a better search engine. It sucks right now.
• Provide a list of the newest movies added to your collection.

There are many such features that can be added to make the user experience much better. I’ve never used Netflix, but it surely provides all of the above features, and considering that a co-founder of Netflix is an advisor, they should find their into Seventymm soon. Maybe the offer will then be more attractive.

Update (March 14th): It looks like they’ve got some feedback about the issues I raised. Now the Terms of Service says Provided you continue to be a paying subscriber of our service, you may keep the DVD/VCDs delivered to you as long as you like. The two week clause has been removed.
Also, the pricing details page clearly mentions the registration fee and refundable deposit. It’s good that they are listening to feedback.

When Google launched their weather update service, I had wondered why they chose Wunderground which was restricted to the US. I was wrong about Wunderground being a US only service, which makes Google’s choice of not providing updates for all countries all the more puzzling. The point of this post is that I now know why they chose Wunderground over the more popular Weather Channel.
Larry Page recently spoke to the graduating class of the University of Michigan and a student recorded the talk (Slashdotted here). I finally got around to listening to that speech and Larry Page mentions how his friend Alan Steremberg, the co-founder of Wunderground and he “basically downloaded the whole web” and did other cool stuff. So, there was no other choice really!

Another useless bit of trivia filed away…

After denying for long that they have any interest in becoming a portal like Yahoo!, it looks like Google has taken it’s first step towards becoming one with it’s new Personalize your homepage project.

In a fashion similar to the personalization of Google News, users can now add news, quotes, posts from Slashdot, mail from Gmail etc. to the homepage below the search box. The drag and drop rearrangement is cool, but, I really don’t see any value in having all that stuff below the search box.
It’s much simpler to get that kind of information through an aggregator like Bloglines. But, most people don’t use aggregators and Google is definitely targeting them with this service, and, of course to get people to register with them to catch up with Yahoo! and Microsoft on that front.

On an unrelated note, here’s an over the top theory of what Google might be planning for the future.

This really cool Java based bandwidth speed test shows both upload and download speeds of a connection. The graphic is updated in real time, ending up at the speed on an increasing graph showing the different kinds of connections.
(via jkOnTheRun)

I’ve been trying out Google’s new Search History feature and find it pretty unusable at the moment. Traditionally Google has been excellent when it comes to user friendliness and attention to detail. But, this new feature breaks that trend. Search History saves both the users search request, and all the outgoing clicks from the results page. My gripe is that the design is towards, on login to the Google account, saving all searches and visited pages. Given the number of searches performed by the average user and the number of pages visited from each results page, the search history feature quickly becomes useless. With four out of five searches and almost 75 percent of referrals to websites happening through Google, I’m sure the search history of users will be overflowing pretty soon. It’s more useful when that odd important search or well crafted query needs to be saved for later retrieval.

A pause option is provided to stop the addition of pages to the history, but, if that is used, it requires a repeat search after enabling it to add the search to the history. So, it would have been better had the design facilitated easier adding of searches after it has been performed. What I have found after using Filangy for a while is that, I seldom need to search through my history. What will be more useful is the ability to selectively add searches than the ability to selectively remove them.

This service is at present similar to what Filangy offers and, as I noted earlier, it was bound to happen. Google isn’t the first to offer such a service though, A9 and AskJeeves already do.

Just used this new service called VoipBuster. Seems to be yet another VoIP service, but, the one difference is that it allows calling landline numbers for free. Right now the free calls are available only to a few popular destinations. I had to try this out and so, downloaded the app and called my brother (landline number) in the US. He was out. Then I noticed that the format of his mobile phone number was the same as the land line number, tried it, and surprisingly it worked. The voice quality was pretty good, considering that my internet connection is only 128 Kbps. So now I’m mailing all my friends in the US asking them for their phone numbers
I don’t know how VoipBuster stacks up against Skype, as I’ve never tried calling PSTN or mobile networks. Hope popularity won’t become a thorn in it’s side like it did for Skype.
Thanks to NevOn for the info.

Update – VoipBuster is not accepting any new users.

As we are currently in BETA stage of developing this new and exciting product, we opt to continue our test runs with our existing BETA usergroup for the next couple of months. Consider yourselves the happy few.

Time to rethink the free calls offer.

Update 2 – VoipBuster is back, but with new restrictions.

Here is a really cool use of the online photo sharing service Flickr. Enter any word and have it displayed as randomly picked photos. A number of innovative uses of the vast collection of photos on Flickr are popping up these days. Amaztype is another.
No wonder Yahoo! recently bought it.

Update – There are many more user created Flickr hacks. Find a list of them at The Great Flickr Tools Collection.

Tags – flickr, yahoo

Google has added weather forecasts to their growing list of services. The weird thing is, it’s only available for US locations. Google Maps being US only is understandable. But, weather information from all around the world is already available on The Weather Channel. I wonder why they chose Wunderground, which is a US only service, as their source. Maybe it’s because they’re pitching it as a way to get weather info through the phone too (SMS), which isn’t available elsewhere. Still, a web only forecast shouldn’t have been a problem for other locations. As far as I know, The Weather Channel doesn’t charge anything for the data, as many browsers make use of extensions and sidebars which pull in data from there.

Tags – google, weather

In the already overcrowded search engine space, Filangy is a new player which offers ‘personalized search’. What this means is that, apart from the plain old web search, Filangy also allows users to search through only the pages they have viewed. This is done with the help of a browser toolbar. Such a feature appealed to me immediately and I had to try it out as soon as I read about it. But, as of now it’s only available by invitation. Maybe they are hoping that a Gmail type viral marketing effort through invitations will bring in more users in the long run. Anyway, I gave them my e-mail address, and got an invitation after some time. I’ve been using it for a few weeks now, and, I have to say it’s pretty handy.

The toolbars are available for both IE and Firefox. As Maxthon isn’t supported, I’ve been trying it out on Firefox. Once the toolbar (extension in the case of Firefox) has been installed, it has to be authorised, so that the username is mapped to the toolbar. As I browse, the toolbar looks at the URL and sends it to Filangy. If at some point of time I want to go back and look at something again, then all I have to do is enter my search term in the toolbar and that’s it. When the search is through the toolbar, Filangy does a normal web search by default. A direct ‘WebCache’ search requires some extra mouse clicks. Not a big deal. The results tell me exactly which pages I had browsed through had the term I’m searching for. One irritant is that the time taken for the pages I’ve visited to be reflected in my searches is totally unpredictable. The pages would have already been indexed, and assigning the content of those pages to my account shouldn’t take too long. But, Filangy is a Nutch based search engine and it must still be undergoing a lot of development and tweaking. If the pages I visit are available to be searched in a few minutes at the most, every time, it would be great. WebMarks is another useful feature that allows users to bookmark any page when they are browsing. All those bookmarks can be accessed from anywhere later.

Privacy is obviously a big concern with such a service and Filangy seems to have taken all precautions in this regard. There is alway a risk involved in shared computers though. The pages browsed by all users could be indexed and searched through later. But, this can be prevented by using the option to pause indexing for a specified period of time. Also, only the total number of indexed pages can be seen and there is no way to look at a list of all the indexed URL’s.

Although this a useful service at present which caters to a niche, I feel Filangy in its present avatar will find it difficult to find many users. That’s because Google desktop search is all that is needed to provide the same functionality, i.e, searching through visited pages. And, del.icio.us does a much better job than ‘WebMarks’ as a online bookmark manager. The only thing going for them right now is that users can access a history of pages that they have visited from any computer. Google could easily do something similar with their toolbar, and if it is integrated with Gmail and their desktop search, well, that’ll be bye, bye Filangy. But, to be fair to them, it is still in very early stages of development and more features are bound to be added soon.

Tags – filangy, search