Web

Web — View Comments
20
Jun 10

Free TV on the net – not anytime soon

I don’t have a TV. When my roommate and I got the Comcast broadband connection, we fell for the up-sell and got the basic cable connection assuming we’ll buy a cheap TV at some indeterminate point in the future. A year later, that hasn’t happened. Of course, after about six months of paying for the cable connection, but not using it, I made the mistake of calling Comcast customer service and tried to cancel it. I’ll need a PhD in cable TV rate plan economics to fully understand why, but it turned out that cancelling the cable connection would not change the total amount we would pay by even a single cent. So, I just gave up. With the World Cup going on, we’re finally getting something out of it.

I came across ESPN3 as I was trying to find out where I can watch the World Cup matches online. It works for someone who’s not obsessed with the game. When I started watching the games on ESPN3, I didn’t realize that it was accessible only because I had a cable connection from Comcast. Then I came across a post on NewTeeVee which explained the ESPN3 model. I went back to read a post by Bill Gurley that I had bookmarked on Instapaper but hadn’t got to (Instapaper is turning out to be another Google Reader. I can never keep up). It is a fantastic explanation of the economics of the TV business and why the vision of “free TV on the net” may never materialize. To summarize, the cable companies are the biggest customers of the content creators. The $32 billion of affiliate fees that cable companies shell out is what allows a lot of the content to be created in the first place and they are extremely wary of losing their customers to free online video. Their basic argument is – if the content creators don’t expect services like Hulu to pay any affiliate fees, why should they? This is why there are rumours of Hulu going behind a pay wall soon.

With the TV Everywhere initiative, which BusinessWeek has covered well, it looks like people will have to continue paying the cable companies irrespective of the device / connection from which they access video. I don’t mind paying somebody every month, but where is the innovation that the internet allows? Hopefully, Google and Apple can bring about the disruption that smaller players like Boxee and Roku haven’t been able to.

Web — View Comments
10
Sep 09

RSSCloud

We had a meetup on RSSCloud (organized by Nick) at the School of Information today. In a nutshell, RSSCloud is an effort to make the web real time. It has been in the news lately after WordPress added support for it. Dave Winer went through the details and Matt Mullenweg and team described their experience implementing it in WordPress. Unfortunately, I had to miss part of the meetup to attend a talk by Vinod Khosla, which was excellent. I’m sure I missed some interesting discussion around RSSCloud and PubSubHubbub (PuSH). I don’t see the end user losing in the contest for adoption. Both are open protocols and will only make the web better. Many services may just add support for both. Given how open Automattic / WordPress is, it wasn’t surprising to hear that there are plans for PuSH support at some point in the future. RSSCloud got there first because it was easier to implement.

I’ve wondered how hubs, in both protocols, handle updates when there are lots of subscribers (in the millions). The obvious answer is a job queue, and that’s what one of the PuSH implementations of the hub does (backed by RabbitMQ). I asked Joseph Scott, the WordPress developer who implemented the feature what they do for WP.com, and I believe it’s something similar. The WordPress plugin at this point just sequentially pings all subscribers. That should be sufficient for the vast majority of users. The interesting problem is how real time it would be when a hub has to update 10 million subscribers? Also, what is acceptable as real time? 1 second, 10 seconds, 1 minute? Interesting thought experiment, but I think that’s a problem to be solved when we get to it.

The best part of the day was that I finally met Doug Kaye in person at the meetup. He’s the father of podcasting if you’re not aware.

Politics / Web — View Comments
12
Feb 07

Presidential candidates on Flickr

America is at 70% internet penetration according to these stats. It looks like the presidential candidates are taking the internet really seriously this time, because they’re on Flickr and even have their own social networking application!

Barack Obama on Flickr. His social networking application.

John Edwards on Flickr.

From figures I’ve seen, India is at around 5-6% penetration. So, it looks like it will take atleast another decade for the internet to play any significant role in Indian politics.

India / Web — View Comments
2
Feb 07

Mint – New business newspaper and website

The Hindustan Times has launched a business paper called Mint. They have a website too. They’ve partnered with the Wall Street Journal and in typical fashion, reading a news article requires one to register (But hey, it’s free!). Bugmenot beckons…

That apart, what’s even more surprising is the perennial problem of invalid RSS feeds seems to have hit them from day one. There are zero links in the feeds, and so, they’re obviously invalid. I had posted earlier about NDTV’s works-today-not-tomorrow feeds. Do all the sites use the same sub-standard CMS or something?

I guess nobody there cares because they don’t get too much traffic from feeds. It’s just a cool thing to have. Hopefully, it’ll change once the feeds start driving serious traffic.

Among all the MSM news websites in India, IBNLive and DNA do a very good job in my opinion. They are head and shoulders above everybody else. DNA for their well designed, simple and very functional site and IBNLive for just getting what a good news site should really be. They’re integrated very well with the television counterpart CNN-IBN and their initiatives like providing streaming video and doing simple no-brainer things like putting up transcripts of TV interviews quickly on the site shows that they “get” what a good news site should really be like. And of course, the RSS feeds have always worked :) . So, to the people working on the DNA and IBNLive websites… nice work!

Update: I had to browse IBNLive in IE recently, and boy do they have a lot of ads! Just started appreciating AdBlock Plus and the Filterset much more.

Update (7th May, 2007): Mint has opened up the site now. Registration is no longer required to read the news articles. It’s good that they have realised the futility of asking people to register just to read the news.

Services / Web — View Comments
28
Jan 07

Unreliable Net Banking

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…

ICICI Error
This is a reproducible bug btw…

Blogs / Software / Web — View Comments
12
Dec 06

Auto comment close in WordPress

Comment spam is a huge problem on blogs, and plugins like Akismet and Spam Karma are available for WordPress to help cope with it. But many times the spam gets through even these filters and ends up in my inbox. The situation is so bad that the filters catch approximately 10K spam comments a month on this blog.

One way to prevent the spam is to disable comments on all the old posts. I looked around for a plugin which did this some time ago and couldn’t find one. I didn’t really feel like figuring out how to write a plugin, so I ended up adding a kludge in the code. Today, I came across a plugin which does exactly what I wanted. The code for the Auto Close Comments plugin is available at the codex. [Via]

India / Web / Yahoo! — View Comments
31
Oct 06

Cricket podcasts

Noticed a new podcast on Cricinfo today. I’m a sucker for discussions on cricket as long as the people doing the discussing know what they’re talking about. It’s anchored by Sanjay Manjrekar and the first show had Tony Greig and Ian Chappell discussing the ball tampering controversy. Quite interesting.. I was especially impressed with the production quality of the audio. I listened to a couple of the widely advertised Yahoo! podcasts with Sunil Gavaskar and was very disappointed. It came off as an artificial effort and the audio quality was horrendous.  If people want to do any serious podcasting, they need to check out the audio quality on the podcasts from ITConversations. I’ve had the inside view on the effort that is put in and the end result is always awesome.

I’m calling the Cricinfo show a podcast, but there’s no RSS feed!

Services / Software / Web — View Comments
13
Aug 06

Last.fm – It rocks

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.

Services / Web — View Comments
1
Jun 06

Share your OPML spammed?

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)
Share Your OPML
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.

India / Web — View Comments
26
Apr 06

Quite surprising….

…that NDTV.com, a leading news site can’t generate a valid RSS feed. It’s not that it’s temporarily broken. It’s been broken for months, maybe longer. I had even written to them pointing out the problems (yes, there’s more than one). Obviously, no reply. It is beyond me how anybody could provide an RSS feed without the link attribute.


Bad NDTV feed

In some feeds where the link is present, it’s completely broken. It’s seems to be some time bound thingy after which the link becomes invalid. It goes without saying that it doesn’t validate (as of today).
IBNLive recently changed their link format to make it more search engine friendly. After that change the links in the feeds were broken because of a small error. I wrote to inform them of the problem and it was fixed immediately. No reply in this case too, but atleast they fixed it. IBNLive seems to be paying more attention to their website at the moment and it’s showing…they’re kicking NDTV’s butt on the web.

Also very surprising that Yahoo! India News does not provide RSS feeds.

Science / Services / Web — View Comments
25
Mar 06

Computing cycles as a resource

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.

India / Services / Web — View Comments
8
Mar 06

Seventymm – Online movie rental service

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.

Stuff / Web — View Comments
21
Aug 05

In defence of tags

The creator of Bloglines, Mark Fletcher writes..

I was going to blog something about how tags are bad, evil horrible bad, and highlight the failure of existing search technology, but I couldn’t muster the energy. High level message: tags suck and are unnecessary except in cases where no other textual data exists (like photos, audio or video).

I’m a huge fan of Bloglines and really appreciate the convenience it provides, but this just sucks. I really hoped to see Bloglines implement a tagging system and now it’s pretty obvious that it won’t happen in the near future, or maybe never at all. From my point of view, tags are incredibly useful. Their use might highlight the failure of existing search technology, but right now, they serve the purpose.
Tags allow us to make use of the innate ability of the human mind to make connections where none might be obvious to the most sophisticated algorithms. They also extend a layer of personalization without much effort because it is the user who tags objects in a way that need not be clear to anybody else. I might give a link, blog post or photo a tag that nobody else can relate to, but holds a special meaning to me. For example, I might tag a friend’s blog post about the Himalayas as a place I’d like to visit, while someone else might interested in it from the perspective of a geologist and give it a tag to reflect that. Wouldn’t it be easier to get back to that post using tags rather than searching for it and then wading through the clutter? By using more than one tag the process becomes even easier.
If Bloglines had provided me with the ability to tag my posts, I wouldn’t have had to use del.icio.us to bookmark interesting blog posts. And by letting users tag posts they find useful, Bloglines could definitely improve their recommendation engine which doesn’t seem to work.

Software / Web — View Comments
5
Aug 05

A list of VoIP applications

With the price of bandwidth falling, internet telephony is becoming popular everywhere. Obviously, the most popular reason for this is the cost, or rather the lack of it. Text chat is inconvenient and voice chat is in. With a widely distributed family, cheap cost effective ways of communication are important to me. There are many applications which allow this. But, like I’ve learnt earlier, an open market is a luxury not present everywhere. When there is only one telephone service provider and it also happens to be the ISP, blockage of the use of certain software ensues. As part of the the eternal cat and mouse game that will never end, I have found many VoIP applications. Many of them are no longer usable by me (read blocked), some of them are, but only till they become popular enough. Then I’ll have to move onto the next one. Here are some of the applications that I’ve used or will be forced to use shortly.

There are bound to be more out there. Suggestions on other applications (the more obscure the better) and experiences are welcome.

Update: Few more

Personal / Web — View Comments
1
Aug 05

Site Blocked!

I love my country, and it’s not patriotism speaking. Right now, I just appreciate the freedom to access the internet I enjoy back home. This is the reason for my rant –


Site Blocked

Before you jump to conclusions, I was just trying to access Bugmenot.

Asides / Web — View Comments
29
Jul 05

10 Years That Changed the World

10 Years That Changed the World – The cover story of the August issue of Wired that chronicles the growth of the internet in the last ten years. An excellent read which shows why trying to predict anything about this phenomenon is so futile. One thing which stood out for me were the excesses of the boom days. For example, a company spent $10 million on a celebration, having raised venture capital about twice that amount. Not surprisingly they went bust pretty soon. Also, Yahoo! bought broadcast.com for $5.7 billion. Today, they redirect it to yahoo.com. Ouch!

Search / Web — View Comments
13
Jul 05

YubNub

The number of useful services that the internet has to offer these days is far too difficult to keep track of. YubNub is a nifty little tool which claims to be the command line for the web. It’s a site from where any number of services can be accessed. For example, the command gim india will perform a Google Image search for the term India, or login www.nytimes.com uses Bugmenot to provide a username and password. Other popular shortcuts that can be used are wp for Wikipedia searches, a for answers.com queries, am for amazon.com searches, and many many more. The best part is that anybody can create a command.
But, I see a huge potential for abuse if it becomes popular. People could easily start using it as a personal bookmark alias system for the sites they visit regularly. Maybe a better idea would be to let users create accounts and then create their personal commands, allowing addition of existing commands if they so wish. Then would be truly useful. Still, a great idea born out of a programming contest.

Cool / Web — View Comments
12
Jul 05

Wikipedia history animation

Recently Andy Baio of waxy.org, offered $50 for the best tool that animates Wikipedia history, i.e, a tool which seamlessly shows in real time, like a video, the changes that have shaped an article into its present form. With contributions the prize quickly became $250 and other goodies. All the participants used Greasemonkey to show their wizardry, and the results are simply amazing.
Wikipedia Animate was declared the winner and rightly so. Watching how an article grows using this tool is in essence watching what Wikipedia is all about. It’s very difficult to describe what it does, so I suggest you try it out for yourself.

Asides / Cool / Web — View Comments
1
Jul 05

del.icio.us direc.tor

del.icio.us direc.tor is an excellent alternative user interface to del.icio.us accounts. As all nifty web based UI hacks do these days, it uses AJAX. Desktop application like responsiveness in a browser window seems to have the potential to change the way we use computers. Not even considering the thin client/network OS argument, I can already notice how such applications are changing the way I use the internet, Gmail being the prime example. We have exciting times ahead of us!

Asides / Web — View Comments
22
Jun 05

Stumble Upon

Stumble Upon is a browser add-on that helps users find new sites on the internet. Based on topics of interest specified by the user during sign-up, a click of a button loads a random page. There are options to review sites or just specify if you like the site or not. Based on that input, over a period of time, Stumble Upon loads pages that the user will find interesting. I’ve been using the Firefox version. It’s a really nice tool and has turned up some real gems.

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