String theory

IBN Live quotes Extreme Tech, a technology website, as saying:

The innovative doodle that Google put up for the country and jazz guitarist, songwriter and inventor Les Paul resulted in $268 million in lost productivity.

The calculations are basically a house of cards made of slabs of back-of-the-envelope calculations built on a foundation of assumptions. Still, even if I ignore the number or method, the exercise annoys me. Consider the positives:

• Several million+ people, who may not have heard of the pioneer Les Paul, now know who he was.
• Instead of muddling 5 minutes on Facebook or Powerpoint or thinking about what they'd do after work, they spent time with a new toy, and some of their neurons (especially on the right hand side of the brain) welcomed the change.
• They marveled at the current state of web technology and some of them resolved that day to learn to build such cool things.
• By listening to what others had done with the audio-doodle, they figured out that great music can be made even from humble instruments. Some dusted off their old guitars and others made appointments with musically-inclined friends and teachers.

I wouldn't know how to calculate it, but I guess that whatever the loss to numerical productivity and annoyance to neighbours, the contribution to human knowledge and creativity was firmly in the black.

And if you want to pluck a few strings again, here you go.

A Google a Day

A Google a Day is a new trivia game by Google. Apart from the fact that is neatly designed and fun to play, I'm guessing it helps Google collect data about how people would use web search to answer questions.

I've always thought search engines and Q&A sites (this seems to be where the action is these days) could harness the power of quizzing. Google seems to have designed the whole process nicely. Judging by how they have taken the pains to make these questions relative un-google-able via answers to these exact questions elsewhere by people trying to solve them, a lot of thought has gone into the design.

As someone who runs a daily quiz blog himself (and has a similar in-built "show answer" design), I wonder how easily the scalability-conscious Google generates these questions. The questions seem to have a human hand in them, judging by the framing.

There's always place for one more daily quiz site, I guess :-)

Facebook's new messages system

I've always wondered why, in the age of online handles and content-based routing and web identities, do we still need to have 8+ digit numbers for phones. Since it's painful to remember more than a handful of these numbers, we end up giving them useful aliases on our mobile devices or address books. Instead, why can't we simply have something like a "name telecom provider" interface?

Which is why I was intrigued to see that very same point being made in Facebook's announcement of its Facebook Messages revamp. It's very clever, it's very social, and it is likely to take Facebook to people who didn't care to be part of that ecosystem. When GMail brought in a fresh look at e-mail, it was typically Google: fast, usable, but geeky (tags instead of folders, email classification, attachment reminders). This, in comparison, is social-like-hell (for us not-so-social types) - separate inboxes for friends vs others (v. simple - why didn't others implement this?), the promise of replaying your interactions with a person over a lifetime, and convergence of email/IM/sms.

The announcement also suggests that they spoke to high-schoolers to understand what they thought about messaging, which is interesting. So Twitter is for the 30+ crowd and the hare-brained-celebs, GMail for those who discovered Google in their twenties, but FB will evolve with teens.

I don't use FB very much, but it looks like it's just arrived on my online doorstep. Especially if this is the vision:

Relatively soon, we'll probably all stop using arbitrary ten digit numbers and bizarre sequences of characters to contact each other. We will just select friends by name and be able to share with them instantly. We aren't there yet, but the changes today are a small first step.

Zuckerberg's Social Network keeps getting wider.

(just a bunch of thoughts that struck me when I read the announcement)

A quizzing use case for Google Wave?

Got on to the surf board and lined up at the edge of the ocean, but not quite sure what to do - seems like a common Google Wave experience for people I know. Perhaps there's one thing we could do - remote quizzing.

It's never been easy to do a live/interactive quiz for people scattered across various locations. Setting up tele-conferences is not an option, which left conferencing on IM, never a stable and pleasant experience. Wave could well be the answer.

With a group of well-behaved participants (how hard will that be to find at a quiz :-)), a moderator should be able to conduct a quiz with people taking turns to answer. Media files can easily be shared, whether on Wave or elsewhere. Wave seems a natural environment to collaborate like this.

G'mla kaa H'mla

Google's April Fool jokes can sometimes try too hard and end up tired, but this year's effort from Google Australia is quite clever and culturally relevant. G'd on you, lads.

Google Spam back to Alpha?

Google Spam back to Alpha?

I'm not sure why this is happening, but each day, more than a handful of annoyingly mundane filth remains untouched in my GMail Inbox. Instead of being shown the backdoor (as salesmen traditionally are), they're punching the front doorbell or squashed against the French windows.

My limited searching on the subject did not reveal any recent upsurge in complaints from netizens, so I wonder why I have so much false negatives each day. Unless the Google machine learners are having a summer vacation. Till then, I try to find solace in odes to spam (1 - All You Need Is Spam, 2 - Don't Be Inadequate Anymore).

And to make this post utterly worthless, here's a little riddle:

Q. Why is the song "dhak dhak karne lagaa" similar to most Google products?

A. Because it's a Beta version.

TiS a little pfunny. That's all

Was expecting something like this, naturally. But not so clever, compared to previous efforts. Probably the best line was the last sentence in the FAQs:

Why is TiSP in beta?
When things go wrong with TiSP, they go very, very wrong. Let's leave it at that.