Dear Google, Take from Facebook what you have build over the years - the web

Me, Myself and My Google

I remember the first time I was plugged to internet back in 1997. I created my email id. It was on rediff.com. Then I surfed some porn sites. Then I saw yahoo.com. Almost everyone I knew was on rediff. Very soon, almost everyone was on Yahoo. And the most exciting thing to do was to do private and public chats on Yahoo Messenger. Then came the days when Yahoo chatrooms started to flood with nonsense messages, porn websites became popup machines and soon the internet became a wide wide shit. Those were the days when suddenly everything (I used) across the internet became too obstructive, complex and confusing.

In the midst of all those came google.com. A neat and clean interface for searching the web, which was perhaps the biggest problem at that time. Google took the challenge to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. And they did a great job with their search engine. People started liking google and used Yahoo, Rediff and MSN for their emails. Then came gmail.com and suddenly out of nowhere everyone had a gmail.com account. It was again neat and clean. And then again, all of a sudden, the voice chats, buzzes, beautiful big smileys, public chatrooms, multiple screen names, erotic talks on Yahoo chat came to and end simple non rich text formatted, non fancy UIed chat windows. Somehow people liked it. Probably they were bored of all the glittering stuff, or maybe some principle of UX design came into play. Ever since, Google became a part of everyone's life with products like Docs, PicasaWeb, Blogger, News, Scholar, Books, Knol and many more. People had faith in Google, their ideas and their values. Off lately there are various slanders on Google about the way they use data to create relevant text ads, but despite all these, a vast majority of people still love Google.

What The Facebook?

Social Networking was something that was not so popular in India. Not in 2004, the year I went for my Bachelors in Engineering, the year Facebook was founded and the year Orkut was founded. Sooner, everyone I knew was on Orkut and it was kinda fun. We used to meet up, post scraps to each others, and had communities where we discussed the C++ puzzles. Life was easy and fun. This probably continued till early 2008s (in India) when people were not accepting facebook because they found it too complex to use. Probably people just could not visualize what is "writing on wall". And then facebook kept evolving, changing its UX to make it more resemble the real world interactions. That is where Orkut was left behind. Orkut was good for novice users who expected barely scraps and messages and communities for interactions. But as it goes in the real world, you appreciate, like, comment on your friends' activities. All of a sudden, all this was possible on Facebook. One other problem with Orkut was of privacy. I remember there were communities where pictures of real girls from their profile was hotlinked and posted. This obviously irritated a lot of people and they started to remove their content from Orkut. Almost at the same time, as I precisely remember, the Indian community was starting to look towards facebook because it was social, it was fun and it was secure. Orkut was still being used by those who were new to social networking and then they gradually graduated to use facebook.

Soon, everyone I knew was on facebook, even my mom, my dad and my 8 year old cousin. Life became easy. Google released OpenSocial in late 2007 and people started to develop games and apps for Orkut. It could have been a big hit if people had been using Orkut or they had interest. Orkut failed to attract new users and even continue old users. Orkut started to die, and pictures of Orkut - R.I.P became popular on the internet.

You like it

Sure you will ask me, what's the big deal with that. Google is in search and ads, and facebook is in social networking. Facebook already beat Google's Orkut, so do they still compete? The answer is - more now than ever.

Sometimes in last year or maybe last to last year "Like Button" was introduced, and very soon every webpage on the planet started to have a "Like This" button. (Even this page has one, please like/recommend it. Thank you :-) The concept is pretty neat. Your friends see that you like/recommend Bellicose beliefs, and they will probably come and read what is it. If they "like" it, it goes on virally. Alternatively, if you come to Bellicose Beliefs two years later and you see that one of your friends like it, you will be more interested in reading the content. This is a win win situation for the web admins/ bloggers/ any other website and probably that is the reason for it becoming so popular, so soon. Now looking at the other aspect, facebook has a record of all the pages you like and your friends like and their friends like. So, they are more close to figuring out your taste, your work, your life and provide you better ads/recommendations. Everything tailored, just for you.

Now let's see how google tracks internet usage - "Ads by Google". Most of the ads you see over the internet are served by Google's Ad server. Every ad stores a cookie onto your PC and this helps track the click, the content. All this is done on a very broad scale and the results are generated so that they are fit for a majority of people who fall under the same category. This is where difference sneaks in. Google does not track individuals, it just track the pattern formed by many users and uses that pattern to server ads, which might not be suited for you, but are suited for a majority of population. It works.

What's the need for a search engine?

Probably you've started to notice it. Every single link you share, every single web content you "like/recommend" comes in your facebook search box. So, if you are looking for something that you probably have liked in past, just go to search box and start typing it's name. You will see it coming there as in the diagram below.

For more details, you can go to "Show All results" and alongwith the things that are related to facebook, you see results from Bing (which as per Google, copies their search result). If this continues to grow, fewer and fewer people will go to Google for searching something, and that will be done only when facebook fails to deliver. So the search for which Google is known, shall be taken by facebook and Google will get only facebook's leftovers.

Does facebook pose a serious threat to Google's main source of revenue?

In order to understand this, we first need to figure out what is Google's main source of revenue. Google's main source of revenue is Adwords which accounted for USD 23b in 2009 (http://investor.google.com/fin_data.html).

Facebook's revenues for 2009 were as

1. $125 million from brand ads
2. $150 million from Facebook's ad deal with Microsoft
3. $75 million from virtual goods
4. $200 million from self-service ads. (http://www.businessinsider.com/breaking-down-facebooks-revenues-2009-7)

This total amounts to USD 550m or USD 0.55b. Facebook's total revenue in 2009 is 46 times smaller than the revenue of Google Adwords.'Looking at this figure it is clear that Facebook is not posing a serious threat to Google's revenue.
Now here is the present scenario. Facebook Like Button on various sites, Facebook places, Facebook questions - Facebook knows which content you like/read, where you visit and what are your doubts. Using this data, Facebook can possibly come up with an Ad Sever that has if not more, equal powers as the Google Ad Servers. If they come up with this, and you start seeing "Ads by Facebook" instead of "Ads by Google", then the war will get more interesting.

The social web - by Google

In this particular text, I will try to figure out, how the web could be more social with the help of Google. Google already has, and in much better form what facebook is offering - social interaction, videos, emails, news, web search but in separated forms. Things are are at different URLs and one must remember/click/bookmark each location. Let's say Google comes up with a social web - a portal that is sufficient for all your needs and is social, I would call it GoSocial. It would be a mashup of Google Search, Gmail, Buzz, Picasaweb, Docs, Music Search, YouTube, Blogger, Knol, Groups, Latitude and Maps. So you can upload pictures which will be stored in your picasaweb albums. You can blog and your blogsppot.com address shall be linked to your GoSocial account. You can upload videos on GoSocial and they will be stored and served by YouTube. You can create documents and share them with Google Docs running in the backend. You can interact with groups and can create questions and answers with the Google Groups engine in background. You can create community pages with the help of Knol. You can use Latitude to implement a feature similar to facebook places, even better in some aspects. Maybe, I need to think more so that I can come up with a possible layout of this social web. But this is my general idea. I am a die hard Google fan. Everytime I visit their numerous services, I can picture different modules of a system which is highly social, real time and most important of all is not evil, lying around. In my personal opinion it's time to come up with a version of web, which is more social and Google, you can do it.

Over the decade, Google has helped build the web, make it safe, clean and present the data in an organized manner to all the inhabitants on the planet. Why let someone else harness it when it essentially belongs to its creator.

There are many more things in my mind to write about, so keep watching for a second part of this post

Exporting multiple photoshop images in JPG

There are cases when we have multiple photoshop images (.PSD) images and we want to export them/ save them as JPG format, possibly even resize it. So, the best way out is to use Picasa Software (http://http://picasa.google.com/)available for Windows, Linux and Mac. It automatically detects all images on your Hard Drive (even photoshop images in PSD format). Now you just need to select the album (folder) containing the PSD files, and click on "Export" at the bottom. This export will provide you options like resize and picture quality and many others. After selecting them, just click on "Export" and that's it. ou have saved multiple PSD files in JPEG format in one go, using Picasa :-)

Don't forget to comment, if you liked it.

A better feed reader

Most of the feed readers - web based, desktop based are more or less similar in their approach. You subscribe to a feed, and they will display all new (or non read) items. It is good. Now this is what a feed reader should do. Some feed readers (like Google reader) go beyond this and allow you to share your favorite feeds with your friends.What more does anyone needs?

Well, there are many more ways in which a feed reader can be enhanced. I wil be talking about the one that i find most useful.

Everything is not important

I am a feed junkie. I go to any website, and if i find anything interesting, i immediately subscribe to its feed. Months later, i realise that not all posts from that website is what i actually am interested in. Let's take a scenario.Most people are subscribed to Slashdot or LifeHacker or Reddit. I am particularly interested in Programming and Technology. And specifically in Python, C++, WebApps. But what i am getting in my feeds is everything from FORTRAN to JAVA and from Microprocessors to launch of new space craft. This is useless information for me, and what i will be doing probably is - select all, mark as read. If i dont get a chance to read my feeds for a day or two, i will easilt have 1000+ posts and when bulk mark as read, i am probably going to miss out things that might be important for me.

Overcoming the situation

In my opinion, there is only one way to overcome the situation. Get the specific posts from the feeds, in which the reader is interested. So, if i am interested in Python and C++, i will be able to see and read only those feeds that have relevent information about Python and C++.
Again, there are two approaches to make this possible.

Approach 1) Let the reader speak for himself.

When a user is subscribing a new feed say "Programming", suggest him - This is a very broad category. Would you like something in particular, say C++ or Python? If he says yes, go ahead and keep this thing in memory.

Aproach 2) Find out yourself.

In this approach, the user is initially presented with all the posts corresponding to a feed. A track record is kept for the feeds that the user has actually read and for those feeds for which he has just "marked as read". Based on these data over a span of time, the system will be generating a set of keywords, which describe a range of interests for one particular user.

One or both of the above approaches can be used. What matters is that the set of keywords for the range of user's interests in posts should be accurate. This is never guaranteed to be comprehensive, but should be somewhat near to it.

Now things are quite simple. We have the feed, we have the list of posts, and we have the user's interest. For every post in the feed, scan it. See if it contains things that might interest user. Show him only those posts, that he is interested in. If the system is uncertain about a post, that can be under the "posts you might be interested in" section of the feed reader.

If implemented in this manner, i believe that feed readers can be more popular and good than the present ones.

If any engineer who is working on some feed reader is reading this post, and might consider it for their next release, i would be happy if they could contact me and say "Thanks" :-)

Make this world a better place.

Getting Started with AppEngine - Pune GTUG

The Pune Google Technology User's Group (Join Pune-GTUG) will be holding a session on Getting Started with Google AppEngine. The details are as under :

• Date :: May 16th, 2009


• Time :: 1600 hrs - 1730 hrs (India Time Zone)


• Venue :: Dnyanvatsal Commercial Complex
  Survey No. 23, Plot No. 189,
  Karve Nagar,
  Pune, India 411052 (Map)

Speaker :: Pranav Prakash (me ;-)

Agenda Topics ::

1. Little talk about Cloud Computing


2. Getting Started with Google App Engine Python


3. Live Examples on Google App Engine


4. Question and Answer


5. Introduction to Google App Engine Java (if time permits)

If you are in Pune, and interested to learn about developing scalable web apps in Google Appengine, then you should attend this talk.

See you there.

Google preventing automated searches

It looks like there has been an increase in the number of automated searches being performed over google. And they are not happy with it.

What i was fascinated with is the google calculator. I has just started to write a script in Python for calculation related things and what i could get is that there are now less ways to do automated search over Google.


Let's have a look at how Google prevents automated searches.

If we open http://www.google.com and do a search for "35 mm in inches", what we obtain is the result. A close look at the URL pattern gives the following information.

• The new search pattern of google is

  http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=5+mm+in+inches&btnG=Google+Search&aq=0&oq=5+mm+in+in&fp=CGM4k02K5DI

  . The use of anchor tag (#hl) is interesting.
  Another interesting thing is that there are two parameteres on which the same search keyword is being fired - q and oq.
  The q is the actual query that is used to fetch the result and oq is the query that you typed. The following image makes this even more clear.
  
  


• Another interesting thing is that if we try to open the same page via Python's URLLIB2 interface, we get the google home page.
  


• Apart from that, the most famous URL pattern for any search
  

  http://www.google.com/search?q=google+search

  
  gives a 403 - Forbidden, when tried to access via Python's urllib2 interface.
  

So, it looks like Google is narrowing the way people perform automated search on its engine.

In the next couple of days, i will be trying to find out if there is still some holes left, or not and will discuss my findings here in a more elaborate manner. You could very well, follow my blog to make sure you don't miss anything. Comments most welcome.

YaWa - AppEngine Library to automate models behaviour

When it comes to my qualification, i am a software engineer. When it comes to my work, i deal with only webapps. And when it comes to web app, it comes to data exchange - between the system and the user. Hell lot of data exchange. Most of it is in the form of "forms". There is a form wherein user inputs some value to the system. The system the processes the request and gives the response. A major share of these requests and response are based on some tables, or the DataStore entity as AppEngine calls it.
I had been working on a way to abstract these interactions. So that the forms could be generated magically. These forms are not just plain DjanoForms, rather highly interactive forms, which has the ability to perform all the basic actions - create new record, edit an existing record, delete an existing record and search a record. And now i have with me - YaWa.
YaWa stands for Yet Another Widget fro Appengine. It is a library that can be imported in your appengine applications and helps you abstract the process of human-system interaction.

What does YaWa consists of.

In plain terms, yawa consists of a couple of python modules and a couple of templates. That's it. There won't be much need to modify the core files, until you want some feature that is not provided. The templates are the eye-candy. They are responsible for the look and feel of the forms. You may modify these templates in order to suit your needs.

How to use YaWa

In order to use YaWa, all you have to do is to prepare a list of Models that you want to work with, a list of those properties you want to exclude. Now the core module of YaWa, called bond, will feed on these lists and based on the templates, will generate UI elements.

Project code and live demo

The project is hosted at http://yaw-appengine.googlecode.com. A live demo can be taken at http://pran.appspot.com.

Suggestions and issue reporting

Report any suggestions, feature requests or issues here.

Cuil vs Google - the battle grows stronger

Just a few hours ago, Cuil was launched, and it has already created a fuss in the market. I just saw the reports on Techcrunch about the arrival of Cuil, and i decided to have some of my own observation.

Privacy

Cuil says that "We do not keep logs of our users’ search activity.". Well, this is something i loved. I don't want the Magic-Mirror-On-The-wall to keep remembering all of my search information. That might be useful for Engineers over the Googleplex, but from my point of view, i certainly don't feel benefited from it.

Cookies

Every website uses cookies to store relevant information about visitors. What differentiates them, is in the way they consider which information is "relevant". Cuil is concerned, with only the safe search and typing suggestions. While google is more interested in my time, date of use, and also stores cookies to last till the year 2032 (may be i am wrong, i don;t remember it exactly, but it is in this range only).

Search Results

While Google uses the right sidebar for ads, Cuil uses it to further refine the search, on various basis. I looked for India, and found a beautiful page. While a google search for same, is often a bit boring.

UI

The UI of cuil is much better and easy to explore than that of Google. It offers top tabs also, alongwith a sliding sidebar.


Well, i use Google Service to post this blog, and another Google service to upload images over here, but we are talking about SEARCH here.

I think, Cuil is going to be a tough competitior of Google.

Funniest Google pic

Today morning, i was viewing a website, that did not changed it's URL for the search results. I mean if you view the first search result page, or the last the URL was the same. I was a bit uncomfortable, and tried to see the Google's URL for search results. And it changes accordingly.
However, i did some changes in the URL and i got this funny pic. The fact that makes this pic funnier is the Google logo at the bottom. The O is misplaced, and hangs at the bottom.
How can this happen. We all know there is a relation between the result page and the number and style of O that appears in the Gooooogle, but having an O dropped out from the name is quite funny.
All i did was to change the start parameter to 10,000. And then i got a message saying that ,"Sorry, Google does not serve more than 1,000 results for any query. You asked for results starting from 1,000,000.". It means the designer had probably expected this kind of query, and hence this error message.
Now i tried to play a bit more, i changed the start parameter to a negative value say -99 and i got the search page 1, for that. Even i changed it to alphabetic value and the start page was visible. So, they are doing a validation for these values, then why leave behind the values greater than 1,000. And even more, leaving apart the O :-)

Have a look yourself and enjoy.


Here is a better and enlarged view of the image.

More of orkut into google search result

Google added orkut profile links to it's search results quite a long time back. But now, it seems to go one step further, by improving it and adding the mutual friend, and possible friends if you search for an organization.

Here is a screenshot taken from my account. I just searched for my organization name, and i got new friends out here. And yes, frankly, i did not knew them :-)

Kool enough.

However, interesting fact is that these results were shown only when i used the Google India and not when i tried these searches on Google.com. So, it can be said that these searches are terrority specific. They know that Orkut is the leading social networking website in countries like India and Brazil, and hence the results. Too accurate to miss.




The result of integration of orkut into google search is getting day by day. Hope one day, we will be able to find Kumbh ke bichde hue bhai over google :-)

Google adds orkut profile in search results

Finally, the Google search does result in orkut profile information. This setting has been present in Orkut settings tab, since long time. But no result was displayed in the Google search. However, recently Google has added the Orkut profile URL as a result in search.
This makes sure that in order to view the profile you must have a orkut profile and the privacy settings of the owner are appreciated.
Currently only SandBox profiles are listed, but very soon, the normal profiles will also be listed.


As you can see above, this is the google search results for the keyword Pranav Prakash. In the last result is my sandbox orkut profile.



Similarly, this is the google search results for the keyword Aakash Bapna. In the last result is sandbox orkut profile.