Ideas, Rule

Alright I am not going to write a comparison report on these three browsers. Just something I noticed today and jumped out of joy. Now this is what I call innovation and user experience.

In Firefox I typed in Seth Godin. It directly took me to sethgodin.typepad.com (mind you I don’t have a bookmark for this site)

Next I typed in Russian Vodka NYC. It took me to nymag and on the Russian Voda bar page. Amazing!

Try going similar things in other browsers. Chrome will take you to the google query page — WTF!!! Aren’t you suppose to be the rulers of the search world and user experience!

At last IE, I didn’t even try because I know what it might do — PAGE NOT FOUND

One thing which is truely part of every Infosys employee is the INFOSYS BULLETIN BOARD (or BB as it is called). During my stay with Infosys, Bangalore, I did not visit the Bulletin Board often, but heard quite many things and discussions on the same.

Be it technology, social talks, queries, buy/ sell — it had it all and straight from the heart (well brains too)

I had an idea then, and created a presentation below. I had sent it to Nandan Nilekani, and he was kind enough to reply back and asked to me to talk to a senior project manager and see where it goes. Meanwhile I moved out of the company. 

However I still feel that this idea has some potential. And why only Infosys? I am sure most of the companies have a forum where employees express their opinions. If possible, why don’t use that collective intelligence to contribute towards a social cause.

An Idea for Infosys Bulletin Board

Came across this site at Salesforce – http://mystarbucksidea.force.com

I guess the ailing coffee giant is trying to use some collective intelligence. Not a bad idea. I also added one of mine. Check it out!

http://mystarbucksidea.force.com/ideaView?id=087500000005HzzAAE

Feel free to comment too.

I often go to the mall near my apartment in Jersey City and see several escalators there. One thing which always amazed me is why at 2:00 AM in the night the escalators are running continuosly? And all of them just going up and down .. all alone. You will find similar scenario all over the place. Every town, every public place which has escalators. 

So I started to read up on energy required to run an escalator. I came across this article from Treehugger.

 ”The national energy use of escalators is estimated at 2.6 billion kilowatt hours per year, equivalent to powering 375,000 houses; its cost is roughly $260 million.”

Can’t there be some logic to auto-start the escalators? Well, in the same article you will see that frequent start and stop might cost more energy. Well in that case, there should be some intelligence in the logic — which will check if its day time, or if the time gap between people riding is very less then don’t auto stop and start — it should run continuously. However if there are fewer people coming on-board it means that either its night time or slack time. So it should automatically switch in some auto-start/stop mode.

In addition, the logic for upward escalator should be different than downwards. Well downward escalator should start only if there are minimum say 5 people riding .. else it should be in stop mode only. In addition there can be a switch like we have in elevator which we press if we want to ride it.

And yes, this should be done to all existing escalators … please don’t say that we cannot do this for existing escalators. 

So this is what can be done:

1. Have a sensor for Auto ON and OFF — to the existing and new escalators

2. ON and OFF logic for downwards and upward escalators should be different.

3. There should be a start escalator button for people which can be used to start an escalator if it’s stopped (meaning one can skip to start the escalator)

It’s hilarious and it’s so true.

Louis C.K is just mind boggling with his observations and punches. Don’t miss it.

I thought of starting a category which focuses on mashups of Web 2.0 applications. So instead of pulling social data from x number of places and arranging it on a new application, I think there is high time these entrepreneurs and VCs think of joining hands.

Now one can talk about several pros and cons of doing something like this. Without getting into it, all you have to understand is this:

- Users won’t have to remember URLs, login ids/ passwords and features

- They don’t have to worry about their distributed friend population across networks

- They won’t have to complain saying oh why is this feature not available in that application which is soooo much needed there also

I think the list is never ending. Now let me give you an example where I saw a partnership between two applications.

Tumblr has joined hands with Vimeo to host the videos of the users. Well, that makes sense to me.

So in this first post, I would like to suggest two applications which have some degree of overlap in their offering, should think about either sharing data/ UI/ features/ user base.

It will certainly be a win win situation for everyone.

Ning and Meetup

About Ning:

What makes your own social network on Ning special? It’s yours.Your brand and visual design. Your choice of public or private. Your very own members. Explore some of the features you’ll get:

http://about.ning.com/product.php

About Meetup:

Meetup is the world’s largest network of local groups. Meetup makes it easy for anyone to organize a local group or find one of the thousands already meeting up face-to-face. More than 2,000 groups get together in local communities each day, each one with the goal of improving themselves or their communities.

—————-

Well, while writing this blog and reading more about Ning and Meetup, I came across profile of Brad Burnham who happens to be on the board of both Meetup and Ning

Okay, 2008-09 is Twitter year. It’s a whole new world out there with its own language containing words like tweets, @, RT etc. However my guess is Twitter started to capture and share “What are you doing?”, and is thus is becoming a complete Internet Drain. I was following a friend and he is talking about coffee, snow, oatmeal. I mean it might be “cute”, “informative” to some, but definitely not me. Yeah, reminds you of Facebook or other social networks. In the beginning it looks great .. but eventually turns out a chaos.

Here is my wishlist of new applications which can be built on the Micro-blogging framework. Frankly it will be great if these features are available in Twitter itself so that I don’t have to keep track of other apps built on Twitter APIs.

1. Filter Tweets (Fileets)

Well, I want to know what my friend A is doing in the evenings, and should be able to subscribe to only those tweets which are posted in the evening. Don’t want to know what he is having for breakfast, or that he had a heated argument with his boss (who doesn’t!!)

Yeah, alright I am following Obama, but then I am only interested to listen on the TARP or Economic Rescue Plan.

The point is if I am following 100 people and they all post 10 tweets, either I will miss some tweets out of these 1000 or I will go crazy. Well I might even get fired from my work place to be so loyal to Twitter.

2. Pattern Twitter (Pwitter)

Advertisers want to see pattern. Scientist as well. Nature herself has a pattern. Why don’t these social networks see that? If I am following people who talk mostly on Innovation, Ideas, Venture Capital — it should pattern it out and get me useful suggestions to follow other users who contribute on such topics.

3. Answer Twitter (Anster)

Yahoo Answers, LinkedIn Questions, Answerbag.com — so many places to ask questions. Why? Can’t we use a Twitter model instead? It would be more productive.

4. Group Twitter (Gwitter)

10 years back Yahoo Groups were so popular. We all use to have groups for close college friends, another group for entire class etc etc. Several of them. It was fun people posting their updates, attachments. This trend got replaced by Facebook, Orkut and likewise networks.

These days I feel even usage of Facebook is an overkill to keep in touch. Isn’t Twitter sufficient enough? But then I want different groups in Twitter.

Well lets say I will create one group as NY Friends, another one as College Friends. Start adding people in these groups so that they can read and write on these groups.

5. News Twitter (Nwitter)

I am thinking of working on this idea, and is in it’s very early stage. So instead of writing what it is about I might be able to show it to you. Till then please keep thinking and tweeting

In my last post I wrote about how there should be some kind of monitoring service. One of my friends critiqued me that this is against the whole concept of freedom of expression blah blah blah.

I disagreed. The service is meant only for Enterprises and companies susceptible to get pulled into court because either employee has said something inappropriate. Now the next question is does this “check” apply for every social network? NO. Minitoring applies to those sites where employees put their company names (examples: LinkedIn, Facebook) because now the world sees their talks and associates them with the company.

Think about anti sexual harrassment policy we all sign when we take up a job. Infosys did not have any such policy and when Phaneesh Murthy’s scandal came up in 2003, it was company who had to pay 3 million USD.  Why? The simple reason is Infosys did not a policy which employees had signed. 

I am referring to similar issues which companies will face. So if we have such service they will serve two purpose.

A. Corporations will get a disclaimer from the employees that whatever activities an employee does, enterprise doesn’t have any role in it.

B. Monitor and report back any illegal/ inappropriate talk on the web, so that before it reaches every mailbox it can be pulled down.

Yeah, I think it will be needed soon.

Sometime back I came across this article in Economist. Here is a paragraph from it.

“On October 31st Virgin fired 13 of its cabin crew who had posted derogatory comments about its safety standards and some of its passengers on a Facebook forum. Among other things, crew members joked that some Virgin planes were infested with cockroaches and described customers as “chavs”, a disparaging British term for people with flashy bad taste. On November 3rd BA began investigating the behaviour of several employees who had described some passengers as “smelly” and “annoying” in Facebook postings.”

While talking to a friend, I was telling him a possibility of Social Policing. With several hundred online social networks around, with several million working professionals, there is a high chance of one “uttering” something not meant to be. The concept goes like this.