So, what has Facebook done to lose its charm? I would say-”Copied Google plus and Twitter“. The very essence of Facebook was to recreate the joys of college life in the virtual space. I am not an avid Facebook user, but yes I do end up spending 5-10 minutes reading through my news feed that includes the stupid but cute updates of the girl I have a crush on (Maybe!!!).  A couple of days back, Facebook launched the subscribe option and I was all excited. Wow!!! Now I can subscribe to Mark Zuckerberg,  Joe Hewitt, M.G Siegler, Robert Scoble and a lot more people.

Few days into this subscription thingy and my news feed was full of content from the social media whores and my cute crush was nowhere to be found on my news feed (I know I can use my smart list to get to her). Each one of these people such as Scoble are very happy that Facebook did this. They are supposed to be happy. They can now push their content to even more people. That is what their job is.

Alright!!! I can unsubscribe from the feeds of these people (I have not done that yet). But, these are smart people. They write viral content and they will get it shared by one friend or other.And my personal space will be invaded (too much intellect will come in).  Facebook was supposed to be my personal space, where I see those cute rants. Isn’t it?

Facebook can still get us out of all this mess by creating a separate tab for subscribed content (if my friends share it after seeing it on their feed, I can’t do much). Facebook must understand that it is fun to be on the network, because there is not much intellect push going on. Facebook must stick to what it stands for and not become my daily newspaper like twitter is. Twitter is supposed to be the space where celebrities share their bullshit and I enjoy it. Facebook, please O please, don’t try to become the next Myspace. Facebook doesn’t need to look like Techcrunch or hacker news either. I know Google plus is leading you into all this but you better understand what you stand for.

Get in touch with the writer at mitra[dot]arkid[at]gmail[dot]com.

“A lot of nerds get that”, says Daniel Gross on what Greplin stands for. For the rest of us (who are not quite nerds), ‘Greplin’ stems its name from ‘grep’, a popular CS terminology for search. Search as an online experience (a need rather), is second to none. Google has been around for a while now, to do the job for us, well in most parts. There are different verticals to online search. Google controls the majority but there still is space left in the search market for smaller players to innovate – Blekko’s slash tag is an example. While Google can powerfully crawl the entire web, there are places, a search engine can’t go. Where exactly ? Password protected user data in the cloud and the social online data of those, that it isn’t on sweetest of terms with.

Greplin tries to be your search partner into these areas. Greplin is a a user-authorized search that can access your data on the cloud – Facebook, Twitter, Google Docs, LinkedIn, Salesforce, and more. Founded by Daniel Gross, a 19 year old from Israel, 48hrs before his YC DDay (Y Combinator Demo Day). An intersting story – his own words. One might think why didn’t Google build something such themselves. Well, they could have if they wanted to. But being the search giant they are, they would have had stiff resistance getting into the cloud data of rival social networks and perhaps to a certain extent on the user front as well. So, this vertical of search had to be explored by a newbie.

It wasn’t a smooth go for Gross at YC with Amazon screwing his initial DDAY project over, completely. And just when the kid was getting a little restless, Paul Graham was there with his simple, yet magical words – go, build something that you yourself are a target audience for. Thanks Paul – those words mean something to all of us, me included ! And with a scratch model of Greplin, Gross took the stage. Struggle followed for the series A funding. But once he had it, things only went uphill – securing another round of VC funding from Sequoia Capital, getting Robby Walker on board. And the valley has been sweet on Greplin since !

Once you sign up for the product, you are asked to add your online accounts – Gmail/Facebook/Twittter/Google Docs/LinkedIn and the like one by one, some 5-10 mins for initial indexing (depending upon how extensive your online presence is!) and you are good to go. A clean intuitive UI helps too! Once you start typing your search query, you start getting indexed results, much like google instant. Corresponding to a search query, you get search results in the form of messages, people, streams from across your indexed networks.. The business model adopted is freemium. Basic necessary indexes are free (Gmail/Facebook/Twitter/Dropbox/Google Docs/LinkedIn) while other Applications like Yammer/Salesforc/Basecamp etc require you to choose a ‘Premium model’. Free and Premium models also differ on the no of messages/people/streams/files indexed. Greplin also plan on rolling out Google Voice and Google Reader soon !

On security concerns, Gross says :

For the bulk of the services that we offer for indexing today, we never actually capture your username and password, which I think is important to a lot of users. So you know, if one day, lets say, somehow, our accounts are compromised your password was never exposed to us. So it would still theoretically be safe.

While fundamentals work fine, there are glitches too. Sometimes a search query shows multiple instances of the same search result (mostly in case of a multi-threaded Gmail conversation). While users can index multiple Twitter profiles, the same support for Gmail/Facebook doesnot seem to be there at the moment. Also, perhaps the no. of messages/streams is a little less in the free model, as I couldn’t get hold of an year old Facebook update. I’d take the liberty to propose one refinement in the indexing algorithm (considering the limited no. on the messages/streams for FREE users) – the user’s streams/messages should be indexed first and then probably those of his friends (this is to say if my understanding is right !). Another feature that I as a user would like (maybe in days to come) : indexing of the user comments on the Facebook status updates. But it again boils down to a trade off between how deep the indexing is being done for a particular model ! And yes, one last thing – that chrome plugin ad right in the middle of the page is a NO !

Have actually written to Greplin support on these. Hopefully, they will listen to these little demands from their prospective users and provide a better user experience.

Overall Greplin is a yes for me.

Why ? One, because the user in me feels a need for the service (even though the frequency will be say 1/100th of Google search, but that is only going to increase over time) and two, because the developer in me would love to be a part of this project !

I can be reached at vikashbitmesra@gmail.com. My twitter feed @_Vikash.

Google Buzz is being considered a threat to Facebook and Twitter, but hold on. I see the activity on Buzz going down already. Google  Buzz is actually being used by people who don’t use Facebook and Twitter too much. That for me is a pattern. The community is not small but these people are not used to making a zillion status updates a day like the Twitterati and the FB addicts. One of the major reasons for the success of Twitter and Facebook has been their clean API. FB connect has made sure that your Facebook profile information is fast becoming your identity on the internet.

So, here goes my sneak peak into what all is going in the Buzz developer community.

Here is a small list of applications which have come up:

• http://www.buzzcantweet.com/ Yes, now you can Buzz and Tweet together.
• http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=327268316969 Update Facebook with your Buzz.
• http://www.buzzcounter.net/ Get a Buzz counter for your website.(No official app yet.)
• http://apps.facebook.com/BuzzNow/ Facebook app to Buzz.

With Google Buzz undergoing tweaks everyday and applications coming up everyday, we will try and keep you updated.

However, one thing which stuck me as soon as i started using it was “Buzz must have something more to it than just being a Facebook/Twitter killer (It won’t kill any of these)”. After a series of poor products from Google in Knol and Lively, and a quarter baked Google Wave(I am not writing off wave yet), Buzz is kick ass and has more more to it.

With Buzz Google has been able to solve some major problems :

• It has its ingenious real time status update stream now. It can mine data as much as it wants. And with the amount of personal information it already had, it would not be difficult for Google to get users using it.
• Have you ever looked at the status update’s URL on Buzz. I will give you a sample. It looks like http://www.google.com/buzz/mitra.arkid/Nm8hyou4jFm/God-I-am-not-even-logging-into-twitter-I-am-loving On going to this URL you are able to see the status update and the comments and like’s on it. The URL here is more interesting than a twitter status update which looks like http://twitter.com/ArchieIndian/status/8964687084 There is a lot more data captured in the URL than in twitter.
• Google Wave was not good. I agree but don’t all of you want a little bit more out of Buzz. Buzz has the  feature where people can post a buzz to a limited list, something like a collaboration tool. Wave’s can be started for a limited group too. On wave you should be able to edit pictures together and have voice chat’s together too.
  

  Google Wave is the future of Google Buzz

  Agreed that Google Wave right now, just doesn’t work, but  don’t you all think Google is trying to teach us using Google Wave through Google Buzz. Once we are educated enough using and Google Wave’s development is complete too (Google now can take it’s own time), we would all graduate to Google Wave.

I just thought of all this randomly, but all these things like Google Buzz, Google Wave, Google Chrome OS,Geotagging of Buzzes from phones, Android and Nexus One seem to be dots  in the same space and it would not be difficult to join them. Joining them creates a technological breakthrough for sure.

So, what is the future of Twitter and Facebook?

Stop making these comparisons, i would say. Twitter will always have its position as a marketing tool, as people are more addicted to Twitter than anything else. With a super cool API and the zillion of applications made with the help of Twitter, it remains the new age digital press.

Facebook is the new age social network, and with so many applications to play with. With a flurry of developers making so much money through facebook application development, Facebook  isn’t dying too. Facebook is a fun place, where people play  fun games and and join causes and try to create the so called online buzz on “Social Causes.”

What does Google Buzz do then?

• There are a number of these very close friends on my gmail contact list and I forgot to read their blog updates and lost track of what they are doing. Now with their blogs updated directly to the Buzz(through Google Reader), I started going through them again.
• Google Buzz is what i expected from Twitter a while back when they released their retweet feature. Commenting on twitter statuses was cool for me.
• It pushes your updates to people who matter the most, because in you Gmail contacts you add people who are really necessary for you to get stuff done.
• If Google is able to control spam, the click through rates may just be much higher than a twitter or a facebook.
• Buzz already has a list system, and a way to push updates only to a list . No one else provides that to me as yet. This feature can be immensely useful to me and many others.

Who looses out the most?

I see Google Buzz getting integrated to Google apps and then a lot of companies who were giving out this social intranet thing, notably Salesforce’s chatter are  completely destroyed.

What I expect from Buzz next?

• A clean way to search the public Buzz updates.
• A cleaner way to search people on Buzz inside Gmail interface only.
• A good API for us developers to play around with.
• Buzz for Google Apps gives immense power to start-ups. It almost solves all their intranet problems.

With mashable and techcrunch already up with their buzz it buttons, I need to start writing one quickly. My verdict, Buzz is not Google Wave or Google Knol, it just works.

Images are courtsey: buzz.google.com

The competition just got fiercer as far as the URL shortening service goes. Google has come out with its URL shortening service called Goo.gl, Facebook with fb.me and Bit.ly has released a pro version.

So, What is it that makes Google and Facebook venture into URL shortening? What is it that these people provide that other don’t.

Bit.ly:

• Mature service. Used by twitter automatically.
• Lots of data like number of clicks available in the dashboard.
• Bit.ly pro is going to provide custom URL‘s for the big publishers. The Bit.ly blog goes on to say “Placing a simple “+” at the end of any bit.ly link (including these white-label, bit.ly-powered links) takes you to real-time information about that page and how it is being shared: how many people clicked on that particular link, where they came from, and more.  For publishers, the new service allows them to keep their brand visible while maintaining access to bit.ly statistics.“

Goo.gl:

• URL shortening from the Google toolbar and feed-burner.
• Speed, Stability and Security is what Google seems to be banking on. Read google’s blog for more.

Fb.me :

• The sheer number of status updates made on Facebook will make the service popular.
• Now that people are able to post their facebook updates to twitter, fb.me will be visible on twitter too.

So What is it that Google, Facebook and Bit.ly are looking at. Where is the money out here? Is Google looking at collecting even more data? Are there more evil plans of advertising to this?

Are we going to see custom URL’s for every person and is the click on that URL going to earn them money? Facebook connect and Google ID’s can easily help Facebook and Google do that. Are Google, Facebook and Bit.ly looking at social advertising seriously? We will know very shortly i guess.

The clean twitter API has meant more and more third party twitter based applications

• It is the power of every individual tweets which has to be calculated and the the power of the tweet-er. An average can be later found out to find the influence of the person.
• The number of followers you have is important but not the most important factor for sure.
• Your followers who are following less than 500 people is a much more important factor.
• From among these people considered how many of your followers are active on twitter (in two way communication).
• How many times a tweet got retweeted is a very effective measure of a tweet’s importance.
• How many times the tweet got retweeted, writing RT @… manually can be even more important.
• One very complex factor which I have come up with is the visibility of tweets. I feel, at any point a person looks at the last 10-15 tweets and the tweets directed towards him. So, if we can device a way where we can find out for how much time was a tweet visible among the top ten tweet entries on any of your followers wall and  whether the follower came online during that while or not can be an important metric. Whether the follower came online is a difficult parameter to calculate.It is however possible to check of the follower tweeted during the while (If he/she has tweeted, it surely means, he/she has come online).
• If we can measure how many people have replied to a particular tweet, the metric can be of immense importance.

These are some thoughts which I have had during the last few days about measuring the importance of a particular tweet. I would try and put up more as I think about this more and more. I am not sure, if any application yet calculates all the metrics mentioned by me but in the future I expect something on these lines. I would like people to go through a brilliant post by Avinash Kaushik which made me think about this post.

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So what is real time search?

Real time search  basically boils down to searching the information contained in our status updates on the various micro-blogging, social networking and information sharing sites. These happen to be much quicker than the updates on various news sites around the world. What with, over a billion people sharing information from various parts of the world.

Why was the real time search needed?

Sometime back, this year when there was a lot of hue and cry over the Iran Election, whenever we typed Iraq on Google, we kept on getting the same old Wikipedia link which was very relevant to say the least, but was not what we wanted. However, a quick search on Twitter, the most popular microblogging site, gave us some stunning results. At this point, most search engines started including (and are expanding) ‘real-time search’ in some form or the other.Google and other search engines woke up to the importance of our status updates.

I am feeling lucky- Google- Counter to 2010

The Google Blog says “Of course, none of this would be possible without the support of our new partners that we’re announcing today: Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku and Identi.ca — along with Twitter, which we announced a few weeks ago.“

Here are some of the things I tried with Google today, and there were some interesting discoveries right away.

I was on the Google home page and clicked on the I am feeling lucky button without typing in any search query. I saw a counter ad couldn’t understand what it meant. My natural instinct told me “Google it”. The results, I got were not what I was looking for.

The results were not exactly what I was looking for showing me the original definition of I am feeling lucky and other stuff.

Options to filter the google search

The realtime stuff had not yet achived the relevance to get to the top of the results. So, I clicked on the “Show Options” to get to the filtering options.

From here the filtering got easier and i clicked on the latest filter.

Getting relevant real time results from Google RTS

I quickly realized how the real time web was taking over the search world by a storm. In order to get real time search merged with google, try searching something which is trending on google and you will see it.

Search for Tiger Woods on Google

Having seen all this, I quickly realized the problems which Google has with the irrelevant trending hash-tags of Twitter. The fact that Bing has ruled out the possibility of integrating the real-time stuff readily into their search results makes the strategical search engine market even more interesting. Bing will continue to provide the twitter search results at a separate URL at bing.com/twitter.

Google Trends has come out of Beta(Donot forget to check Trendrr which I find more interesting at times than Google trends) and we can see Google trends at the end of the search results, if it happens to be relevant.

Google Trends is out of Beta

The next big thing which I am looking forward to is the integration of facebook updates and how people react to their social networking Gossips getting crawled by Google just because they clicked on yes to a privacy statement they didn’t bother to read. There will be a lot of changes in the way search results are seen. There will be privacy policy checks done. The Web Analytics parameters will undergo a huge change. We will also recommend people to have a look at the Yahoo search results which have also started putting twitter status updates along with other results.Scoopler, SocialMention and Collecta are the other three realtime search engine, I would like the readers to try out.We at microreviews will keep a look at these and try to put them up for you all.

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Readers’ opinions are most welcome.

Few months back, I had gone on to say, Twitter is almost becoming a place where marketers are talking amongst each other. However, as we all realize the success that twitter has been, as it changes its tag from “What are you doing?” to “What’s happening?”, all brands which wrote off social media have a lesson or two to learn from some other brands which are now starting to leverage money from Twitter.

Earlier this year, we had covered how Dell is leveraging social media to create brilliant touch points for the customers. Dell had taken the Feedback 2.0 approach through social media. Dell told Bloomberg on Tuesday that it has earned an estimated $6.5 million in sales of PCs, accessories, and software, thanks to promotions on Twitter.Over the last three months, there has been a 23% increase in the number of people following Dell’s Tweet’s says Dell’s online unit vice president Manish Mehta. @DellOutlet is now followed by 14,71,000 tweeple (including many bots ) . Dell has over 100 employees sending out tweets to the 1.7 million people it has following its DellOutlet account. Tweets range from special deals on PCs and accessories to help with tech support. And these have brought in $6.5 million in sales.

$6.5 million is not huge when compared to the total revenues of Dell, but it clearly states the fact how Dell has started the process of leveraging social media. With Twitter growing in India, at a rate experienced in the US a year back, Indian companies must start looking at social media and twitter in a more serious way.

For social media help, I would recommend people to get in touch with  Aditya Prakash and Vikas Kumar on twitter.

You can also email them here and here.

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So what is Threadsy : In bold terms, its an effort at something, Google failed at. Remember Wave – Google’s much hyped (and failed) integrated real time online communication game changer.!! Google tried integrating various elements of online communication in Google Wave, which probably got too much for an average user to handle. The interface was creepy, with functionalities only quarter developed in the beta-launch.!! So is threadsy better.? Well if not better, at least far more organized with a much cleaner user interface and not half developed/integrated features. Threadsy for beginners combines your multiple email accounts, twitter, Facebook and IM at one place. You dont have to sign in differently for them and switch tabs. You just have to have a Threadsy private beta-invite [can be found at the bottom of the post], sign up at Threadsy, enable IMAP option in your mail settings and you are good to go.!!

How well does it give a feel of the actual accounts :

Well, you can pretty much do all that you do in your mailbox or from your Facebook/Twitter profiles. All messages directed at you (in mail or @replies in Twitter) are put together in one stream called the ‘Inbound’ column at the left. And pretty much all that you follow on FB/Twitter are streamed into the column on the right called ‘Outbound’. You can access all your IM accounts too at the bottom bar (all you need is a Mebo account). Every single operation that you do from your inbox has been smoothly integrated, majority of what you do on Twitter : post/RT/favourite/@replies have been integrated as well. Similarly for Facebook pretty much everything has been integrated too : like/comment/post/inbox/profile viewing. One very good feature that comes across is the bio page of a particular user that comes up in the unbound section when you click on one of his messages in the inbound section.

Verdict : Threadsy shows promise. No wonder then that it broke into the Techcrunch50 finalists.

Where does it lack, or can improve :

Our personal/professional communication and networking doesnot exactly end at emails, FB and Twitter. All professionals today own a professional networking profile (say on LinkedIn), are a part of many other social networks like Orkut, Myspace, even a youtube channel. And even amongst what Threadsy has to offer (emails/FB/Twitter), improvements can totally be made.

Emails :  From a personal experience I found out that sometimes some messages simply do not show up on  your email inbox in threadsy (to be truthful this has happened just one single time.!!). Also there is a little delay that can be observed in the timings between say a message arriving in your mail inbox and your Threadsy inbox.

Twitter : No complaints here.!! All messages (tweets/@replies/DM) are captured and without delay. A good feature is that you can see the tweetpics inline. Just one little thing – older tweets of  the day are a little difficult to see. I didnt see a straightforward way to read the older tweets at least.

Facebook : Again updates/inbox are well captured. Older updates are a little difficult to see.

Overall, Threadsy has offered a good consolidated amalgamation of your regular and major communication clients at one point. The interface is well organized and clean. With time as it comes out of private beta and goes for a real launch the User will have much more at his disposal and probably in a better coordinated and feature laden way.

TEAM Microreviews wishes Team threadsy all the very best in  their efforts.

Note : 10 Private beta invites available : http://bit.ly/4APKQk

Similar upcoming products in line are Silentale and Zood. Keep tuned in for them.

For more on tech product reviews, pls contact ArchieIndian and Aditya Prakash. Mail them here and here.

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