I’ll be in and/or around Delhi for next couple of weeks. I’d be happy to meet my *online* contacts and friends in person. Drop me an email if you’d like to meet/talk.

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Code Search results in Google reults,
originally uploaded by gsharma.

Google is trying hard to integrate all its products into its core product. I think it is helpful to the user and more importantly making Google SERPs display dynamic (as compared to text results).

The dynamics in the results will make users explore the page (hint: image, video and other types of ads).

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No wonder Google’s stock is dipping down!

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I was looking for a ticket on Yatra.com, but didn’t find S’pore Airlines on it. I then tried Makemytrip. They seriously need to work on their usability. Add the dammn ticket cost and tax for the consumer. I can’t believe that they don’t let you sort results. The default sort order they show you is totally random based on the ticket cost (not including tax), so it is not even the cheapest ticket on the top. I think most of their orders are placed via phone or their online chat ‘thingy’. I know labor is cheap in India, but my advice to them is, spend resources on the product - then you’ll see less of those calls and online chats.

On another note, I like Ixigo, they got funded recently (congratts!). Ixigo is Indian ‘Kayak’. I like their simple, clean design and a ton of sorting/filtering features. That’s what a good product should look like!

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I find it interesting that ideawin’s “Untitled” page is built using BBEdit (an editor for Mac)

meta name=”generator” content=”BBEdit 8.7″

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Automattic, Wordpress’ parent company raised Series B round of funding of $29.5M! A company with hardly any revenue and undefined business model got a whooping 29.5M. Is is bubble 2.0 yet? (BTW I really loved Richter Scale’s performance at Crunchies.) I don’t think so.

Automattic is not making much money because they choose not to. They can run ads and make some quick bucks, but they are not doing it. Why do they need 30M then? OM Malik mentions about a social network on WP.com. That might be possible and one of the things they might be working on. However, I think power lies in Akismet. It saved me and others off millions of spammy comments. They can take it out of comments (hint: email) and serve enterprise as well as SMEs. I would like to see what they do with this money in coming months.

Congratulations again!

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Google released its Open Social 0.1 sometime ago with a promise to be something open and make life of a developer much easier. It has been a few months now and it is still not there yet. I have programmed on both Open Social and Facebook’s Dev program. Facebook’s APIs are much thought out and gives a developer a lot of power. On the other hand Google launched the half-baked hardly-alpha set of APIs. Implementation of Open Social on Orkut is nothing much more than framing pages (not literally though). Google’s Open Social will be releasing ver 0.6 on Orkut soon. Here are the release notes.

According to a Google employee

Orkut’s sandbox is going to be moving to version 0.6 of the OpenSocial API. The Orkut team has been working hard to complete this update and is currently aiming for a release of the new functionality late next week.

It seems like they have made the “framing” better.

Enhanced support for fetching remote content. Another addition to the API is the new opensocial.makeRequest method. This is an enhancement to the current gadget API IG_Fetch… methods. The opensocial.makeRequest method allows for POSTs as well as GETs, and you can specify whether you want your data fetch to be signed or even authenticated.

I am no longer wasting my time thinking about an Open Social app, at least till they come up with a solid program for developers.

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I think this should be the mantra used by Indian consumer/content based companies. Clickjobs integrates Internet, mobile and print. IMO it is a very good move. It provides the recruiter/companies an easy way to post jobs and a huge print audience as well as Internet audience. It gives a huge print audience access to the jobs which they may not have been able to find otherwise. It also gives the probable candidates an easy way to apply for the job, instead of forcing them to log on to the site. A candidate can create his/her profile once and keep applying for jobs without logging on to the Internet.

It would be good to see other companies come out with innovative ways to create these bridges.

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I have been using Gmail for a long time now. I really love using the intuitive design and very good usability. I get about 50+ emails everyday in my personal gmail inbox. I use various filters and labels to sort my emails, but there are times when I have to label the emails by myself, without using the filters. I have more than 25 labels (I guess) and it is difficult to reach to the label starting with ‘P’ or ‘S’. I have to scroll down my huge list of labels, which is painful if I have to label a few emails.

When I was at Googleplex earlier this year, I saw a Google employee had a workaround to this problem. She added ‘_’ (an underscore) in front of the labels she wanted to see on the top. She added multiple underscores to labels depending what position she wanted it to show in the list. This work around is good, but not really a solid solution.

To begin with I would like to see ‘most frequently used’ labels on top. This will make life easier. Although a better solution would be to have an inline editing (think Google Calendar or Flickr) to add tag and as the user starts typing the label, the interface should suggest the labels.

It will be good to see Gmail team to make labeling emails easier!

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