The Randomness of Randomness

Throwing information at yourself

// October 14th, 2008 // 1 Comment » // Internet, Technology

Information and knowledge are two never-ending elements and people crave to gather as much of them as possible. Blogs have established themselves to be an alternate media and there are unimaginable number of blogs that have come into existence spanning across unimaginably wide topics. These blogs act as a continuous source of information, news, facts and so much more. Using a feed reader to subscribe to blogs you are interested in, can help you throw loads of quality & relevant-to-you content on yourself.

Google Reader

I have started following quite a lot of blogs on Google Reader. Google Reader is a web-based feed reader that helps you follow websites & blogs for new content. There are various options available if I want to follow feeds, but I preferred to use Google Reader because of the decent tagging system, which helps me organise my feeds and the email-inbox like interface that they have churned up.

The Google Reader Interface

So, you subscribe to blogs you are interested in and let Google Reader throw all of the information that is produced, right in front of you for you to consume. You need to be very choosy with the blogs that you subscribe to. Some blogs like Killer Startups might be very useful ones, but have 15-20 posts per day. So, if you really want to subscribe to such a blog, be very careful to keep clearing the lag and clutter and keep up with the pace of your subscribed blogs, else it would gradually take the form of those 1000’s-of-unread-emails like scenarios, which happened with my previous encounter with Google Reader, when I had over 10,000 unread posts.

So, what made me do a makeover and start off with my Google Reader all over again and not choose some other RSS feed reader?

Google Reader Mobile

I recently bought a smartphone, and then decided to start following feeds on it. I evaluated a few softwares, but didnt really find juice. And one fine day I casually checked out the mobile version of Google Reader from the Google Mobile homepage. What I found was a very simple, clean and intuitive interface to read your feeds.

After using it for around a month, I realised that there were a lot of blogs that weren’t really suitable to follow on the mobile, for e.g. PSDTUTS. So, lately I created a tag on Google Reader: Feeds for Mobile, and used it for all the blogs that I felt I would like to read on the mobile.

So, voila I now use up my travelling time or other idle time like lone tea breaks, etc. reading blogs on my mobile. And when I am on the computer, I read the remaining posts.

UPDATE: My smartphone got stolen and I am badly missing Google Reader on-the-go

Should twitter search crawl other microblogs?

// July 16th, 2008 // No Comments » // Business, Internet, Microblogging, Social Networking, Technology

Put in summize.com in your browser and it redirects to search.twitter.com. Yeah, finally it has been confirmed by both summize & twitter that the former has been acquired by the latter.

Summize was a search engine formed to facilitate people with the ability to gauge user opinions extracted from blogs and review sites.

Thanks to some extended machine learning techniques and a complex data engine at the back end, summize turned out to be a very effective search engine for what it was meant to do. Now common!! The three co-founders had 7 long years of experience building numerous highly scalable search applications.

They realised early in 2008 that microblogging sites can be the best and most reliable source to figure out how and what people are thinking about some particular thing. And twitter being one of the most popular mb sites around, they started using summize to let people search how people on twitter(a.k.a. tweople) think about something.

They churned out something that really interested twitter, and since the last one month, the folks from twitter were in talks with summize to take it over and they now finally have for reportedly $15 million.

Tom’s heart does not really sound as happy about having sold twitter than being sad about not being able to assure that the promises summize had made to their users would be kept. You can read more about that on Tom’s blog.

What people will look upto is that how twitter goes about developing summize further. It is least likely to crawl other microblogging sites, which could give people much wider results than just crawling twitter would.

After all twitter is for people, people are not for twitter. They bought summize because they felt it to be the best out of all the mb search engine lot. So the best mb search engine should be used to crawl & index the mb’s so as to give people a more reliable opinion of what the internet thinks.

Summize’s vision is clearly given in Tom’s above mentioned blog post, and that is what could have been the reason of sustainability for summize had it not been acquired. So, twitter should rather look forward to giving people better results using their search, than letting people only search twitter.

What do you say?

Should twitter use their search engine to crawl other microblogging sites or should they only do it for their own?

Follow feeds on twitter

// July 10th, 2008 // No Comments » // Internet, Microblogging, Social Networking

In our fast-moving lives, it sometimes becomes tough to keep following feed-readers all the time.

Here is a quick and easy way to stay connected to RSS feeds you are interested in following, while you are twittering.

Here is a step by step guide to help you start following feeds on twitter.

We are going to achieve this by using a RSS Aggregator/RSS Mashup Tool called xFruits and the twitterfeed service.

So, lets get started.

1. Log on to http://www.xfruits.com/
2. Click on the SIGN IN button on the top right and two forms will open up for you. One to register and the other to sign in.
3. Register yourself.
4. Click on the Aggregator RSS button
   
5. Customize the aggregator and add feeds you want to follow and click “Aggregate my feeds”.
   You may add links to OPML files as well.
   
6. Bingo! Your feeds have been aggregated.
   
7. The title of your feed(marked above in red) links to the aggregated feed.
8. The URL I got for my feed was http://xfruits.com/miteshashar/?id=some_number
9. You may want to go to the Edit page(by clicking the link marked above with blue) to add/remove feeds and to change your feed’s link to http://xfruits.com/miteshashar/myfeed/
   
10. So, you’re now done with setting up your aggregated feed.
11. Now, you need to log into http://twitterfeed.com using a OpenID. I used my Yahoo! OpenID
12. Click on the link marked in red below to create a new twitterfeed
    
13. Enter your twitter username & password. (You may want to make a new twitter account for your feeds)
    Enter your aggregated feed’s URL(http://xfruits.com/miteshashar/myfeed/) as the RSS feed URL.
    Feed in the other settings for twitterfeed and click Create to create the twitterfeed.
    
14. So, there you go. You’ve completed setting up twitterfeeds with an aggregation of feeds you’d like to follow.
15. It shall take some time for the feed to be approved. It was done in 90 minutes for my feed.
16. Once that is done, the feeds will be tweeted onto the specified account. You can follow the new twitter user you’ve created to follow your feeds.
    

If you have any ideas built over this concept or any suggestions to make, please post the same as comments.

So, happy tweeting & happy feed-following!!

nJoi