Delicious shutting down - Is it the end of free in freemium ?

Delicious shuts down: One free web service I use frequently is biting the dust. I joined quite late into the delicious party but after I got used to it, the delicious bookmarklet was the first bookmarklet on my browser. It was really very good and I used to refer back to those bookmarks to find  - something which I remember having read but can't remember now - articles. I am really sad to see it go. If you have used delicious and want to atleast back up all the bookmarks you have saved, you can export all those bookmarks here.

Other shutdowns of popular products:  I think lot of web services will start to feel the heat and web services which are not able to to monetize may shut down or start to charge for services. Google shut down its notebook service also which I was using. Now evernote has taken that place which has premium accounts and it is rumoured to be making good revenue.Evernote has raised a lot of money and after the growth of the company peaks, it also might want to terminate its non paying customers. Ning a company which provides custom social networks removed the option of free from its packages and all the existing customers were asked to pay up or leave.

Will everyone start charging for services now?  There are two ways that a company can continue to provide its services for free, if it is either acquired by a big company - read google or microsoft or if it makes good money either by charging for services or by ads. Lets consider one by one

 Selling to a big company : Picnik, Youtube, GrandCentral (google voice) & many other companies acquired by google are still providing services for free. That doesn't mean it will always be like that. The founders of those companies will become rich but there is no guarantee that the services will keep running.  Delicious is best example of what will be wrong with this approach.If the new company thinks it is useless or does not fit in with its agenda, it will shutdown. So no company whose motto is selling to another company can be trusted to remain functional for ever.

Money from ads: Companies can make money by serving ads on the site. This is popularized by google. Blogger, Youtube, GMail and all big google properties are subsidized this way. Though there is no danger of these being discontinued in the short term there are some threats to this approach too. Adblocker extension on Firefox and Chrome will block all ads on a web page and you have to whitelist certain sites to enable ads like I enabled google.com to see ads from that site. And how many people will take that pain of enabling those ads?  And Facebook is giving a good threat to google. Don't you think with all the facebook connect information can't facebook show ads on the pages which have activated Facebook Connect ? I think it is only a short time before facebook starts federating its ads. If google loses its relevance or lot of people switch to facebook ads, is it possible that Google can keep supporting bandwidth hogs like Youtube indefinitely. This raises a question which webservice can be trusted to run forever? Which brings us to the third way a company can make money

Charging for services:  Companies can earn money the old fashioned way by charging for services. Lot of companies already charge for services but I think we will see more and more companies starting to charge for services.

Not everyone will start charging for services. Notably all those places which can attract lot of eyeballs like facebook, youtube or google might always be free because by their nature the more people they can bring they earn more. So they might make more than they use and hence they can be free but more services where it is not possible to be subsidized by ads, the companies will charge for sure.

How different it is from freemium ?
The difference is that you will not get free servies indefinitely. Today even if you will not pay you can use tumblr to host your blog indefinitely. Evernote allows you to save notes indefinitely even if you never pay anything to use it within a limit. But the difference which i see it the services will become time-limited. So you can only try but not really use a service. You have to pay to use it. 


I am not saying this is true for  news or other data where the cost of incremental stuff is zero but for web services where each new free customer has a cost associated with him/her however small the cost might be.

Update: A cool service call trunk.ly is poised to replace delicious not in the same way but now a days, if we like something we just share it on twitter or facebook, not to delicious right. Trunkly indexes the links we share on twitter or facebook and is searchable.. So grab a spot for this here

A suggestion for Gmail Team - Update

Image via WikipediaCouple of weeks back, I wrote a post outlining a suggestion to the GMail team to delete the social network notifications. Though the exact feature is not available, I have found another plugin to gmail which first sorts all of those notifications into a label, so that you can select all and delete. This way you don't need to first write filters for orkut, facebook and twitter separately. And the plugin, also neatly labels most of the low priority emails neatly into categories like social networking, groups, news, shopping etc, so that your main inbox is not cluttered.  The plugin is Other Inbox. Go try it out  at www.otherinbox.com. Have a less cluttered inbox.

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How I overcame by Attention Deficit ?

The Problem:

That is my iGoogle page, i.e my personalized homepage. See how many tabs I have. I follow some 40 blogs and assuming that each one updates atleast one post I read 40 posts. And blogs like techcrunch and techmeme post more than one post per day. So even though I was working on some other thing, I would alt-tab to this read one blog post and continue working. Now a  days there is twitter too. Somebody tweets a link and I will read it. That way I used to read read and read. If I am reading something, then I will not comeback to my work till that article is done. Sometimes, there would be more links in the main article and it would some serious time lost before I come back to my work again.  Now imagine my productivity. I used to do just fine before when my work was a little less and when I had no time constraints. Now a days due to some reasons I have to work with 8:30 -4:30 and this distractions were killing my productivity. Now as you know humans cannot multi-task well and guys are even bad at it. So I decided to do something about it.

Working For a Solution:
So I decided to see how much time I was working and how I was getting distracted. I observed that looking at twitter or igoogle was the main reason I was getting distracted. But I simply couldn't stop myself from doing that whenever I have to wait for a build or deployment. I saw my results in rescuetime and saw that my productivity was very very low.

So I was to somehow overcome the addiction to news, opinion and breaking news But the problem was I liked it. So what should I do? 

Solution: 

I tried to tackle it in two different ways. First, I have to read but I should not read every breaking news. But I shouldn't read during the time I am working simply because it is a big loss to my productivity. I have read in may time management solutions, that if there is something we want to do at a later time, our mind tries to remember it by recalling it again and again for the fear that it will forget it. And the easy solution to it is to write it down somewhere. So I decided that if I come across a good article sometime during the day, I will use the ReadLater bookmarklet to bookmark it. Also, there is a better chance of avoiding it if the environment is clear of it. So I have decided that I will not open chrome browser during working hours. Because of its ease of use, though I open it for some work related search, I tend to open igoogle and get stuck. So I would use IE and then because of the unfriendly interface, I will close it after the official work. And then I scheduled some time in the evening to read all the articles I have scheduled to read later. This way I was able to concentrate well on what I was doing. Basically, I made it less exciting to get distracted then (unfriendly browser) then postponed it as a reward for getting it done (Read Later)

The second way in which I tackled was getting more clarity in what I was doing. I would get a deluge of requests and I would handle them as they come. Hence as a request comes, I would stop the current one, go and look at the new one, reply to it and then come back to the old one, which took a lot of time in context-switching and lost me a lot of time. So I stopped doing that. I would write down all my tasks in the outlook

This helped me keep perspective and be mindful of what I am doing and hence helped me do my work more productively and writing down the tasks helped to eliminate the mind chatter. There was also an option of setting reminders which helped in following up on the tasks. Here I  put everything into tasks and worked on them sequentially. Ofcourse, I had to prioritize but mostly I stuck to what I decided.  

So this helped me to increase my productivity to a different level. I am sharing this becuase in this information and social media age, there will surely something which will catch our attention and we can get easily distracted. But it feels good to use technology to beat the ill effects of technology. Hope it helps you.

Bookmarklets that I use regularly

What is a bookmarklet?: Bookmarklet is a small javascript code which helps you achieve something directly from your browser without leaving the page. To use a bookmarklet, just drag the link in the subheadings below to your browser bookmarks bar and just click it for the desired functionality.

Readability bookmarklet: Open any Indian news site like rediff or times of India or Economic Times. If you want to read any article, it is very distracting. One very good bookmarklet which can make your life very easy is 'Readabiliy'. You can customize how you want to see the page and it will be rendered like that. No ads no distracting flash. Try one and you will not look back.

bit.ly sidebar : You are reading a good article and you want to tweet it to your friends. You can press the retweet button on the site or go to twitter copy the url and send. But in the first case, there is no easy way to enter your comments and in the second case, the url is very big so you cannot write your comments. This bit.ly sidebar opens on the side after you click with the url shortened. You can enter your comments and tweet it.

Share on Tumblr: You are reading something interesting. You wanted to save  few lines of it for yourself. You can do that with tumblr. You can have a tumblog and using this bookmarklet save text, pics and videos to tumblr directly. See my tumblog here. Visit it for amazing quotes.

Add Zemanta: This is a helper in your blogging. Suppose you are blogging and how good it would be if somebody directly help you link important text, related blogs, contextual images and good tags. That is Zemanta for you. If you are a blog, this will surely help you.

Delicious: The best bookmark manager of the web has a bookmarklet too. You can save your bookmarks by just clicking a button and after saving you will be redirected to to the original page. And whats more, you can even tweet directly from there.

Read Later: If you have opened too many windows for reading and suddenly you feel that you don't have sufficient time to read all of them now you can save them later for reading and read them later. There is another site or ReadItLater also which is also quite useful. But I like the Instapaper's presentation better.

Try them out and  suggest any good bookmarklets that you use.

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These guys are changing the world

There are lot of exciting things happening around the world and this is my attempt to share what I feel will most likely be mainstream.

1. Siri: The virtual personal assistant. They have developed a iPhone app which is an assistant which is as close as you can get to real assistant. And the semantic web, which was being talked about with much promise is finally showing its utility. You can book restraunts, flight tickets, movie tickets concert tickets, call a taxi  all with just voice commands. And whats more is that the assistant will listen to what you are saying and will learn about you with AI and recommend better things to you. And ofcourse, they are expanding into more and more domains. I think it is the future of communication and web experience.

2. Ted: I was introduced to Ted two years back where people come and give talks about lot of things in the world. It is all about ideas which can change the world. You can never under estimate what a stroke of inspiration can do to you. That is the importance of Ted. It invites speakers from all over the world who have great ideas and introduces them to WHAT IS POSSIBLE. I have already shared with you many talks in my blog about the speech of Shukla Bose a woman who is changing the world by teaching slum dwellers. There is a video of a poor Africa, who designed his own wind mill to generate power where there was none. There are many such stories in TED and I think it is making the world much much much better.

3. Facebook: Its not that Facebook has not already changed the world, but with their f8 announcement of a new open graph, they are about to take over the web. Every thing we do is going to be recorded (ofcourse, with our permission only) and it will form our social graph. Our likes and dislikes, our shopping habits, our reading habits everything will be recorded and made available to the world at large. These will be shared with your friends and with the world. What they will do with this data is unthinkable now, but will need only a few months before the applications start using this data to build applications which we never even imagined. Welcome to the next level of internet.

Thanks to the NET

This is a post where I want to thank the creators of the internet for it has changed my life in ways i cannot imagine.

How could I hang out with the likes of Seth Godin, Fred Vilson or Steve Pavlina if not for the internet?

How much would I have missed the experienced words of Joel or the head first way of Kathy Sierra?

How much the hacker and painter in me would have lost if not for the essays of Paul Graham?

How would I have missed the satirical takes of Atanu Dey on India or the touching posts of Rajesh for his kid, or the passionate posts of Rashmi and the well researched posts on Sastwingees ?

I am not even touching the increase in my productivity due to the various web applications which we use day in and day out.

Internet like never before makes it easy to hang out(blogs, twitter) with any person of our choice so easy and I am so happy for that.

Apart from being grateful for allowing us to learn from the experiences of the very best in their fields, I want you to point you to two great resources on the net which I am currently using.

I know youtube has lot of videos and channels for various things, but videos in these two places have inspired me very much.

1. TED talks: Ideas worth spreading.

TED is a small nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design.

Some of the interesting talks there are why are or aren't we happy? or why we do what we do?

Head over to Ted.com and browse the various videos out there, you will not be disappointed.

2. Stanford University Enterpreneurship corner:

The Stanford Technology Ventures Program (STVP) Entrepreneurship Corner is a free online archive of entrepreneurship resources for teaching and learning. The mission of the project is to support and encourage faculty around the world who teach entrepreneurship to future scientists and engineers, as well as those in management and other disciplines. The site has been developed by a dynamic team of educators, entrepreneurs, engineers, and designers at the Stanford Technology Ventures Program (STVP)

Some of the popular videos here are The black swans of Energy Innovation by Vinod Khosla, Dont Kill projects morph them by Merissa Mayer

The whole lists of talks is here.

Dont you think internet deserves kudos for this. How on earth it could have been possible for you to attend those conferences in Stanford University if not for the net.

Thanks to the creators of the internet, you have changed the world definitely for the better.

What do you think the best thing about the internet for you?