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

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.

I love Tumblr

Tumblr is a blogging software and I am loving using it. how is it different from other blogging platforms?

It is more a platform for sharing quotes, pictures and links we like more than writing long blog posts

It makes sharing quotes so easier - Just select some text on the page and click the share on Tumblr bookmarklet and a quote type of post is shared on tumblr.

It has lovely themes - more stunning themes than in blogger

These two things have made me love it.. Now I use delicious for saving and sharing good links (Delicious automatically posts to twitter). Twitter has a 140 character limit and everything is a url where we have to click to see it, Tumblr simply helps aggregate all the good content in one place.

Just take a look and may be you will also like it very much.

This is my tumblog: http://ananth.tumblr.com/

Check it and let me know your comments.

Have you 'Bing'ed?

Microsoft has been trying from a lot of time to beat Google in the search game. Its latest attempt Bing has bridged the gap between google mostly. The results are as good as google. But is it is sufficient for me to switch from google to bing?

For normal web search I still prefer google search. But I found one thing for which I will use Bing instead of google. It is image search. It is not that it is spectacurly developed compared to google, but the presentation is very very useful. In google you have to click next after each page but in Bing it has infinte scroll down from which we can see useful images without having to click next. I like this feature so much that I have started making image searches mostly only Bing only. Will be happy if google can replicate this.

In Defence of Google - On its role in Newspapers Problems

With the falling circulation and ad revenues, the newspaper industry is unable to make its ends meet. This problem is more pronounced in the developed countries where internet penetration is high. Newspapers satisfied a need of knowing whats happening around us in the world. Though this is a need, it is not so important that people pay any amount of money for obtaining it. More so if the news is general political or daily news which does not have great value as it changes daily and yesterday’s news is not generally uselful. The case is different with niche media which has specific audience and a little more shelf life than a daily. Thus people will not pay more than few dollars (in the US) or few rupees (in India) for reading that news. Previously, newspapers were able to subsidize the costs of newsprint with the ads they put in the paper and ofcourse the small subscription amount which amounted to something. The advent of internet affected the news papers in many ways than one.

1. With the ability to publish information virtually free, more stories are published about any incident without any cost.

2. With the ability to update the information realtime, the need to wait till the next day or next edition of newspaper is gone.

3. With the information already available online before the newspapers and read, people found reading newspaper the next day redundant resulting in reduction in subscription numbers of newspapers resulting in loss of revenue for newspapers

4. With more people reading the news online and ability to target the ads more effectively, the ad dollars moved online thus resulting in less ads on the newspapers resulting in further loss of revenue.

All these conditions sort of reinforced each other resulting in daily newspaper business becoming unsustainable.

The newspapers have to recognize that their business model is no longer effective. It is not that they did not provide any value to the customer, but whatever value they have provided is being provided at a lesser cost and in a better way to the customer. Thats why the readers are willing to leave the printed newspaper in favour of online editions of the news. People in the newspaper industry, rather than understanding the fact and trying to adapt are trying to blame google or trying to protect their content.

But is blame game on google right? Google provides value to the people. It allows us to know which is the best story a particular topic to read. As there are lot of publishers on the net, google does a very valuable job of filtering the news and provide the best of them. Nick Carr says

Wow. “A billion clicks.” “Millions of dollars.” Such big numbers. What Google doesn’t mention is that the billions of clicks and the millions of ad dollars are so fragmented among so many thousands of sites that no one site earns enough to have a decent online business. Where the real money ends up is at the one point in the system where traffic is concentrated: the Google search engine. Google’s overriding interest is to (a) maximize the amount and velocity of the traffic flowing through the web and (b) ensure that as large a percentage of that traffic as possible goes through its search engine and is exposed to its ads. One of the most important ways it accomplishes that goal is to promote the distribution of as much free content as possible through as many sites as possible on the web.

Yes google does that, it organizes the information in a best first manner and it is an enormous service to the people, it does it for free and it is best for the end user. Hence customers and I love it.

The problem is not Google, but their failing business model - The internet has disrupted their business model and now they have to figure out a new business model. Ofcourse, changing their robots.txt file and not getting indexed in google is not at all a solution, but blaming google or trying to extract money from it is also not. So what is the solution? Unwittingly this google-bash post has a solution.

The key to Google’s monopoly control over content distribution on the web is its ability to judge what’s most relevant in an increasingly large sea of content. If media companies want to compete with Google, they need to look at the source of its power — judging good content, which enables Google to be the most efficient and effective distributor of content. They also need to look at Google’s fundamental limitation — its judgment is dependent on OTHER people expressing their judgment of content in the form of links. Above all, they need to look at sources of content judgment that Google currently can’t access, because they are not yet expressed as links on the web.

So they understand that the ability of google to judge whats relevant is their problem - and the simple solution is that if their content is the best they will be rewarded always isn’t it? If the newspapers can give the speed, flexibility and ease of usage and unique content then newspapers can get money. But newspapers compete on ubiquitous content not unique content and I am not sure how much value they will add in reporting facts.!!! This is the whole problem, you have to differentiate yourself to charge more or otherwise why will users pay to you when there are people who are willing to report for free in their blogs?

Current news is always interesting and internet makes it easy to publish and discover. Newspapers which used to do this are not relevant in that segment. Niche papers will continue to to make money. I think the subscription model will not work for normal newspapers as who will be willing to pay for a thing that can be obtained for free? Does it mean that newspapers have to die? They have to adapt to a lean and mean way of doing things. If they differentiate themselves, engage with people and develop a brand, people will come to their site directly without going to google by subscribing to rss feeds or email alerts.

I wondered what we are going to miss by the going away of newspapers? What about the investigative journalism that newspapers do? And seths post on this topic clears all my doubt on that he says -

Punchline: if we really care about the investigation and the analysis, we’ll pay for it one way or another. Maybe it’s a public good, a non profit function. Maybe a philanthropist puts up money for prizes. Maybe the Woodward and Bernstein of 2017 make so much money from breaking a story that it leads to a whole new generation of journalists.

So whats the conclusion ? Newspapers will not remain the current form. Newspapers which embrace the way of doing things on the internet will thrive and grow, others will fail but we will never miss them.

Update: Another post here in support of google

Update: A post here on how the newspapers can earn money. I think this is spot on. And I am sure they will surely be making more money on internet

Google Notebook Rocks

I didn't use any online notebooks till now, but when I saw the announcement of google notebook on official google blog I decided to try it once. I have to accept that I am hooked. First of all the functionality of notebook is so cool. whenever we are searching for some topic on the net and we encounter variety of materials on the web. We read the material, even if we like only a part of the material presented there, we had to save the whole page or file or else we had to copy the material and place it in a notepad or a doc. It was a little cumbersome. Imagine if we close and accidently hit no on the confirmation dialog..! All our efforts are lost. Come notebook, noting information on the web is very easy. You can copy paste the matter into the notebook using your google account. But what was the feature I liked most was the plugin into the browsers which when installed would make your life mighty simpler. All you have to do is to select some text which you want to note and click on clip on the notebook. This feature is lovely. It gets saved into the notebook. The interface is also clean as other google products. Try it..!

Get Alerts on your mobile for free with Google Calendar...

I was trying the google calendar and was trying to find the similarities and dissimilarities with my most used calendar application - MSOutlook. I found that the differences were not in terms of functionality but it was leveraging in its online nature. There was collobaration between calendars, we can search public events. Calendars can be shared. With the help of shared calendar we can map all our telugu holidays in my calendar. It helps for better planning..All these features on one side... I was not convinced about going for google calendar..But one feature is very impressive.. In my opinion, it can make a lot of difference to our schedule and the way we work.. We can configure google calendar to alert us not on the computer screen... but on our mobile phone... Suddenly the possibilities are unlimited.. We are not at the mercy of sitting in front of our system to get an alert. Mobile phone being a ubiquitous device will help us get alerts any where in the world.. If we take enough time to plan our day..then google will do its mite to help us achieve our goals.... Long live Google...!!

Its a superb peice of software and you should surely try it.. If not for anything else... You can atleast set a reminder for your friends birthday so that you dont forget it and get gyan from him for not wishing...!!!!!!! Try it out at Google Calendar and comment about it ...

Try this.. It is awesome.. you will surely become a google specialist..

http://www.schnuderoderchoder.ch/brain-teaser/


This is a brain teaser my friend anand asked me to try... Really it was very difficult.. Try it

Good Telugu Website www.nalamothu.net

Today I was searching for reviews of radio channels in hyderabad. I found an article in a blog which was written by a doctor. Clicking my way through this site I found a complete website in telugu with all the links like a portal. The link for review of radio stations is
http://telugu-talk.blogspot.com/2006/12/fm-radio-stations-in-hyderabad-review.html

It also had links to various blogs and websites. I was really very happy that a telugu person has a commendable web presence serving all the other telugu people. Whats more is that he even offers free services to other people.

Free Services: Search engine optimization and Adsense placement. Guidance on System and software problems. Advice on Medical and Health issues.

These are the lines directly taken from the site. visit the site at www.nalamothu.net
There are various links and the link for currently running contests on the net was interesting. visit it and enjoy..

Predictions for 2007 -- Technology

While I was browsing through the predictions for 2007, I found an interesting poll in one of the predictions at

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/2007_web_predictions.php . The predictions were also pretty interesting and comprehensive. Particularly what attracted me most was the poll which was being conducted about technology will help any search engine overtake google.

You may like to participate in the poll. Access the pol from the above link only.

The poll is like this

Just watch the different options for that poll. They are different search options like Artificial Intelligence,

people powered search, previews,clustering,visualization,vertical search,personalized search, social search....! Oh I never knew there were these many search technologies.. And see the companies based on these technologies, the world is trying hard to beat google.. and by the way I am going to post on general understanding of each technology and how it may affect google.




I havenot tried all the sites there but I have seen del.icio.us, Snap, Live Image Search, Technorati.. All these are powerful alternatives to google.




The Snap and Live Image search can be really helpful to view the preview of the site without going to the site in the result.




del.ici0.us is completely user submitted links and are really helpful but they are not complete, still some good information can lurk without a

ny user having submitting a link to del.icio.us. So it has to mature to be more useful to users.




Technorati uses a better way it counts the inbound and outbound links from a site, number of times it had been favor

ited in technorati and based on traffic rankings from alexa.com and lot of other criteria it ranks the pages and they are really very good results. It can even now be used as an alternative to google especially for blogs.




Are you not excited to know the result of the poll?? The poll is not yet closed but I would paste the results till know




So the world believes that personalized search(22%) can topple google with considerable proportion believing that artificial intelligence(20%) will do the trick. People who support me also are not less (19%) for people powered search. Read my previous article on thinking beyond google . I think vertical search is also notable(14%). Lets wait and see which technology will take the lead in toppling google off its seat...or we have to see whether google will make itself better by adopting any of the technologies given here..! Only time can tell that.!

Get A Free Art of the Start - Signed by Guy Kawasaki

There is this website called startup.in which is a site to profile the start-ups in India. It has news and views on the start-ups based in India. Wish it will become something like techcrunch.com to India. In order to publicize the site as well as startups in india, this site has started a unique offer. It is offering famous book by Guy Kawasaki ( Author of "Rich Dad Poor Dad" ) , "Art of the start" book signed by the guy itself. It can be obtained it two ways. One you can write articles about the startups-- You can tell how and what related to a startup. You write those essays, publish in your blogs or somewhere else but post the link in the comments below the topic and you can stand to win a book for free or else if you just write about this scheme in any blog also you can win it if you are lucky. Go to this page and check it.. http://startups.in/India/story.php?title=Get-Art--Start-free-Autographed-by-Guy-Kawasaki

You can read the review of the book at
http://www.demop.com/thetedrap/2005/05/book-review-art-of-start-guy-kawasaki.html

visit the blog of kawasaki at blog.guykawasaki.com

All the best!

Looking beyond general search engines--Dont Search and filter but Search on filtered results

I dont know how many people's first web stop is google for information they want... but I think its a massive proportion of the web users. Remembering url's is almost passe now. Just type it into to google and off we go. But the problem with the contemporary search engines is that we have to wade to lot of search results to exactly reach our point, I mean the information we wanted. But in the age of web 2.0 which is all about collaboration, there is a better way of getting the most relevant results. The answer is social bookmarking sites.

Wikipedia defines social bookmarking as Social bookmarking is a web based service to share Internet bookmarks. In this system, while surfing the net if a person comes across a highly interesting or useful topic he can submit the link to the bookmarking site with a tag or a set of tags. Other users can search this links with the set of tags users have submitted and directly going through the whole cycle of searching, reviewing and deciding its usability. In this way he can use his time better and also discover obscure but relevant posts. In this way the site can become more accessible. The next advantage is that it automatically ranks the links on the basis of the number of people submitted this link. If more people like the matter in that link more people will submit it and hence it will become more popular and its rank goes up. Thus the next advantage is that most relevant links will always come at the top and also that the relevance is measured by a human and not a machine and hence it will be more useful to the end user.

It has some disadvantages also.

It is still in infancy as people still have to know about this and submit the link to these type of sites for other people to browse.

The tags with which the pages are labelled are not standard and the user may use his own tags for a link which has been tagged with other label by other person. Hence search may not always produce the right results.

Some people may use this to manipulate the popularity of their site by submitting their url many times to such sites thereby increasing the ranking of the site, even if it doesn't contain the best information on the labelled topic.

But on the whole it is a alternative to the contemporary search engines where the ranking is decided by a non-humans. If this technology matures and good checks are in place to filter out manipulations for traffic then I think it can be more useful and may even race with contemporary search engines.!

Famous social book marking sites are delicious and digg. I have placed links for them after the post. If you find this article useful and informative you can submit it to respective sites.

I have also added the feed options on the site. You can subscribe it via a reader or directly subscribe via e-mail.