Type-casting

I had predicted that something like this might happen in my blog post 6.5 years ago, :-)

Cricinfo turns 20

I came to know today that Cricinfo has just turned 20. While reading some of the articles, I realized that I too have completed a decade of following Cricinfo. As a huge cricket fan since childhood, Cricinfo has been my daily companion for the last 10 years. While I do not recall the very 1st time I visited the site, I do remember that I regularly started visiting Cricinfo in 2003, when I entered B-school. Getting access to a broadband network for the 1st time in my life, I began checking scores and reading articles on a daily basis in my Hostel room. I still remember the day when I followed Brian Lara's march towards 400, and "multi-casted" the event on our internal messaging software to the entire Hostel. We would even go to the extent of opening the site on the desktops in our classrooms used by our Professors to share their presentations, and project the ball by ball commentary on the projector, so that cricket crazy students like me could check the score while we waited for the Prof. to enter. I remember how, as a Class Representative, it was my duty to close the window as soon as a Prof. entered our classroom. One one occasion, I mistakenly minimized the window instead of closing it. In those days, when a batsman was dismissed for Zero, Cricinfo used to make a duck walk across the screen. This happened even if the browser window was minimized. And as you would expect, soon after a Prof. started teaching, a duck appeared nonchalantly walking across the projector behind him. Thankfully for me, he did not notice the collective chuckles of the students and turn around to see what was being projected on the wall behind him.

Just like we sometimes get nostalgic about our lives before the internet and mobile phones, I am thinking back to the days before Cricinfo. In those days, I used to religiously subscribe to magazines like Cricket Samrat and Sportstar, for my dose of Cricket scores and articles. And I used to note down details of all Sachin's Test 100s in my notebook, for reference. This also gives you some idea about how long Sachin has been playing.

Happy 20th birthday to Cricinfo !

e-Wedding

When one of my best friends told me about his wedding date a couple of months back, I was pretty distraught. There was no way I could attend his wedding, as I would be out of the country at that time. Not only was I sad about missing this momentous occasion in his life, I was also disappointed at missing a chance to catch up with all my old friends that I would have met after years, at the wedding. I could also feel the disappointment in my friend who was getting married, that one of his closest pals would not be around to see him get hitched.

Then one day, over a telephonic conversation, we hatched a plan to overcome our geographical boundaries. As with almost all life's problems these days, the web came to your rescue. We decided to use my friend's laptop and webcam, along with his wireless internet data card connection to webcast his wedding LIVE via Skype.

And thus, the web helped Me and his Grandma, who was unable to attend on account of ill health, register our e-presence at wedding from different parts of the world.

Related Post - GBM

Should newspapers charge for online content?

As I work in the Media vertical in my organization, I am constantly bombarded with information about how newspapers are struggling as more and more readers turn to online modes of news consumption. The web is abuzz with articles on the biggest problem newspapers are facing today - online revenue is growing, but not fast enough to make up for falling print advertising. This got me thinking about what could be the real reason behind this.

In an ideal world, the amount of revenue generated by one medium should be somewhat proportional to the readership of that medium. Example, if 30% of NYT’s readership comes from NYT.com and 70% from the offline newspaper, around 20-30% of ad revenue for NYT should also be generated from NYT.com. This is clearly not the case; otherwise the above problem might not have arisen.

One factor that comes to mind is that the effectiveness of online advertising can be measured much more easily and accurately than offline advertising. For example, it is very easy to find out how many people clicked on your ads on a news website, but very difficult to measure how many readers paid attention to an ad posted on page 5 of a newspaper. The only measure of effectiveness advertisers probably went by over the years was the sales volume, which may or may not have been impacted solely by the ads they published in newspapers.

Hence, for all the decades that companies had been posting ads on offline newspapers, they may never have been able to guess the value (eyeballs) generated by their ads with a great deal of accuracy. So they continued to pump in a lot more money than it was probably necessary, into newspaper ads.

But advertisers today are no longer constrained by limited amounts of information about online ads. Hence they are now perhaps not going over-board with their online ad spending. The amount of online ad spend is being driven by more precise information about the value obtained. Thus, advertisers are perhaps not being as profligate with their online ads spending today, as they had been with offline ads all these years.

The rise of targeted online advertising might also be a reason for the dip in proportional revenue. While in an offline newspaper, targeted advertising would only be limited to placing a sports equipment ad on the sports page, or placing a home furniture ad in a special home improvement supplement, online ads can be targeted based on the reader’s demographic and historical browsing data.

This factor is making advertisers smarter; helping them place ads with more accuracy, and spend more wisely. They are now paying for ads to be displayed to only a subset of readers accessing the news website that belong to their target segment, and not for the entire population. Thus, advertisers are perhaps spending less on online ads for a new campaign as compared to what they might have done in an offline counterpart in yesteryears.

The above factors, along with other drivers like higher number of avenues for advertising available today (mobile, TV, non-news websites etc.) as compared to the past, might be key reasons why online ad revenues are not being able to reach the same heights as offline revenues of the past.

Charging users for online content seems to be the favorite line of thought pursued by most media houses today, for increasing online revenues. I beg to differ with this strategy. Free content is the very DNA of the internet. All great internet innovations, from e-mail to social networking, have thrived on being free to the end user (How many takers did we see for the paid 20 MB e-mail accounts that that Yahoo and Hotmail used to offer to users when the free accounts had 2 MB space, in the pre-Gmail era?). Hence, charging for online content might not be the wisest thing to do. Especially since one is always likely to find relatively equivalent quality of free content somewhere else on the web.

The problem caused by data can perhaps also be solved with more data. It might be a good idea for news websites to invest more heavily into web analytics and obtain greater degrees of information about their readers and their reading behavior. This could help them broaden the gamut of options they provide advertisers for targeted advertising; and even explore options that advertisers have never done before. This can drive newer and more diverse ways for posting targeted ads; and consequently earn them more revenue.

The utopian aim should be to reach a stage where they have enough information so that all the ads shown to no two readers on the same webpage are exactly the same. After all, one of the key advantages the web has over offline mediums is that it is not constrained by size and shape. While one can only stuff in so many ads in a copy of an offline newspaper, the avenues for customizing content on a web-page are limitless.

Challenges of customization of online news

Warning:- Technical post ahead.

When I came across this article sometime back, I was specially intrigued by one particular portion –

Everyone can publish, and everyone will - This is a problem, but since online journalism is still in its relative infancy it’s one that can be solved (we’re technology optimists, remember?). The experience of consuming news on the web today fails to take full advantage of the power of technology. It doesn’t understand what users want in order to give them what they need. When I go to a site like the New York Times or the San Jose Mercury, it should know what I am interested in and what has changed since my last visit. If I read the story on the US stimulus package only six hours ago, then just show me the updates the reporter has filed since then (and the most interesting responses from readers, bloggers, or other sources). If Thomas Friedman has filed a column since I last checked, tell me that on the front page. Beyond that, present to me a front page rich with interesting content selected by smart editors, customized based on my reading habits (tracked with my permission).

This got me thinking about the way presentation of news is expected to evolve in news websites, and how it would differ from offline newspapers. Most news websites these days do support “Guided navigation” features, suggesting articles to readers though links like “You might also be interested in..”, “People who read this also read..” etc. While “guided navigation” does have its obvious benefits, I have a difference of opinion with the suggestion that news websites of the future can completely replace the reading pleasure of offline newspapers. Anyone suggesting that content on a news website should ONLY be tailored to the interests and reading patterns of the reader, forgets that one of the key benefits of reading an offline newspaper is the ability to BROWSE through all topics all the time, and figure out what is interesting to you at that moment. For example, Mr. X may never have read the Finance section of the news website in the past, but if he sees an article about lay-offs or pay-cuts in the Finance section one day, he would definitely read it. Similarly, Mr. X might never read the Science and Health section, but might be interested in an article on an ailment which he suffers from. If the content of presented to Mr. X by the news website is tailored only on what Mr. X have been reading since the time he started using the service, such articles would never show up for him. Such algorithms would only narrow down a reader’s vision and knowledge acquisition to fields he or she has been 'historically' interested in (historically here means the history carried by the service provider), which might be biased by the previous set of articles and news items accessed on that service. Hence, an attempt of this kind, narrows the reader’s interest and intellectual growth in the direction defined by the interest he or she had from the time the reader started using the service. I do understand that such algorithms do get more “intelligent” as the duration of use increases. But there is a limit to which an algorithm can guess what a person wants to read.

A hybrid approach might be the way to go in the future. Front pages of news websites can have 2 sections, one presenting the latest headlines and editorial articles belonging to various topics (that is same for all readers), and one that presents articles based on historical data about the reader’s reading habits (stored with the reader’s permission). Going forward, algorithms of the future, apart from a person’s reading habits, must also consider other attributes like a person’s background (educational, professional, personal, demographic) while coming up with customized articles of the reader’s interest. This approach might help counter the two scenarios mentioned above. In this aspect, integration with social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn etc. might be an option worth considering.

6 Online Vices

This tag from Nikhil has forced me to come out of my online slumber.

I agree with all the vices mentioned by Nikhil, hence I will start my list from no.6. But I will go one step further and list 6 vices from my side. :-)

6. Sending mails with "Hi" or other such meaningless subject lines

In these days when an average person's mailbox consists of hundreds and thousands of mails, and searching for the right mail is a time consuming and often irritating activity, the least one can expect is the sender to use proper subject lines in mails (indicating the content of the mail), so that the recipient can easily figure out what the mail is all about.

7. Sending mails with no subject line

This is not an out-an-out wise as it were. It might sometimes make sense to send mails without subject lines. But one should try to avoid it unless absolutely necessary, for the same reasons as mentioned in point no. 6.

8. Typing entire mails in CAPITAL letters

This is a universally accepted vice. Not only does a mail in ALL CAPS indicate that the composer is try to shout aloud at the top of his voice, but it also makes it very difficult to read.

9. Using multiple font colors in one mail

While it might be necessary to use more than one font color in a mail (for highlighting a particular portion), extravagant use of multiple font colors various sentences / words in the same e-mail a big turn-off.

10. Not being able to find mails in one's mailbox and asking people to re-send mails frequently

Mailboxes of today have ceased to be tools of leisure and become the single most important repository of personal information. Hence, it is imperative that people manage their mails properly, and not loose or misplace them frequently. Given the extremely high number of mails received by everyone these days, it is natural to misplace an odd mail or two at times. But this should definitely not be a chronic problem.

11. Using "Read Receipt" and / or "High Priority" in all mails

Excessive use / abuse of anything makes it loose its value.

My Gmail Wishlist: 5 features I would like to see in Gmail..

Regular readers of this blog will know that I am a huge Google and Gmail fan. Not only do I use Gmail very frequently[1][2], I also keep thinking of ways of making this fantastic service even better. Here is a list of 5 features that I feel Gmail should possess. Some of these features are already offered by other e-mail applications.

1. Delete / archive in one click. I believe this feature is present in AOL mail. When you mouse over a conversation, icons for deleting and archiving the conversation should appear automatically, and you should be able to delete or archive any conversation in one click (as opposed to 2 clicks- checking the check-box next to the conversation and clicking on Delete). The check-boxes next to the conversation can be used only when deleting a number of mails together.

2. Sorting. I know that Google believes in "Search. Don't sort." philosophy, but I would still like to be able to sort mails based on various criteria like sender, date, mail size etc.. I know that Google believes that you can perform "sorting" function through various combinations of search keywords, but that still involves remembering the search keywords etc.. Direct sorting is much easier, as it is just a matter of clicking the Sort button on sortable fields. Sorting can also be used along with Searching, in order to locate a mail faster.

Here is an example. You know that a friend of yours sent you a very large multimedia file many months back. You want to locate that mail, but do not have any idea when he sent it, what was the content or subject line of the mail and what was the title or size of the multimedia file. Plus you have 100s of mails from the friend in your mailbox, and looking for one particular mail sent by him by just searching for the friend's name or e-mail id is not feasible. If you have the sorting feature, you can search for all mails from your friend, and then sort the mails in descending order of attachment size. You will be able to find the mail you were looking for in the initial set of results.

I understand that implementation of sorting feature can create complications in a conversation based e-mail service like Gmail. A conversation can have multiple senders, multiple dates and multiple attachments. But I trust Google to find an innovative and intuitive way of doing this, if they ever decide to do so.

3. Video Chat. Just like the normal Gchat window appears as part of the Gmail window, it would be really cool to have a video chat window appear as part of Gchat. This would help a person video chat with one or more friends while he is composing other e-mails/ navigating within Gmail.

4. Save a mail in Drafts or Outbox and set the time of delivery. Suppose you need to send a mail to a friend on 14th of this month. But you know that you will be traveling and will not have access to Gmail on the 14th. You can then compose and save the mail in the draft section, and set the delivery date to 14th. I suppose this is similar to the existing reminders functionality. But giving this option as an email is also a nice to have feature. This feature is already present in MS Outlook. It is specially handy when you want to let your boss know that you are working late. You just need compose a mail to him and set the delivery timing as 1 AM :-)

5. Forward a bunch of mails together. Again, this is present in Outlook, and would be good if Gmail can provide this as well. There are times when you need to give a new joinee in your team a dump of all the conversations that took place before he joined. The Bulk forward feature can save time in such cases, as it takes away the time you would need to individually select a number of conversations and forward them one by one.

In case anyone reading this post has some other feature he would like to see in Gmail in his mind, I invite him to share his thoughts as a comment.

The Gmail Story of the ‘Arbit Choudhury’ Trio !!

Hemant vaguely remembers the 26th of June 2004 when he got an invite to create a Gmail ID from a batch mate at NITIE – a management school in Mumbai, India. He got so fascinated by Gmail that he soon invited Shubham and Nikhil – his closest pals – on 26th of August 2004. Those days of 2004 and these days of 2007; the trio haven’t looked back or anywhere else for email.

The refreshingly simple and innovative and clutter-free interface giving keyboard shortcuts (for key board freaks like us) swept all three of us off our feet and it was almost love at first sight. :-) The interface, the speed, the search capability, the labels, everything was truly extra-ordinary; besides the unimaginable 1GB of mailbox space it was giving those days – come to think of it; today it stands at about 6 GB (and we’ve got so habituated to the space that one of us has 45% of the 6GB consumed).

Gmail, which redefined web based email services, slowly become our nerve center. We moved all our contacts to it and made Gmail our single point of contact for all practical purposes. We did still have friends on hotmail and yahoo and other services, but they were also being infected by the Gmail-virus and gradually ‘converting’.

Together the 3 of us have shared the joy of working on Arbit Choudhury – The worlds first MBA comic character. We created Arbit Choudhury when we lived in the same campus, but post our MBA, we went on to join demanding jobs which took us to different parts of the world.

Gmail helped us stay in touch and seamlessly coordinate all our work and allied activities. A majority of our online communication, brainstorming and discussions shifted to Gmail, besides instant messengers. And when Gmail integrated a chat with mail, we gave up other messengers and migrated “full time” to Gmail. Amongst the three of us, conversations have been exchanged across 3 Continents (Asia, Europe and North America); 8 countries (India, Switzerland, UAE, UK, USA, Mauritius, Malaysia & Thailand) and 20 cities (Mumbai, Pune, Hyderabad, Bangalore, Chennai, Bilaspur, Baroda, Bhopal, Geneva, Lucerne, Zurich, London, Norwich, Kuala Lumpur, Kuwait, Dubai, Baltimore, Jersey City, Bangkok, Pattaya) over the last 3 years.

Arbit Choudhury comic strips are released every 15 days and all communication on this has been happening through Gmail over the last 3 years. Each comic idea is evaluated by 3 of us first and a panel formed out of 20-25 friends before it enters our ‘idea bank’.

Thereafter Shubham creates the pencil sketch, scans it and sends it by Gmail; and then refines the sketch based on feedback. Once the pencil sketch is finalized, Hemant colors it using an imaging tool and the final ‘comic’ again goes through a feedback routing on Gmail. Finally, the mail-text accompanying the comic also goes through a similar loop of discussions on Gmail, before the comic gets released to our mailing list.

Till date, over 100 comic strips (and emails) have been discussed, finalized and quality checks done through Gmail. In fact, in all our GMail boxes the labels around ‘Arbit’ are by far the heaviest.

Besides Gmail; allied services of Google are also used for ‘Arbit activities’; discussing Arbit plans on GChat, scheduling Arbit activities (like website backups) on Google Calender, simultaneously working on shared documents on Google Documents (previously Writely) etc.

GMail has frankly been the life blood of Arbit e-volution over the last 3 years. Today it is also playing a similar role while we are dreaming of our own start-up. It is the nerve centre of all out ideas, brainstorming and discussions. For us, Gmail, along with the allied services, proved to an ultimate collaborative tool to work on.

The extent of our dependence on GMail and it's related services was best summed up by Hemant, when he blogged about it in his own inimitable style, stating that our daily routines begin with "Google before Gargle". Also, it become apparent when Nikhil commented once that if someone wants to know us, he/she should read through our Gmail.

We believe that today, GMail has virtually reached the pedestal of the best e-mail service in the world. It has done so not by simply meeting customer expectations, but by giving them something they never imagined in their wildest dreams. And by doing this, it has left all competition playing a hopeless catch-up game. With all the wonderful innovations Google has brought so far, it has also raised the bar for itself in the future. Google users will continue to expect such extra-ordinary innovations in the future too. And we have no doubt they will succeed.

Come to think of it, we even discussed about participating in the Gmail story contest and discussed all about it over Gmail from 3 different cities across 2 countries. :-)

-- The “Arbit Choudhury” Trio

Here is our story on Google's GMail Stories website.

Online Habits

My 5 Favorite Websites:-
1. Wikipedia
2. Cricinfo
3. Orkut
4. IBNLive
5. Moneycontrol

Favorite Browser:-
Mozilla Firefox

Google Tools and Services I use:-
1. Reader
2. Docs and Spreadsheets
3. Bookmark
4. Calendar
5. Picassa
6. Maps
7. Checkout
8. Gmail Mobile
9. Alert

Tagging Nikhil, Hemant, Manish and Abhishek to share their online habits.

Update:- Nikhil , Manish and Abhishek have responded to the tag.

GBM

The other day, I was chatting with my cousin in the US over Skype. As she had to step out for some urgent work, she asked me to keep her 8 year old son busy by chatting with him till she came back. She set up the web-cam so that we could see each other while chatting and left. I chatted with the kid for about 45 minutes before his mother returned. On her return, she thanked me and said that this might be the first instant when someone sitting in India had been baby-sitting a kid in the US !!

Is this the next big thing in outsourcing?? :-)

GBM- Global Baby-sitting Model

Blogging 2.0 has arrived !!

Bloozler , the next wave in Blogging, was launched at BarCampMumbai two days back.

Bloozler is the ‘Tool’ from bloozle which enables anyone to read all the blogs / news feeds etc in his/her reading list at one single place. No more going to each blog individually and checking for updates. No more missing out on the latest post. No more keeping track of your (blog / rss feeds) reading list by maintaining it in favourites or in document files.

So whats the Big Deal !! There are already some good blog aggregators / feed readers available. Whats with bloozle’s bloozler !!

Well, Bloozler tries to transform the simple act of blog reading and the attempt is to take it to the next level of maturity. Blogging is a phenomenon which has given netizens the ultimate freedom of expression. Simultaneously, it has become a nice source of latest happenings, news, views and reviews. In this Web 2.0 age of User Generated Content; people just don’t want to read some blogs out of plain interest to spend leisure time. They want more. They want to know more and more about the best blogs around, they want to increase the width as well as the depth of their reading. People not only want to read some blogs they already know of, they also want to read the ‘best’ blogs around (but usually don’t do so since they do not know the best ones around). Also the quality in these best blogs may not be consistent.

Bloozle takes into account all these current and future needs of the global blogging community. Conceptually, Bloozle is the platform which brings together the blogs you read, your friends read and everybody (using bloozler) reads. It then brings in a mechanism for ‘organizing’ the complex world of blogging information. Rating and tagging features form the foundation for organizing and filtering the huge abundance of user generated content resulting in ‘blog float’, the best blog posts or feeds automatically floating to the surface for everyone to read.

Bloozler is the web-based tool at your disposal for taking advantage of the revolutionary concept called bloozle. This web based tool will enable you to access your reading list from any internet connected computer terminal in the world and deliver the hottest blogs and posts right onto your screen.

Do check out Bloozler

I've Got Mail

26th August 2004 was a big day in my live. It was the day I opened my 1st GMail account :-)

GMail was launched on the 1st of April that year, As part of a fantastic promotion strategy, GMail was not open to all net-izans of the world, but only to a select few who received invites from existing GMail account holders. This generated unprecedented curiously, with everyone itching to have a 1GB mailbox, powered with Google’s unparalleled search capabilities, and a host of other features no other e-mail provider had ever dreamt of. By the beginning of August, some of my batchmates at B-school had acquired GMail ids, and other net-crazy students like me were bugging them incessantly, asking for GMail invites. I was personally interested in grabbing a GMail account as early as possible, as I wanted to possess the id "My first name"@gmail.com . But unfortunately, that was not to be. By the time I eventually got an invite from a batchmate, this id had been taken.

Once I had my GMail id, I was completely hooked to it. The interface, the speed, the search capability, the labels, everything was truly extra-ordinary. Soon, I embarked on a large scale migration from all my existing email accounts to GMail; sending my GMail id to all contacts, exporting all address books to GMail, changing the subscription for most of my Yahoo Groups to GMail etc. etc. Very soon, as the avalanche of Arbit Choudhury Fan Mails started descending on my GMail box, I realized that shifting to GMail was indeed a great idea, since archiving hundreds of fan mails would have been impossible in any other mailbox, given the fact that most other providers were only offering 5-10MB space at the time.

I still remember some of my friends having initial apprehensions about GMail, worrying about the fact that GMail would “read” their personal mails for placing “relevant text ads” beside the messages. GMail enthusiasts like me disregarded such notions as trivial trepidations of technology laggards. Any radically new concept always attracts its shares of skepticism, and GMail was no different.

Over the last 3 years, GMail has virtually reached the pedestal of the best e-mail service in the world. Though Yahoo Mail supposedly has more accounts, I believe this is due to the fact that it has been around for a considerably longer time than GMail. Apart from a few old timers who have been using legacy email services like Yahoo Mail and Hotmail for years, and a few others who have deep rooted apprehensions our the privacy of their mails, GMail has become the pre-eminent mail service of the times, liked by one and all. But like most other Google products, GMail too attracts it’s fair share of controversy, which I guess is due to the radically different way in which they go about doing their stuff at Google, as compared to their conventional counterparts.

In spite of it’s enormous popularity, very few people use GMail efficiently. Many people use GMail as an e-mail attic, dumping all their low importance mails in the GMail-box. Many others, even though they use GMail regularly, do not know how “Labels” work, and use labels just like they use “Folders” in other mailboxes. And then there are those who just don’t know how to organize their GMail box, and keep thousands of unread mails in their inboxes. This is akin to owning a King Size Mansion, but keeping it in a messy and unkempt state.

Ever since I began using GMail, I have tried to follow a few basic GMail manners, so that I can make more efficient use of my mailbox. These manners might not work for everyone, since each of us like to organize ourselves differently, but give a general idea about GMail etiquette.

1. Only keep those mails in the Inbox that require further action, and archive all other mails. This helps keep the inbox clean and uncluttered, highlighting the current action items, and relegating the rest to the background.

2. Do not archive any mail without a attaching appropriate label(s) to it. If you do so, it might forever get lost amidst thousands of other mails in the "All mail" folder, and you may never be able to track it. If the mail is not significant enough to deserve a full fledge label, use the label "Miscellaneous" :-)

3. Add a filter to all the "faltu" (insignificant) mails you receive from various yahoo groups and other subscriptions, "lebel" them appropriately, and make then "skip inbox", saving your Inbox from thousands of irrelevant “unread” mails.

The danger with keeping an unclean mailbox cluttered with many "faltu" mails is that one can easily miss out on an important mail amidst all the trash.

You can always visit the label periodically and check the mails.

4. If there is a “regular” mailer that you receive that has high importance, create a filter to attach a “Label” to it, but do not add the “skip inbox” condition. You can read the mail in the inbox, and then archive it. Creating a filter to attach a “Label” helps you avoid the repetitive task to attaching a label to a certain category of mails manually every time.

5. Periodically visit the “Sent” mails folder, and attach relevant labels to all the sent items.

6. Periodically peep into the “Spam” folder to check if any important mail has landed up over there. Sometimes, some important mails get filtered by the spam guard and end up in spam folder. Hence, it makes sense to periodically browse through the spam folder to check if any important mail is stuck there. Keep emptying the spam folder at frequent intervals, so that you do not have to browse through too many spam mails at one time.

7. Though not deleting any emails is a core GMail philosophy, it makes sense to delete mails that are of absolutely no present or future use. Having a King Size Mansion does not mean that you never throw out trash, does it? :-)

Many people reading this post might wonder why I am harping on the importance of labels, when you can search and dig out virtually anything in GMail. While searching for a keyword can help you locate all the mails containing the same, all the search results might not be relevant. For example, suppose you have a bank account in ABC bank, and they send you frequent mailers about their offers and your account transactions. If you just search for the keyword “ABC”, you will not only get the mails that came from the bank, but will also end up getting all the mails that you sent or received from other sources, that contained the keyword “ABC”. Locating the mails you received from the bank, will need you to either refine your search (which is difficult since most of us are not aware of the various "query words" that can be used to refine a GMail search), or sift through all the search results manually (which is a tedious and error prone task). This problem gets increasingly magnified as the number of mails containing the keyword increase. Hence, it is always better to organize mails into relevant labels, and then search for the appropriate keyword within the label.

Nikhil recently told me an ingenious technique used by him to organize his GMail. If there is an email which he wants to 'tag' (not label) with certain keywords, he sends a reply in that conversation to himself, with those keywords in it. This helps when one needs to find these emails later based on the 'tags' in addition to the words in that email.

I would like to invite all readers of this post to share some GMail manners they follow, as comments. It would be interesting to know the different ways in which different like to organize their mails.

Please note that the Gmail manners mentioned above should not be confused with Gmail Tools and Tips. A complete list of tips can be found here.

Before you begin to feel that I am a GMail Marketing employee, let am also mention something I don’t like about GMail. :-)

I for one, do not subscribe to their “Search, Don’t Sort” philosophy. At times, one would like to sort emails based on certain criteria, in order to draw certain conclusions. Here is an abstract example. Suppose you remember that a friend of yours sent to an MP3 file containing a beautiful song long time back. But you are either not able to remember the name of the friend, or have too many mails from that friend in your mailbox, and hence cannot locate that particular mail through the GMail search mechanism. If you have a “sort” option, you can sort all the mails in descending order of attachment size, and hence locate the mail containing the MP3 file, as it would be one of the larger mail attachments in your mailbox. While this example might not properly capture the problem I am trying to highlight, I feel it necessary to bring this out as I know a person who refused to shift from Yahoo Mail to GMail, due to the lack of sorting option in GMail.

I have just realized that this is one of the longest blog posts I have ever made. In case my GMail rant has got to your nerves, I end on a lighter note, with this old PJ from an Indian biscuit ad.

Reporter to a male college student:- “What do you think about e-mail?”

Male college student:- “E-mail is good, but fe-male is better !!”

P.S.:- Here is Nikhil's take on GMail Manners

Google Devta !!

When I happened to stumble upon this article yesterday, the last 2 paras caught my special attention.

The next step: the Gdrive

The fact that Google now thinks that it is able to handle the amount of data world wide Gmail requires may indicate that the next step is close at hand, namely the Google Platypus Gdrive.

The Gdrive is not public and you cannot use it yet. But the Google staff can. They can use Platypus as an online disk drive, saving not only email and documents, but any types of files. Welcome to the world of online computing!

I am beginning to wonder, is all this a part of Google's new vision, that of translating each and every offline computer application to an online one. Do they want to create an online equivalent for all offline activities performed on a computer. Are they trying to move the world towards a day when any action which could be performed on a PC today, can also be performed collaboratively online.

Here are some indications that hint such a vision:-

- GMail is virtually an online equivalent of Desktop mail applications like MS Outlook and Lotus, in terms of unlimited storage and archival of mails.

- Google Calender being a an online extension of the Calender functionality in Desktop mail applications.

- Google Docs and Spreadsheets are the online equivalents of word processors and spreadsheet applications like MS Word and Excel.

- There are rumors that Google plans to come up with an online version of MS Office itself, known as Google Office

- GDrive is the online equivalent of the Hard Disk.

I wonder if one day, Google will come up with a completely Online Desktop, when people would just log into their virtual desktops online, and perform all the functions they can with their physical desktops today.

For the billions of Google devotees like me and Nikhil, that would be the ultimate online place of worship !!

e-arth !!

As I had written about one and half years back, the Web is increasingly becoming an irreplaceable and irrepressible part of our lives. This post takes the argument a bit further and dares to imagine what might lie in store in the e-ons ahead.

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I have noticed that over the last few years, my handwriting has progressively deteriorated. While trying to decipher the reason for this, I realized that I am now writing much lesser than what I used to earlier. I type almost everything I need to write, in the form of e-mails, documents, presentations etc. Perhaps the only time in the day when I need to pick up the pen is when I need to sign anything. As a result of all this, I am slowly LOOSING the habit of writing!!

Now let us take this line of thought forward. Children of today are being exposed to computers at increasingly younger ages. They are typing more than we ever did during our childhoods. Soon, assignments in school will be submitted in softcopies (like it happens in higher education). And then, perhaps one day, even exams will be held over a LAN, where school students log into shared machines and type their answers. In the years to come, people will carry laptops/palmtops/PDAs with them all the time, and will key in all the information they need. There would be no hand written signatures either. Every signature will be digital, in the form of fingerprint or retina recognition, or something even smarter.

Hence, the need to WRITE anything with a pen will be completely eliminated!! As a result, humans would completely forget the art of writing, and future generations might only learn to “READ and TYPE”, and not “READ and WRITE”!!

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How would thought leaders of the future work? How would they spread their ideas and vision to trillions across the world? As expected, it would be simpler than ever before.

I can imagine a 21st Century Swami Vivekananda, meditating on a lone rock, off the coast of Kanyakumari, the southern most tip of India. He would have a laptop with a wireless data card on his lap, which he would use to publish his ideas about humanity on this blog. Billions and billions of people would have subscribed to his blog around the world through RSS and Atom feeds. As soon as the Swami would make a blog post, his billions of followers would swarm their PCs. Each blog post would get millions of comments, not only from devotees appreciating the Swami’s thoughts, but from other thought leaders of the world, debating them. He would no longer have to travel half way across the world, to deliver a speech in the Parliament of Religions. All he would do is record his speech on his web cam, and share it with the world on Youtube!!

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Google Before Gargle :-)

In 1996, two university students were cutting their meal expenses in order to save money to be invested in their research project - BackRub. Back then people started their research work from libraries; 'BackRub' changed the way research is begun - today research starts at Google.

In the past couple of years, Google has become a phenomenon - a noun, which is now a verb, being synonymous with search.

I am a self-professed Google Maniac. I use more than 10 different Google services daily. As I have mentioned before, the growth of Arbit Choudhury owes a lot to Google. Google has helped me, Hemant and Nikhil seamlessly co-ordinate and synchronies our activities from 3 different parts of the world. Archiving truckloads of fan mails on GMail, discussing Arbit plans on GChat, scheduling Arbit activities on Google Calender, simultaneously working on Arbit documents on Writely, and reaching out to Arbit fans through Orkut, Google has been the life blood of Arbit e-volution.

And we are not alone. Google, with it’s innovation and imagination, as won over the hearts of net-izans across the world. Google’s core strength lies in offering users products and services way beyond their expectations, and in doing so, transforming the entire landscape of the industry. Right from creating the revolutionary PageRank algorithm for search, to providing virtually unlimited storage and handy conversation based GMail, to seamlessly integrating Messenger services with e-mail, Google has constantly given it’s user more than they ever hoped for. And by doing this, it has left all competition playing a hopeless catch-up game.

With all the wonderful innovations Google has brought so far, it has also raised the bar for itself in the future. Google users will continue to expect such extra-ordinary innovations in the future too. Quoting a famous Sidhuism, “The best way to make people remember good deeds is to keep repeating them”, Google will have to continue surprising people with wonderful products and services in future too. And I have no doubt they will succeed.

In it’s birthday month, here is Arbit Choudhury’s tribute to the phenomenon called Google..

P.S.:- Click on the phrase to know more about "Google Before Gargle" :-)

Arbit e-volution !!

I was talking to Nikhil the other day, when he refered to Arbit Choudhury as a "New Generation Comic Character". His words have been resonating inside me ever since. Arbit is indeed a 21st Century comic character, one who has completly been born and brought up Online. Arbit Choudhury was first launched in MastishK, an Online Management Games Extravaganza. Then, Arbit reached thousands of fans through e-mail forwards. The latest Arbit Choudhury strips are now released on the regular basis through the Arbit Yahoo Group and Website. Arbit Choudhury jokes are also available on India Times 8888 SMS service, under the keyword 'MBA', which is perhaps another 1st for any comic character. Going forward, we plan to take Arbit Choudhury to his fans thorugh other new-age communication channels like RSS feeds, Pod casting and Animation Films, thus covering the entire gamut of electronic media.

Hemant and Me have now passed out of NITIE, and work from locations as far apart as Hyderabad, India, and Geneva, Switzerland. With it, the Making of Arbit has also gone fully online. This is where Arbit Choudhury owes a lot to tools like GMail, GTalk, and Writely. While we collaborate and synchronise our operations across geographies, I can't, at times, help but feel pleasently amused by our own Global Delivery Model. Just the other day, we were symultaneously working on a document on Writely, and discussing the same over GTalk Voice Chat, my mike when bust. I could hear Hemant, but he could not hear me. So, we ended up setting a new Voice vs. Text Communication Paradigm, as Hemant spoke and I replied in text !!

The extent of our IT dependence is best summed up by Hemant, when he says, in his own inimitable style, that our daily routines begin with "Google before Gargle", and that the 3 basic necessities of our lives have become "Bread, Butter and Broadband" :)

When I ruminate over Arbit Choudhury's evolution as a Comic Character, I cannot help but feel that Arbit Choudhury owes his success completely to the Internet Age. It would have been virtually impossible to take a new-born comic character so quickly to afficianados across the world, before the advent of the web.

Tim Barners Lee, I owe you a treat :)

P.S.:- Today, I complete two years on Blog World. Thanks to Sallu for introducing me to this wonderful arena. Blogs represent the final frontier in "Freedom of Expression", by giving anyone who wants to say something, a public platform to do so. What will be the next revolution hitting Blog Land? Keep checking this space for more :)

“Web”ster’s Dictionary

The web is completely altering the way humans do everything. Sometimes I wonder, is the web altering humans themselves?? Is the web, apart from changing the way we do things, also changing the way we think?? As part of a generation of “Web”sters, for whom the web is as indispensable a part of their lives as food, I wonder if the web is actually modifying our behavior, our attitudes, and our very nature itself.

But lets reserve the topic “Psychological Effects of the World Wide Web” for some PhD student. This post is about the 3 elements of the web, which have become an integral part of my life. I am sure most other “Web”sters will share my thoughts.

Mailboxes

The mailbox has become the primary way in which we stay in touch with people. I write more mails a day than I make telephone calls. I write mails to more people a day than I talk to. Our mailboxes are fast becoming our most important virtual possessions, containing information about everything we do, be it official or personal.

How many MBs of my Gmail mailbox am I currently using?? Just 587 MB.

Passwords

Can you count the number of different places you need to use passwords?? Bank accounts, ATMs, online subscriptions, mailboxes, everything requires a password. With the threat of online theft always lurking around, it is highly unsafe to use the same password everywhere. And greater the number of different passwords you have, greater is the chance of forgetting them every now and then. Nothing can be more annoying than forgetting a password when trying to access anything important online.

Without your password, you are nobody. Amnesia has become even deadlier now.

Blogs

One of the great fads of the 21st century is surely going to be Blogging. Blogs have truly taken freedom of speech to the next level, and given anyone who wants to express something, a public platform to do so. Blogs are destined to become great public-opinion builders of the future. Just like every computer literate person has a mailbox today, everyone may soon possess a blog of his own. And terms like “Blogophile”- a person who loves writing and reading blogs, might soon be introduced in the dictionary.

"The real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men, but that men will begin to think like computers." – Sidney J Harris

Kalpana se bhi vichitr hai yeh sach !!

This was a dialogue uttered by Amitabh Bachchan in the movie “Akhein”. At times, one encounters incidents that make you really appreciate this statement.

Case I-

I was browsing through the book review page of a magazine, when I chanced upon the book review of a book called “In Search”, which traces the evolution of internet search engines, and more specifically, Google. The most mind-boggling claim made in the book is that Google, with it’s database of all the words searched for by billions across the world, can now answer the question “What does mankind want??”. It can tell what do people what to know. What are their aspirations, their fears, their priorities. In short, they can tell what people across the world are thinking!!

Food for thought... uh ??

Case II-

Saw a new ad on the tele the other day. It was an ad for a potato chip company. And guess who was the lead model in the ad. None other than Saurav Ganguly.

Goodness!! That has to be the daftest Ad campaign in history!! These days, hiring Ganguly as the mascot for your brand must be the surest way of killing it. Unless ofcourse, you are offering the product in the West Bengal market only!

Weird Wired World....

Being in a top notch institute has it’s perks.. Sprawling campus, state-of-the-art infrastructure, great batchmates and so on.. But, the one thing that keeps most students hooked most of the time is a 4 letter word- ‘2mbps’.. That’s the speed of the internet lease line.. Most of the time, all of us are online.. Most of the studies, as well as most of the fun, takes place on the net..

The entire campus is on a 100mbps LAN.. All PCs, in hostels, in classrooms, in faculty rooms, in offices..are on the LAN.... Thus, effectively, one can access any PC from anywhere on campus.. Humongous amounts of data is transferred on the internal messenger (called ip messenger) daily.. Doc files, pdfs, software setups, songs, movies.. You name it.. It’s on the lines.. The wired world helps us play some ingenious pranks too.. When a Prof. declines to share his presentations with us, IT comes to the rescue.. All you have to do is share the CD drive of the classroom PC on the LAN, then copy all the presentations to your hostel PC as the prof. teaches in class.. So you get all the stuff that was taught in class, without even attending it.. This is what I call ‘virtual education’.....

Text and note books are on their way to obsolescence.. Most of us tend to download pdf versions of textbooks from the net, rather than buying a hardcopy.. Others don’t bother to read books at all.. Just the MS Power Point slides used by profs. in class are enough.. And what if you have a nagging doubt while studying??.... Well .. All you have to do is ‘multicast’ ur doubt on the ip messenger .. And voila.. In a few seconds, you hav answers from all those who know..

It is very difficult to find an activity we perform without the help of the net.. Wanna know bus routes of Mumbai?? Wanna know which movie is playing in which multiplex?? Wanna read newspapers or magazines?? Wanna book a railway or air ticket?? Wanna listen to the latest hit movie songs?? Or wanna set an alarm so that u get up early in the morning?? There is only one place to go.. near ur PC..

All important info. is sent through mails.. And it is not unusual for someone to write 15-20 mails a day..

IT has it’s effect on work as much as it has on fun.. During my 2 months of summer internship, I have hardly ever carried anything to office.. Whatever I did in office, I uploaded it on my Yahoo briefcase at the end of the day.. And I could continue the work from my room later.. But IT is taking it’s toll.. It has almost killed the reading habits.. By conservative estimates, I spend 80% of my time in front of the comp, whenever I am in my room..

Now for weirdest part.. Me and Nikhil live in adjacent rooms, and have a connecting door in between (which is perpetually open).. So in effect, we live in joint rooms.. So what does he do when he wants to give an important message to me late in the night, when i am already asleep?? Write it on a piece of paper and leave it on my desk?.. No way.. He’ll mail it to me.. As he knows that mail is the first thing I'll check as soon as I wake up......

"IT support is like a soft bed.. easy to get into.. but very difficult to get out of.."