Wanna do some micro-blogging with google reader ?

It's possible now to do some micro-blogging with google reader ! I didn't see this new addition in my previous post, or it was not out yet. Anyway webware has been blogging about it, so just check this how it's so cool with one example item of mine.

Basically, now you can add whatever you want in your shared items, i.e., not only rss items, but images, html, etc. To insert stuff, drag the bookmarklet in your browser's toolbar, and whenever you stumble upon something nice to share, clik it, simple ! And yeah, I think the "item" in google "shared items" is really making meaning now.

New Features in Google Reader !

I love Google Reader, there is not a single day without using it. You can keep up-to-date with hundreds of feeds, categorize them, read them all at the same time when you're procrastinating too much (press shift+A), and much more. Definitively, one one my favourite web app !

I forgot to say that you can easily share blog posts with friends, and the new feature is that you can now also annotate these shared items !

The second feature, though less useful, is the nice picture that you can choose to add on top of your shared items page. These days I'm really into fishes so this picture really suit me presently (more on the fishes very soon).

Twitter's getting decentralized by the crowd ?

Heavy twitter users like Michael Arrington and Dave Winer are pushing towards a decentralized twitter network. Just imagine one second, that could mean a twitter service out of control from the original twitter company !

If you think about it, twitter is all about micro-blogging, and thus, like usual blogging, no bottleneck should be present, i.e., everything should be decentralized.

Anyway, I'm looking forward seeing how the original twitter guys are going to handle that ! People love so much the twitter service they want to take care of their baby themselves, interesting crisis for the parents !

Testing Amazon Web Services Bandwidth

I've been quickly testing the Amazon EC2 bandwidth capabilities. Here are the results:

From amazon availability zone us-east-1c to New York:

• download speed: 7255 KB/s
• upload speed: 2167 KB/s
• ping: 7 ms

From amazon availability zone us-east-1c to San Fransisco:

• download speed: 1899 KB/s
• upload speed: 759 KB/s
• ping: 138 ms

To compare these results, here are some tests done at my swiss university:

From EPFL to New York:

• download speed: 1130 KB/s
• upload speed: 479 KB/s
• ping: 109 ms

From EPFL to San Fransisco:

• download speed: 682 KB/s
• upload speed: 201 KB/s
• ping: 377 ms

Installing the Wireless Card Netgear WG311 v3 on Ubuntu 8.04

To install this card, you can find a lot of step-by-step information on this page. However, there is some more tricks to do:

• The drivers of the card have disappeared. Fortunately, you can still find the needed files at this place.
  
  
• On Ubuntu 8.04, to get the wireless network each time you reboot your box, you need to append the ndiswrapper module to the /etc/modules file (need to be root).
  

Web Apps API

Just quoting a very interesting part of a post from webware about web apps API:

"Since we're moving towards a Web world in which services and social networks are far more important than their interfaces -- and where the best interface builders are often not employed by the companies that make the services they are writing apps for -- getting APIs right is critical."

Pitching - the american way

Explained by @Scobleizer:

@aruni I would get to the demo fast, then explain what we just saw, cover the market need/pain/size, cover competitors, then cover team.

My european education would tell me more to do it like that: cover the market need/pain/size, cover competitors, cover team, demoing while explaining.
But it's much more boring.

I'll try the american way ;-)

Some Virtual World Market Numbers

There is a growing number of teens visiting virtual worlds. What is possible to deduce from this figure is that a teenager who is 16 in 2006 will be 21 in 2011. So maybe penguins will not be fun anymore. We can assume that grown-up virtual worlds will thus become increasingly more visited.
















From this second figure we can see that search engines are really the way to display influential ads. That's true, sometimes we query google not to get search results, but to get very relevant ads. For example, when you are searching for a specific hotel in a specific city, you want to see who is willing to pay to advertise their product on the top (or right) of the page. Interactive ads are the second winner for the most influential ads. I consider advergames and adverworld as being cutting-edge interactive ads, and there is still a lot to be made in that field, that's encouraging ! Advergames and adverworlds are not just ad billboards in an online environment, they are really created from scratch around a brand to advertise.





















To finish this post, here is an interesting figure about the number of hours spent on second life, which as you can read is provided by linden labs. This seems to go towards the opposite of rumours spreading over the internet and local newspapers. But let's be careful because the source of information is not so neutral.






















(eMarketer figures grabbed from this post)

Two videos I need to watch

The first one is about the "Getting Things Done" method, i.e., the GTD method. How to stop procrastination and get things done !



The second one is a Scoble interview of MySpace CTO.

KinderGarten Physics Lecture !

Clifford Stoll gives a really entertaining and energetic TED spitch !