Apple’s new push notification service API

http://www.crunchgear.com/2008/07/31/apple-hands-out-push-notification-service-api-to-developers-background-apps-ftw/

This should open up interesting transaction model for application developers. But this is a two-edged sword, cuts both ways. On one end applications can provide more real time information , to the point notifications which can serve like a virtual assistant to iPhone users. On the other end if not used right this can potentially be a spam/annoyance.

I’m sure API will mandate developers to provides user options to decide if device owners want application developers to push notifications or not. Depending on how important the app is users can drive the destiny of this interesting feature.

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July 31, 2008 | Filed Under Business, Communication/Technology, Daily-Life | Leave a Comment 

Supercharge your tweets with FatBird ; Its on Steroids.

This post is been in sitting a queue for a while and today I get a time to write about it. As most of us know Twitter is the new way of looking at the news. Well I should say it is new age media now. There is certainly a media shift happened in last few months around twitter. We get to see breaking news on Twitter before A-listers of the media.

Lot of mainstream bloggers using twitter more often than ever. Even though there was quite bit of apprehension about whether twitter can go mainstream or ready to go mainstream, according to me gap between mainstream media and twitter media is very perceptional and your attention span. Big difference between these two is that news on twitter comes in packet of 140 characters and you have running stream of updates to read the whole story. Having said that every tweet (one status update on Twitter) becomes very important for followers (in a traditional media its readers) to consume when someone updates his/her status (traditionally news publisher).


There are tons of twitter apps doing interesting things and adding value to this whole twitter ecosystem. Here at MesageDance we been a fan of Twitter from day one and had twitter status udpate posting via email for few months along with every message users sends (blog post, YouTube video, Digg share, Google Reader share etc) to MessageDance can be updated to user’s Twitter timeline.


With FatBird, we released a new feature called “MyTweets“. With this feature MessageDance becomes the full blown client to Twitter which can send, receive your tweets on demand along with other goodies. Check it out..


Bling Your Tweets


MyTweets in a true sense supercharges your tweets. User’s 140 characters gets more powerful as it exposes important assets of each tweet.
  • TinyURL expansion : instead of tinyurl , It expands the url and shows the real url to the user
  • If the url is YouTube video url it shows YouTube video right below user’s tweet.
  • If the url is Flickr url it shows Flickr photo right below user’s tweet.
  • If the url is MP3 it shows audio player inline right below the tweet.
  • User can Reply or Retweet right there from each tweet.
It feels good to save user some time and few clicks on the WWW.


Set your tweets free with TweetShare.

Having done all the blinging to tweets, How about setting your tweets free to go wherever they want to go?.




TweetShare feature
  • Lets users send the anyone’s last 10 tweets (whom user is following) to their blog, friends, facebook etc.
  • Lets users send conversational tweets to user’s social destinations.
This opens up the door for tweet blogging and link love between blogger and urls in the tweet.
FatBird is your tweets on steroids. Let it fly to places.

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July 11, 2008 | Filed Under Communication/Technology, Fun Stuff, MessageDance | Leave a Comment 

Live coverage of #railsconf by @igrigorik

Last 6 tweets from igrigorik

IronRuby on rails: only the sql driver was needed to get the stack running… Otherwise everything is the same, and works as expected at 05/30/2008 05:58 PM

Multicore FUD talk: first impression, stop reading from your notes… Room drifting asleep. #railsconf at 05/30/2008 05:50 PM

Back to pen and paper @ railsconf. Wewt. at 05/30/2008 05:45 PM

@timbray more twitter coverage of #railsconf here.. Courtesy of dead laptop. at 05/30/2008 06:31 PM

Multicore talk: plugged Switchpipe by @peterc - mix and match cluster management at 05/30/2008 06:29 PM

Engineyard: ebb is not production ready; don’t worry about the app server, should be the least of your worries. at 05/30/2008 07:15 PM

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May 30, 2008 | Filed Under Communication/Technology, Daily-Life, MessageDance, Ruby/Ruby On Rails | Leave a Comment 

what GigaOm is talking about on Twitter.?

Last 10 tweets from gigaom

Amazon PPV Streaming Coming Soon [NewTeeVee]: Amazon will be unveiling a new video pay-per-view streaming .. http://tinyurl.com/6m7wz3 at 05/28/2008 10:20 PM

Apple Ships OS X 10.5.3 [WebWorkerDaily]: Today Apple released another free minor update for users of OS X.. http://tinyurl.com/55ox9d at 05/28/2008 10:20 PM

RedLasso: No Ceasing and Desisting for Us, Thanks [NewTeeVee]: RedLasso, the television clipping service, .. http://tinyurl.com/3hwult at 05/29/2008 08:42 PM

Pinch Media Offers Metrics for iPhone Developers [GigaOM]: Just as any online content producer or web site.. http://tinyurl.com/42mg8g at 05/29/2008 08:42 PM

OStatic Buffer Overflow….. [OStatic]: Novell has delivered its Q2 financial results. The company reporte.. http://tinyurl.com/63pfjx at 05/30/2008 12:13 AM

Forbes: Google Bought YouTube, Now Trying to Make Money on It! [NewTeeVee]: Forbes posted a magazine story.. http://tinyurl.com/3zdkvf at 05/30/2008 01:49 AM

Flowchart.com Offers Online Drawing Tools [WebWorkerDaily]: There’s a new entrant in the online draw.. http://tinyurl.com/6jkc47 at 05/30/2008 03:47 PM

Open Thread - Do You Have a Backup? [WebWorkerDaily]: While we do talk a lot about data storage and securi.. http://tinyurl.com/3klqff at 05/30/2008 05:18 PM

Asus Laptops to Offer Linux-Based Instant-On Features [OStatic]: Asus, which has seen healthy and growing .. http://tinyurl.com/6zud7q at 05/30/2008 05:18 PM

The New iPhone’s New Winner [GigaOM]: Depending which iPhone rumor you believe, the 3G version of iPhone h.. http://tinyurl.com/55v4g7 at 05/30/2008 05:18 PM

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May 30, 2008 | Filed Under Communication/Technology, Daily-Life | Leave a Comment 

Google AppEngine disappoints Twisternow ?

When Google AppEngine launched it was match made in heaven between developer/entrepreneurs + launch of their dream startup/project. It is true up to certain extent no doubt about that. Apart from being a great platform for developers to jump start their idea which took them weeks if not months before, It is not considering apps like Twisternow for rapid scalability in terms of request/user/bandwidth quota. 

As per Techcrunch , AppEngine is designed for 

Absorb spikes in traffic. When a web app surges in popularity, the sudden increase in traffic can be overwhelming for applications of all sizes, from startups to large companies that find themselves rearchitecting their databases and entire systems several times a year. With automatic replication and load balancing, Google App Engine makes it easier to scale from one user to one million by taking advantage of Bigtable and other components of Google’s scalable infrastructure.

Now where is the fun in having your app on AppEngine , if they can not adjust to popular application's growing demand in a true sense. So how did it help Twisternow 
  • They wrote a code (in python), deployed on AppEngine - Great!
  • They get to have their own domain instead of twisternow.appengine.com - Great !
  • People started noticing their app and liked the simple idea of Twisternow - Super great!
  • More and more people come to your site - Super super great!
  • Then what ? - Over quota from AppEngine - Not so great!.
So for Twisternow guys all they got is initial ramp up , but as the message says they are probably moving their boxes somewhere else. It would be good to see if Google AppEngine can have few intelligent rules built in based on applications popularity/page views they toggle the quota, probably have app owners pay some money to scale smoothly without hitting against the quota wall. I'm sure that will be a preferred option for application owners, rather than thinking of 
  • new infrastructure 
  • time associated with the move 
  • The most important - Impact of user mind share shifting somewhere else. As this is a key factor always for new startups, competitors launch every minute.

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May 16, 2008 | Filed Under Business, Communication/Technology, Daily-Life | 2 Comments 

Google FriendConnect Preview video

Google FriendConnect Preview from googledevelopers.

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May 13, 2008 | Filed Under Business, Communication/Technology, Daily-Life | Leave a Comment 

Email still has plenty of juice left.

"Oh! I have so much data, I want to protect every bit of it and I want users to come to me everyday" said Social network sites when they gathered millions of users. For well known reasons social media world is keeping the tremendous amount of valuable data trapped within its arena. This is no secret to savvy users of all these different services. So we see initiatives like DataPortability and OpenSocial picking up good traction. Facebook, MySpace are doing this but taking careful steps as they have a lot tied with their data which they want to protect as much as they want. Users want their data to be portable and they want it quick. On the other end we have "email" which is loved my billions from its inception thru today and it is still not used very well in the context of social communication and messaging except basic notification service within every major social media sites.

There is a huge gap between email world and social media world as far as data distribution is concerned. Email should go beyond "Notify me when I have a new message or comment" notion. Wouldn't it be helpful to get all that email power close to social media community in terms of outreach, sharing and connection. 
As per About.com 

183 billion messages per day means more than 2 million emails are sent every second. About 70% to 72% (or between 128 and 132 billion) of them might be spam and viruses. The genuine emails are sent by around 1.2 billion email users. 

Recently as per Techcrunch on the other topic very interesting numbers came around usage/how much time users spend on different desktop applications. If you relate these numbers with email.
  • In top 10 , users spend more time on 4 email applications (Outlook, Gmail, mail, Thunderbird)
  • In Top 3,  users spend time on 2 email applications.
So we love email here at MessageDance and believe that there are enough innovative and intriguing things can be built around it using users current attention span and exposing them to the interesting content sharing model across social media. To facilitate this, in last few weeks we have released nice little features like
We are working on lot more in coming weeks. 
As we let the time and great ideas build the gap between, so called "legacy email" and emerging social media, we will run into creative ways of using our daily life which is trapped in the wonderful world of email.

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May 10, 2008 | Filed Under Communication/Technology, In General, MessageDance | Leave a Comment 

Modern Marvels : Magnets - on History channel

Quite an interesting series on History channel and this one is one of them. you can watch it on the following link.
Website Snapshot



Watch Modern Marvels: Magnets Online Free

.

How magnets evolved from centuries and today at the core everything is driven by that one magnetic force (including electricity, our computer storage etc).

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May 6, 2008 | Filed Under Communication/Technology, In General, Science And Culture | Leave a Comment 

Digg Story: Nanoparticles Help Gauze Stop Gushing Wounds

200Digg! It is interesting on what all can you do with Nanotechnology.

Now chemists have infused cotton gauze with nanoparticles, giving it a vastly improved ability to halt blood loss — even in tight spots like the neck or groin where it’s hard to apply pressure.

Click here to read this story on Digg

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April 25, 2008 | Filed Under Communication/Technology, Daily-Life | Leave a Comment 

Turn your Macbook into seismograph / earthquake sensor

I ran into a very interesting article on Wired today. Article title said “Scientists Want Your MacBook for Earthquake Detection“. when I saw that I was like a oh! not another “Use your computer idle time to search for Extra terrestrial and other global causes“.  As usual it is an interesting thought and great idea, apart from knowing what scientists want I found few neat things about the Mac, after reading following section in the article

Cochran’s system makes use of the accelerometers — tiny motion sensors — built into many modern notebooks, including Apple’s MacBook and Lenovo’s ThinkPad, as well as the iPhone and Nintendo’s Wii. Accelerometers detect movement and translate it into digital signals. In notebooks, they function as safety devices: When the accelerometer detects that the notebook is in free fall, the computer moves the hard drive head to a safe position in order to minimize the risk of damage when it hits the ground. But the accelerometers are also accessible to software, so they can be used for games or other applications.

I did not know that motion sensors are this good to the level that they can be used for sensing vibrations and motion around, not just on the keyboard. So I downloaded SeisMac software which can turn your Macbook into awesome sensor device which can give you a visual of noise around your Macbook. This is how it looks It is an impressive piece of software (less than 600K) with the simple idea of tapping accelerometer signals and turning that into running seismic graph. brilliant!. Think about usage of that into all the above scenarios. I’m sure they have different apps for Windows and Unix OS as well, as all the modern laptops these days comes with decent motion sensors for power saving features.Blogged with MessageDance using Gmail

April 1, 2008 | Filed Under Communication/Technology | 4 Comments 

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