JotSpot is acquired by Google

Last week i received a mail from the JotSpot team that they have been acquired by Google. The mail had just some basic information with respect to the acquisition. I check out the web 2.0 watch sites like Read/Write Web and TechCrunch, but did not the information i was looking for which was the future of JotSpot and how Google is planning to use it.

I came across JotSpot approximately 2 months when i was searching for web application which were providing hosted wiki’s and one thing that i noticed is that JotSpot is quite different from any other wiki based web application out there. It has got a mixture of plain Wiki pages and applications that get integrated within the wiki. They currently have spreadsheets, calendar, Photos and File cabinets as services in the wiki. The advantage of using JotSpot for these is that all these services are just like any other page in a wiki. You just create a page of a particular type of application and then you can easily navigate to that page, no special handling is required. The applications that they have are not something too great to talk about, but they are basic an get the work done.

Google already has all these services with them except for file storage (ignoring rumors of GDrive), so what has to be seen is whether they will use JotSpot’s platform to integrate all their applications in the same way. That would surely be a very nice way of accessing things on the web. Users have their own spaces and every application is just an additional page. This sort of consolidation moves one more step ahead of what Google has already done by consolidating writely and spreadsheets in docs.google.com

DTH Services in India and why I would not be using them

Came across an article on DTH Services in India by Mohasin, I had been looking at the pricing and subscription model of both the DTH Services in India, DishTV and TataSky over the last month. Both the services have good lineup of channels and subscription costs are reasonable at Rs. 200, however the initial costs could be anywhere between 4000 – 5000. I was looking forward for these services because of the poor quality of signals I was getting from the local Cable Operator, with DTH I am expecting some clear picture. Unfortunately I had decided against going for DTH for few reasons, It does not have my parent’s favorite channel (Gemini, too difficult to convince them to get rid of cable). I have two Televisions at home, so that would mean two DTH receivers and additional (nominal overhead) subscription cost than the normal.

But the main reason was the inability to Record Shows. I own a TV tuner card (Mercury) and use it most of the times for scheduling (because of my late/odd hours of working) my PVR to record a TV show on a channel I like and would watch it probably over the weekends. This helps in watching them a my own leisure time, however with DTH I would be deprived of that. I can no longer record any shows because it does not use the same Channel based frequency model. I would have to use the receivers Remote for switching channels etc. Until I figure out a way for recording Shows even using DTH, I would not be going near it, or one other option is to use both DTH and Cable.

Flock: The new Social Web Browser

The first thing that anybody would be saying on seeing the title is why an another new Browser, don’t we have enough clutter of them. But Flock stands out from all those other browsers out there, it doesn’t just aim for a good browsing experience, but takes it to the next level, by bring a whole together new user experience in the way we access the Web. So no wonder that it calls it self the Social Web Browser.

Flock (current version 0.7.7, I am using v0.7.6) is based on Firefox 1.5, so it comes by default with all the advantages (or disadvantages) of Firefox, which means that all the extension models , add-ons etc are all there. Not all Firefox extensions are compatible with Flock, I had to hack a few of them to make them run under Flock. Flock hit the web at the right time when Social networking sites are all over the web and are quite a rage. The social aspects of Flock are:

• Photo Sharing: The Photo sharing service of flock currently supports Flickr and PhotoBucket. Flock makes it very easy to upload/manage photos with any of these services, right from within the browser including Bulk uploads with tagging. The organizer is placed very neatly just below the toolbars in a non-obtrusive manner. I tried this with both Flickr and PhotoBucket and the thing I liked about it is that it had the same interface in interacting with both the services.
• Blogs: Flock has a simple editor for Posting to Blogs, it currently supports WordPress, MovableType, TypePad, Live Journal and Blogger. It does not have a WYSIWIG editor like Windows Live Editor, but has simple text based editor where you can modify the html source. I haven’t tried out posting mainly because I was using Windows Live Writer.
• Feeds: Firefox had basic feed support through Live Bookmarks, v2.0 added little bit more through Feed preview, but flock’s implementation of Feeds is way ahead of that, so much that it can be truly called a Feed Aggregator. The Front page view that it has for Feeds is probably something that many feed users are going to like.  It hides most of the complexity of working with feeds so I am sure that for newcomers to Feed Technology and Basic users, flock is surely a recommended option. Since I am a heavy user of Feeds, I am better of with Feed Demon or Rss Bandit.
• Bookmark sharing: Flock had done away with the Bookmarks concept of Firefox and used their own called Collections. All bookmarks are added to these Collections, and can be optionally tagged. The best part is that these collections can be synched with a online bookmarking service. It currently supports del.icio.us and shadows. I used shadows to store my bookmarks. Sharing of individual bookmarks is optional, and you can decide at any time wether you want to share a particular bookmark. The only problem I have with their implementation of Collections is that they have a single level of hierarchy, not a full fledged tree model. My personal advice to the Flock team , please add the tree model of bookmark managing and add bookmark sharing service on top of it. This has been one of the top reasons which sometimes make me think whether I should continue using Flock.

The Search box functionality has also been customized when compared to Firefox so that we get search results in  a menu as we type. The menu displays search results from past history and also results from yahoo.

My two main problems with Flock are

1. Collections not having tree model, which I have already mentioned, and
2. It uses a lot of Memory, it very easily takes up to 200 MB of memory after opening a few tabs.

In the end would I recommend it to everyone ?, yes it is a good browser, and it should surely catch up with all people soon, so go ahead and download it.

The Old New Blog

Not Just a Geek, This was the blog I had started off 2 1/2 years ago , You can find more history about me and the blog at About Me. This blog started off, as I felt that that I should be putting down my opinions on News and Current Affairs topic being a Information Junkie. I did not make much progress soon after starting it, within 1 month I joined in my current job and had to spend some long hours on the projects I worked on. In order to start of blogging more actively I thought that I should restart the blog on tech stuff which is what I spend more time on, compared to the time I spent on current affairs some 3 years ago. Once I get the blog running smoothly, may be I will start of blogging on Current Affairs too. When I initially started of the blog I was spending a lot of time on International Affairs and Conflicts/Histories.

Having given the history, maybe I should proceed to what should be expected from this blog in future. My core expertise area is Microsoft Technologies, but I also do try out other things irrespective of the technology and spend loads of time online trying to learn new things. So I would be blogging about Microsoft Technologies, Linux, Mac (I have a mini Mac Power PC version), Virtualization, Feed Technologies, Web Based Service Apps, Desktop and Web Apps Integration, Productivity Tools, all types of nifty utilities etc.

Hope that summarizes what I would be blogging.