The Face of the Web

It changes everyday. Trends change and so does the people who use them. We have all seen what a simple application like twitter did to the community. It made the community addicted to it. And millions of people find it important to use this service as a medium of communication. I still remember the incident when twitter was able to save a life.

The term 'service' is a very subtle but important thing to note here. Saumitri helped me understand the true role of an application. An application can be a utility or a service. Utility is something a user would come for a specific purpose. He might or might not choose to return to the application. But a service is something that pulls the user and makes him do stuff with the application. The success of twitter lies in the fact that it is a service. And this service has a large amount of marketting, driven by the common user. People who are part of this application sell the application. They are fully in control of what they want to publish, which might be even advertising themselves, and they have a greater reach.

Now applications like twitpic have solved something that twitter did not have. Store a picture in twitpic and we will post a link to your twitter account. Twitter having an open API made things easier. Think of the time when twitter would allow you to attach images from the main application itself. Twitpic becomes irrelevant. Twitpic for me is then a utility. It uses something and routes traffic into the application. Intelligent and effective but for a short term.

Most of those great applications, if you notice, have a very simple idea as their core. They facilitate a certain action and they render them in a unique style. Once we get used to a style, it is pretty hard to revert or use another one. The crux is not to develop UI intensive applications which serve multiple purposes, but to have an application simple enough which fulfils a purpose in a simple fashion.

These kinds of ideas are hard to come by. They just click at once. I am on the look out for an idea that would change my world and one that would leave a footprint on the net.

Search search search

I was wondering how searching 'dineshvasudevan' in those search engines would result. Attached are some results from Google, Yahoo and Bing.

I have a blog of my own and I expect it to come up some where on the first page. It comes up for Google and Yahoo. But for some ODD reason Bing does not even have it on any of the pages. Thats a load of crap.

My Linked In profile comes up for Google and Yahoo but not for Bing. Very bad indeed.

Slideshare seems to be a very popular site for all the three. Thats good.

My twitter profile comes up on the first page for Google, on the second page for Yahoo. I get other people's twitter pages when I search me on Bing. HAHAHA .

Google has a suggest option where as Yahoo includes the result and asks me if I want them excluded. Bing does nothing of that sort.


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