Facebook working on an ‘Answers’ portal?

Today I found a link on Facebook inviting users to apply for beta testing program of their new product, which looks like below:

Wondering what Facebook is upto I clicked on that link & apparently it looks like Facebook is working on a ‘Answers’ portal similar to Yahoo Answers. To get the beta tester access to this application, Facebook requires user to pick three questions & write answers for them. This is clearly about Questions & Answers, let’s see whether Facebook can really stand against well established competitor like Yahoo! Answers.

Subscribe to this blog's RSS feed

As mashable reported few days back, Facebook is testing an upgrade to “Photos” application by adding “Related Photos”. Based on the photo user is looking at Facebook populates other similar photo next to it. If you are a Lifeblob user, this isn’t new to you. Lifeblob had this feature from a quite a long time by now.

With this supposed innovation, facebook will now start showing other photos of people who are face-tagged in a photo next to it. The application feature addition is designed to drive users to explore additional photos that may be of interest based on the photo they’re currently viewing, thereby further personalizing the experience (and increasing page views).

Just to set the record straight, we have had this feature ( and a lot more ) at http://www.lifeblob.com for over a year now and facebook has blatantly copied it. Every time you upload a photo on lifeblob, a recommendation engine not only looks at the face tags, but also the other information associated with your photo to show you photos that are closely related around it.So when you upload your graduation day photos, we discover other photos of your graduation day and show it next to your photo. What facebook has done is picked up this idea and launched a simple version of it that only uses face tags. Bravo!!

–Pranav Bhasin, Founder, Lifeblob

You can check the detailed post about this feature by clicking the above link. This is not the first time Facebook copied something, it copied ideas from Friendfeed (later acquired) & Twitter few months back. Do spread the word by sharing this & also by joining this Facebook page http://www.facebook.com/pages/Facebook-STOP-copying-from-Indian-Startups/128733897152335 which Pranav has created (Yep! an FB Page!)

24HoursLoot is an online store which lists a T-Shirt at discounted price everyday & discount applies only for 24 hours. 24HoursLoot is creative enough to come up with some nice design everyday. T-Shirts with catchy captions, music band logos, geeky slogans are the few of the listed designs so far. Though normally T-Shirt designs are standard, sometimes they allow user to customize it. Like, T-shirt with twitter design allows user to add his/her username, a T-shirt with QR code printed on it for the text you provide…etc. Sometimes they also list products other than T-shirts.

New design will be open to public every mid-night 12 & will be be available for next 24 hours. Website provides options to subscribe to new loots via Email & SMS to make sure you won’t miss any loot. Head over to 24hoursloot.com & start looting!

Vote via SMS is the most commonly used voting system these days. From reality shows to surveys & contests everywhere it’s been used. But, I personally don’t vote at all using this system since it uses 5 or 6 digit short code which my service provider will charge around 5 to 6 Re per SMS. Because of this pricing, participation in voting becomes very less.

I remember reading an SMS forward which says “Missed call system is invented by Indians”!! We use this “Missed Call” technique so much in our daily life. My mom & sis never call me from their phone, they always give me a missed call & I call back! Just because they don’t want to burn their currency talking to me. Taking forward this widely used “Missed Call” technique, ZipDial has come up with a “Missed Call to Vote” system!

For Ex:

Q: Should Meg Whitman become Governor of California?

If YES, give a missed call to +91 40 44 55 69 30
If No, give a missed call to +91 40 44 55 69 31

All you are doing here is giving a missed call, so you will not be charged anything to vote! And this system is so simple, you don’t have to remember “Send XX to YYYYY” and bleh bleh to vote! It is just different numbers to dial for different options.

I spoke to people behind ZipDial at AppJam & they said they have plans to open ZipDial for public where anyone can create a poll. They have just started, I wish everyone including TV channels start using this system. Visit ZipDial & start voting for polls & win some gifts.

Every website uses services like Stat Counter, Google Analytics to tracks visitors & get detailed analytics about their visitors. But, these tracking systems are mainly concentrated at visits made from computers. Though it tracks visits from mobile devices, details are very less. With growing smart phone popularity, you can’t just ignore this space. I personally underestimated traffic which comes from mobile devices to Tech Bangalore, which I found 20% of overall traffic after enabling mobile analytics!

PercentMobile:

PercentMobile is a free mobile analytics service which gives granular details about visitors browsing your website from mobile devices. Details which PercentMobile gives you is just awesome, like, how many devices were wifi enabled, how many were touch screen, how many were smart phones, how many had QWERTY keyboard…etc. PecentMobile also lists all the devices which are used to browse your website.

I enabled PercentMobile for Tech Bangalore few days ago & above screenshot shows how much detail you can get from PercentMobile. Screenshot is partial, there’s more to look in analytics, like Network provider, region, most visited URLs, referrer…etc.

So, head over to PercentMobile & enable mobile analytics to your website!

Magic, is something which amazes us so much right from our childhood. I always wondered how a burning piece of paper turns into a pigeon? how three threads change their lengths as I see it? how did the magician know I will pick ‘A’ spade!? Well, it’s really a magical world. But, it’s not that easy to find information about magic & magicians on the web.

My friend & a magician himself Philip Tiju took the initiative of creating a website which has every information about magic & magicians. After months of hard work he came up with worldofmagicians.com. The site has everything about magic & magicians. History of magic, a huge directory of magicians with basic information about them, videos, photos, information about magic institutions, magic dealers, links to e-groups what else you can think of?

One thing I liked about the portal is, most the place it’s open for public to add information, for ex: If you know a magician who is not listed in directory, you can go ahead and add. In this way public can contribute information they know to the site.

Go to WorldOfMagicians.com

Airtel is getting more competitive in it’s GPRS offerings by offering one more GPRS pack at very affordable price. My friend Ashwin posted a screenshot sometime back which says about this new pack:

So, as per the screenshot if you easy recharge with Rs.19, you can browse free till 200MB. Though it’s unclear how much validity it carries. If you know, do let everyone know via comment section.

Update:

As Chaitu commented here, validity of this plan is 3 days.

Seriously, been using free anti virus since years, but my computer is still vulnerable & keep getting affected again & again. I don’t understand why they aren’t powerful. For me, an anti-virus software should be “Install & Forget”, it should be capable of taking care off all sorts of malicious bad software, trojans, spywares & let me concentrate on work!

Norton Internet Security 2010 does just what I wanted to. It takes care of all bad stuff & allows me to do my work peacefully. As you can see in the below screenshot, NIS has got really nice dashboard which tell you everything about current processes.

Clicking on the performance button shows how NIS is performing on your machine, how many issues it has found, details of the issues it found, memory/CPU consumption ..etc, everything plotted over a nice graph.

Elegant settings window allows you to configure NIS as per your requirements. Certain things which you might already know like scheduling scans, network settings, computer settings, web settings, everything comes under this. All these settings have a simple button which can turn ‘on’ or ‘off’ anytime .

We surf internet all the time. But, the fact is we find new sites via search engines (or I can say just Google?). NIS nicely integrates with Google search results page & shows whether the listed links are safe to visit or not. In my opinion this itself hugely reduces chance of getting infected!

With NIS you can have better understanding of installed applications. Norton scans every installed application & automatically finds out whether to trust the application or not & assigns proper access rights. Norton also tracks CPU & memory usage history of all applications!

Today, my friend’s came come with an infected thumb drive & asked me to format it since he was unable to fix it with the free anti-virus he had. I just plugged the thumb drive in, NIS automatically scanned the drive, found the threat!! I just clicked “Fix” & bingo! NIS took around 5 to 10 seconds to fix it & all the data was safe.

It just covers everything! I don’t think my PC would ever get affected with NIS installed on it! There’s still a lot of settings & configuration available, I just gone through few which impressed me.

Airtel has two unlimited GPRS packs for it’s prepaid customers. One day pack offers you unlimited browsing all the day for Rs.20. Similarly you can go for weekly pack for Rs.99 & do unlimited browsing throughout the week. Getting these packs activated is quite simple via SMS shortcodes as follows:

• To activate daily pack (Rs.20), send MO to 56123
• To activate weekly pack (Rs.99)  send MO to 56122

Since I’m not an Airtel user, I don’t know more about other GPRS packs Airtel is offering. If you are aware of any, please share it with others in comments section.

All of us know Google Transliterate, which we often use to write something in Indian languages. Google has added this transliterate support to many of it’s services including Blogger, Gmail & Orkut. For other sites we used to go to Google Transliterate page type there & copy/paste it, which is a long process. To encounter this problem, Google has Bookmarklets for each language it supports, which magically enables users to type on any site using Google Transliterate.

How it works?

All major browsers have bookmarks & a bookmark bar. You just need to drag & drop the bookmarklet provided by Google Transliterate for the language you select. Get these bookmarklets from this page (This page is actually for Kannada, there are links to other languages on the same page). Now go to any website, like twitter, facebook…etc & click on this bookmarklet. Magic happens & all the text boxes on the page get converted into Google Transliterate boxes!! Screenshot shows how it’s loaded on the Twitter home page. User can toggle Indic language with English by using keyboard shortcut CNTRL+G. The bookmarklet loads Google Transliterate javascript upon clicking which does the magic.

(Sorry about the screenshots, lost my tools due to hard disc crash, had to rely on MS Paint!!)

Have fun typing in your language!!!