Google wave and other Random topics

1 Google Wave

I was not part of the September 2009 craze for Google wave invites and stood blissfully ignorant of it for over a month. Better late than never, got an invite sometime mid October, courtesy Prashanth. Here’s one paragraph review of it, to the extent I’ve seen and explored:

I feel it was a mistake to make Googlewave an invite only platform. Success of any collaborative tool lies in its ability to be accessible to everyone who wishes to collaborate through it. While wave appears like a good platform for multiple people to work on single subject simultaneously, the single most limiting factor I find is that most of the people with whom I’d have collaborated something are not on wave. For example, I need to plan an alumni meet using wave, I’d need all my ex-classmates on Wave. Similarly if you were to use wave for an office project you’ll need most of your colleagues on wave. With majority of potential collaborative partners missing from wave it is current state, I believe full potential of Wave will be known only when it opens up for all. Also I feel Wave should integrate with Gmail seamlessly, just like gtalk (how much you’d have used gtalk if it had different login, very few people on it and not supported in certain browsers?)

Not supporting IE is another negative aspect. Overall, Google wave is good and potential, but not worth the hype.

2 Mylapore Civic Issues

Sundar has started a photo blog for civic issues in his locality. (Mylapore is Chennai’s popular residential area, similar to Bangalore’s Malleshwaram) Good idea. Area newspapers might be interested in such photos. Hope such initiatives get attention of concerned people and make some impact

3 Dayanayak is back?

Looks like encounter specialist Dayanayak is acquitted of all the charges against him and he is learnt to have returned to work. Didn’t read anything about this in media, but his blog (probably maintained by a close aid/fan) was updated recently with more details.

4 Airtel’s expensive pay per second plan

Thanks to Tata Docomo, other mobile operators are forced to launch pay per second tariff plans. However airtel prepaid has decided to take hike SMS rates to Re 1 per SMS for pay per second plans, taking away any cost advantage this plan might have had. With actual sms delivery cost being less than a paisa, this is unfair. Anyway we’ve way2sms, 160by2 and other such services at our disposal to send free SMS. Wondering what will be next battleground for mobile operators: pay per character SMS charges?

5 NASSCOM TPIN

Several years ago, I’d registered for NASSCOM’s skill registry paying some 300+ Rs and got my TPIN (Technology Professional Identification Number). It looked like an ambitious initiative that time but there was hardly any use/application of this service and now they need me to keep paying a few hundred rupees every year just to keep my account active. Unfair again and have decided not to renew.

6 Adwords Promo

Google adwords sent me a Rs 2500 coupon, to be used for advertising my product/services (I hardly have any). but to use this coupon looks like I need to spend my money first. Something I’m not keen. Would have appreciated if I was allowed to run the campaign first using the coupon and then think of payment options. Else this is looking like Spam Today Group’s (aka India Today group) free gifts (The free gift is that they’re willing to sell me a wrist watch for Rs 3000 only claiming it is worth more than 7000 Rs)