Understand the Connections

I am already in holiday mood and not planning to write anything till January 1st week of 2006. Thanks for your visit and will meet you in 2006, Bye.

Everybody almost know that Google gave job to a girl as she had a Google T-shirt and was proud to wear it around apart from having the required qualifications for that job.
It was really an impressive story and made me to think on what is the use of my Microsoft T-Shirt ? I have a T-Shirt with Microsoft printed on it, though it was not officially from Microsoft, it’s a plain white T-Shirt with Microsoft printed on it in big fonts.

I was keenly following the Microsoft Live messenger blog to see what was happening on the new Live messenger world and was waiting to check their beta release, but was not sure on what was the criteria to get access to beta, I knew that it was only on invitation, so I wrote to the Microsoft Messenger team,

Hi,

You would have known that Google had given a girl a job as she had Google T-Shirt, I have a Microsoft T-shirt, can Microsoft give me a Live Messenger Beta trial for having Microsoft T-Shirt.

Thanks
Vijay

And Bingo, I got an invitation.

UK Based company Staellium has come with an interesting text mobile messaging, called as StealthText. This is a self erasing Text message, i.e. once the receiver reads the message it gets deleted and cannot be opened again. This is an interesting concept and might be useful for users who do not want to have their messages stored in the receiver’s mobile for ever.

The receiver actually receives the link of the actual text and once read the link gets moved so it cannot be revisited, I am sure this would have very good audience. To reply to such messages the receiver also needs to be subscribed to their services. Some details from their website.

Your message will arrive at the recipient as a message with a link. The link will simply say that ‘you (Nickname chosen when you registered for the service) have sent a StealthText. Click now to read it…’ There is no other identification attached to this message and it is impossible for someone to discover the sender’s identity. The time and date that the message was sent will also be attached.

To read the message the recipient clicks to open his browser and access the message.

The message will appear exactly as written by the sender with NO other information attached like the sender’s nickname or mobile number.

The recipient is offered the choice of 'Replying to the sender' (which will require StealthText registration by the recipient), 'Barring any further messages from the sender', 'Barring all future messages from StealthText'.

When the recipient closes the browser or moves away from the message the message self-destructs. The message with the link that was sent to the recipient still remains in the inbox but the link is redundant and the page, if they try to access it again, will simply indicate that it has expired or does not exist.

Recently Yahoo announced “Answers” service and expected to announce “Phone-in/out” services in the coming few days. Clearly these two services are already existing and Google doing really well with its http://answers.google.com and Skype leader in the VoIP calling. I have used/using both Google Answers and Skype and needless to say they are really impressive and I prefer them.

We need to probably wait and watch what Yahoo has to offer differently with these two new services when compared to others. Its expected that the Yahoo`s phone charges would be comparatively cheaper than Skype. Yahoo Answers is free where Google starts with 2.5 dollars minimum and they offer to return the charge if the answers are not to the satisfaction.

To touch the title, Yahoo had infact copied these ideas, but then others also cannot claim that they were their originals, If I remember correctly Sabir Bhatia of Hotmail fame did start a site named http://www.arzoo.com/ which answers for users queries for charge but did not succeed and the site does not even exist today, Skype took the leaf out of Yahoo messenger and made it bigger and better with quality of voice and ease to setup. Perhaps thats how things works and I am not understanding that, now I go on to think on where to pick the leaf from for my own company, but havent found anything yet.

It’s really an interesting idea and I was impressed with the concept of www.bugmenot.com . If you wonder what is that,

“BugMeNot.com was created as a mechanism to quickly bypass the login of web sites that require compulsory registration and/or the collection of personal/demographic information (such as the New York Times).”

Every now and then you would have faced websites asking you to register with them before letting you to read an article or post some comment, sometimes you would register if you had any plans to come back but most of the time users would quit, atleast I did. BugMeNot gives you usernames/password for sites, basically these usernames are from a person who had registered with that particular site and does not mind sharing it. So it’s one registration which is shared and multiple users using it.

I was reading articles from http://blogs.zdnet.com/Google/ and wanted to post some comments but was asked to register etc etc, so quit my plans on that. But now I thought of testing this bugmenot with the zdnet site and got a username and password and was really surprised it worked and voila, that’s really cool.

This is indeed an innovative service and the idea is real good.

The other idea which I am impressed very much is the http://del.icio.us/ It’s the collection of favourites ie bookmarks, now bookmarks are no longer specific to machines and my del.icio.us account helps me to open bookmark with any pc`s/computers. There were times when I really missed my bookmarks and could not remember the sites url correctly, this services puts and end to all this.