Web2.0 Tao

TechCrunch has its identity as the most followed blog on Technology giving the most reliable information (and TC gives you that 'Breaking Story' always!). Its influence on the Web and the Technology world is immense and though it has been behind Mashable in terms of numbers for quite sometime now, it still is considered an authority on the Internet! Techcrunch announced in the ongoing Disrupt Conference that they are being bought over by AOL - the biggest blog network on the Internet with a not-so-good history of mergers but an excellent track record when it comes to acquisitions!
The terms of the buy-out seem quite fair at the onset. The editorial team of TC will remain intact, the sales team will have their own space inside the AOL's sales team, the nature of the blog itself would remain same. Though AOL has been doing good on the content front and it is but natural for TC to align itself with the market leaders with a stronger hold on the sales and marketing front, the reasons cites by Michael Arrington do not convince me much. He said that the move was necessary keeping in mind the continuous problems TC faces in the technology front - running the engineering side of the blog and its associated network sites (CrunchBase, MobileCrunch, etc.) They wanted their focus to be content and content alone which is what they get when they sell out to AOL. My question is, Why sell TC when you can always have partnerships, associations or better remunerations for the technical staff! It is lame to think that TC was 'sold' only because Arrington was finding it hard to employ a good engineer!
AOL is the biggest blog network on the Internet and they pursue all major independent blogs around the world (that's what you do when you are a huge company with lots of moolah to buy the smaller ones!) Arrington had been weary of running TC for quite sometime - the web was abuzz with rumors that TC would be sold or worse discontinued!
All I can hope for is that TC continues to report the way they used to; I would not mind much if a small AOL logo appears in the footer and the default search text in the PostUp sidebar has AOL in it!

Web 2.0 became a buzz word somewhere in 2005 (please correct me if I'm wrong!) and as they say, rest is history. Today, we understand about Web 2.0 in many perspectives and can explain it technologically (there is also a cool website which has tried to define metrics for a Web 2.0 app judging by the technology used, here's the link), socially (O'Reilly original definition was more social than technical, read it here) and sometimes (very rarely) on the basis of its looks (the UI part is nevertheless mostly covered in its use of AJAX and the it being a RIA).
I stumbled upon a reality show in MTV called the Roadies and was excited by its parallels with the Web 2.0 funda! Interestingly, many 'reality shows' have come up in the recent past (Big Boss/Big Brother, Roadies, Splits Villa, etc. ) which just lay down the basic set of rules and the major chunk of 'entertainment' is provided by the participants itself. Right from the time of screening (for a show like Roadies) to the point when they interact with each other giving the spice for the takers, it reflects the Web 2.0 principles where the users create the value.
When Hillary Clinton quoted the US-India partnership as a 3.0 she defined a new era of Web understanding even amongst the (usually) technically offset minds!

Web 2.0 is reflecting across all social interaction platforms and is more of a principle than just technology!

I noticed a very interesting thing today in the report for my blog in Google Analytics. Most Adsense revenue was generated by the new visitors. These are the ones who clicked more Ads as compared to the regular/loyal ones.
The loyal visitors do help in bringing a continuous flow of traffic and contribute towards building a network effect by means of recommendations, comments, bookmarking, etc. but as far as Adsense click stream is concerned, the new ones are much more likely to click an Ad than the returning ones (in my case more than 3 times more likely!).
Moreover, your blog/site can be said to be buzzing with activity only if there are a considerable number of new visitors everyday. So, new visitors bring money and a hope for more money/popularity in future!

Yahoo! has got something seriously wrong! In my opinion it is almost a sinking ship and the worst hit are not just the stakeholders but even the users of its services. Very recently Yahoo! sent out a mail to its users to migrate their blogs, contacts and other information from Yahoo! 360 to other platforms as they were shutting down the service from July 13, 2009. The '360' always remained a Beta and failed to attract users except for a few countries like Vietnam (for which a new product 'Yahoo! 360 Plus' was launched, considering the user density in that country).
Yahoo! was also stated to have bid for stakes in the Advertising on Facebook, social community giant.
Another failed attempt in recent times was 'Mash', Yahoo!'s desperate attempt at social Website market. One of their best products have been the Yahoo! messenger without doubt. It revolutionized the 'Chat market' and has always been a leader there. But even the 'chat market' is slowly being captured by GTalk, Skype, etc.

Yahoo! may soon turn into a 'Who ya?'

Google apps like Gmail, GTalk, Spreadsheet, Sites, etc. can all be monitored by its users for their health and issues. Go to Google AppsStatus and find out the issues (if any) on a particular day with a particular app.
We might expect Google to be GOD of all apps but there are far too many outrages and issues, thankfully this user friendly reporting tool makes it easy to identify if the problem is in your network or a Google folly!

Google is slowly incorporating everything into its kitty. One of the new additions is the 'Parked Domain'. Now you can park your domain with Google Adsense. I'm yet to try out this feature but it could be a good idea to try out the Google services. As this is a relatively different territory from the good-old-Adsense, you have to agree to another set of Agreements|Terms and conditions. The fact that a parked domain is much like deceiving people into navigating to some place where they didn't want to go in the first place makes this proposition a little tough for Google as this is quite contrary to the principles of Google (we can have a big debate on this!).

As of now I don't have much info on this particular feature with respect to its use and utilization. Will update you with more soon.

Orkut has a huge user base being the social network of choice in India, Brazil and a few other countries. Though not comparable to MySpace or Facebook managing a social network of this size is a fairly daunting task. One of the biggest problem of any social network is to maintaining its user base healthy and clean. Any kind of junk needs to be filtered as it propagates a negativity across the network virally which may bring it down if not kept in check below a certain level. One classic example could be 'FaceParty' which had a good user base in UK but is struggling to keep up with other competitors like Facebook even though FaceParty went like in 1996 much before people understood the importance of a social network. FaceParty failed to filter the users and the content created by them and is not ranked more than 1500 according to alexa.


Having a 'Report Abuse' functionality is a must for any social network and I tested the same on Orkut recently. I reported an abuse a couple of days back and today found a mail from Orkut confirming my apprehensions about the particular member and taking action against it!