Beta or Alpha?

To start with, if you do not know the basic difference of Beta and Alpha versions of software, here it goes. The alpha build of the software is the build delivered to the software testers, usually internal to the organization or community that develops the software.

Whereas a beta version is the first version released outside the organization or community that develops the software, for the purpose of evaluation or real-world black/grey-box testing. The process of delivering a beta version to the users is called beta release. Beta level software generally includes all features, but may also include known issues and bugs of a less serious variety.

Now, let's come to current trends. First of all, nowadays companies like Google run their products in the markets for years and claim them to be beta versions. For example, Orkut, used by more than 12 crore people, is still in beta stage.

Now let's talk about Google's new service, Knol. Knol is a service started by Google where users can write their own pages about anything and put it online, something similar to Wikipedia, except that there can be a number of pages on a single topic in Knol, and they will belong to the owner of the page.

Now, Knol is in its Beta stage, but the service doesn't even have a working search system. The question is, how can a service that is so much dependent on search, reach its beta stage without a proper search sysytem.

Interestingly, Knol belongs to Google, which is considered the second name for search on Internet. Hope Google does something about it soon.

And now, Knol

What if Google owned the Wikipedia? Well, now it seems that Google is trying to something of that sort as it has started its new service called Knol, the unit of knowledge. (name trying to remind you of mol/mole of science, I think)

Though being a Wikipedia isn't easy. That too when its a commercial company like Google. I mean, of course there are companies that are much more into money but Wiki is a complete charity so a competition should hardly exist between the two.

For now, the only things I understood are that Knol will have authors who could write on topics as they wish and they can also get ad revenues through adsense for ads on their Knols.

This is supposed to create competition but I expect more of confusion and chaos. So let's see how does this new thing works. I hope Google people get good result for using their Knols of knowledge.

Fall of Grand Old Orkut

No more Orkut.

It's not my new year resolution in the middle of the year. It's something that Orkut has done to itself.

Well, to be more clear and specific, we can say that Orkut has become 'facebookised'. And thus comes the fall of the grand old Orkut.

For now, all I'm feeling is that the grand old Orkut got afraid of the increasing or increased popularity of Facebook and decided to go the facebook way, adding a number of applications from music iLike to typeRacer and readingSocial to Bible Verses and IndiaDekha.

Which, I presume, is a bad, bad decision as I have seen a number of people who have found it difficult to cope with the facebook and thus have sticked to Orkut, without even deleting their Facebook accounts, for either they did not care, or they did not know how to do that.

I feel it may also trouble people who were first time netizens and found Orkut the 'simple and best' system to just stay in touch with friends.

Although, on a positive side, the new Orkut may be more interesting to people who were finding it difficult to pass more time on Orkut.

But overall, I think it's a negative thing for the grand old Orkut.

Google and Googlability

I had decided this post to be titled as Googlability. But since I'm a very literary person, at least nowadays, I let myself have some inspiration and named it Google and Googlability.

What is Googlability?

In simple terms, the ability of a search result to be googled easily is its Googlability.

I haven't yet made it mathematical so that it's just a concept and can be understood easily by anyone.

Now let us take some examples to understand Googlability. Let us start with the Indian Premier League. Indian Premier League is an easily Googlable term. That is, when we write Indian Premier League in the Google search box, we simply get the results related to the Indian Premier League we want and not any other thing.

Too simple. Isn't it?

When do you get results for 'Z' when you search for 'X'?

Sometimes we do.

Let us talk about Mumbai Indians. How many results out on top are for the IPL Mumbai team? Though the first ten results are for the IPL team only but not as many as come for Chennai Super Kings or Kolkata Knight Riders. This is an example of relatively low Googlability.

Today we need to know how to make ourselves more Googlable if we want people to register our presence in the online world. Being Googlable is especially necessary for those people and organisations which are googled by people and which need to be seen or heard by the people in order to advertise themselves.

We can say Googlability comes from a balance between uniqueness and generalisation. While you go out in the cyber space for an identity it should be as unique as it can be and that without losing its general identity.

Today I am happy that my name is Googlable enough and gives results on the first page of Google. After all, Googling is all about the first page search results.

In a flat world 1.2 (or) I've gone mad

Believe it or not. It's hillarious!! (nothing to do with Hillary Clinton)

Google is tracking what we are all listening. In all the countries. Based on those who put current track in their Gtalk. Big deal. But not much.

The much big deal is the results I saw. For the first time I entered the Google music labs (as they call it) and checked the results under All countries and All genres. And Mohit Chauhan's 'Tum se hi' was the third topper on the list.

So, in the flat world, Indians are participating in everything. Congrats India! The world is listening.

By the way, if u want to know what India is listening, u can select India instead of All countries. And if u are still not surprised, select genre soundtrack and all countries.

In a flat world 1.1

Dudes, this is a running post. For those who are interested in Google. (or rather obsessed with it)

If u want to know more about more of Google things, and how Google things work, just type 'Google blogs' in your search box and start reading the results one by one. They may be all new to you, or some of them known. But I can assure you may not know all of these things so well. Actually much of this can be geek stuff and may be it's out of range/above head, I think its worth a watch, especially if you think you know a lot about Google.

So, Happy Reading!

In a flat world - I

I do not know how many parts I will be writing in this post. But since I have been reading the book 'The World is Flat' by Thomas L Friedman for a long time now, that is almost since the first week of January, completed more than half of the book, and liking it continuously, I think I can write a lot on this Flat world.

The author has given a list of things, ten in number, that are making the world flat today. But there is, to be very specific, one, that I have been using for a long time now. And that flattener is Google.

Friends, maybe I am obsessed with Google. But I think if it is so, it's worth it.

Well, I do not know how many of you use Google how efficiently but I would like to tell you here how much and in what manners I use Google. As long as I am online.

Google starts with web search. Web search for general knowledge, studies, projects, movies' details, songs, or simply time pass. May be I have left a number of categories I search for. Then, the very next, image search (going by the order on the Google home page). Image search of Google is used for various reasons, to find various things. From pictures required in assignments to movie posters. From beautiful girls (under censored language) to my changing profile pics on Orkut. Google image search only gives meaning to all JPEG, PNG, BMP and other such words. The next one, news, is though a thing I do not search through 'Google News'. But still, almost all the news are found through the standard Google homepage.

Then comes my dear old Orkut. Whatever I say about Orkut is less. I have used Orkut for a lot, lot many things. I have found lost friends on Orkut, have talked to them sending 200 scraps in a day (to one person only) when the reply option didn't exist, have talked to anonymous people on scraps, spent whole nights visiting profiles of girls with different algorithms, collected people of my own town from around the world under the community called Najibabad, gathered information regarding admissions, colleges etc, even provided information to many, shown my power (when there was a race among us friends to have the maximum number of friends, though trying to lessen the number now), and what not.

Then comes the Gmail. A forever favorite. Currently I have at least 5 Gmail accounts running out of which i use 3 regularly. Also, my college has assigned a new mail account in the name of college provided actually by Gmail, making harshitgupta2004@vit.ac.in my new Gmail id. Basically after using Gmail I do not want to use any other mail. Recently I tried AOL mail after using which I could say it was 'Not Made for India'. I was really pissed off as I could not send even one mail properly from the American giant's mail.

Then come the two things, Google Books and Google Scholar, which I rarely use. Actually I have hardly ever used Scholar except for the main Google search engine but after seeing the papers available there, I must say it is going to help people, including myself, in their assignments and projects.

Google blog search is another interesting thing. It has found me things I could never reach through the normal web search. One day I simply searched the name of a friend and I came to know he's running a blog about which hardly anyone knows. I also search blogs when I simply want to know people's view about something, be it Raj Thackeray or my college VIT Vellore.

Photos is one thing I could not use yet as I do not have proper internet connection to upload my pics. Still, I find Picasa really useful and better my photos using Picasa as Adobe Photoshop is too heavy a tool for me.

Then there is 'Blogger' through which I broadcast all the crap that comes to my mind. And those Google alerts in which I used to write any person's name I wanted to know about and get all the info on my mail (I had hundreds of mail alerts in the name of Sania Mirza once, to keep me updated) And the desktop search that searches every item on my hard disks with the speed of Google. Wow!

And even though I don't use Google's docs and spreadsheets as I have Microsoft office on my computer, I cannot afford to forget Gtalk that I use to talk to a number of people simultaneously. In fact I have talked to 4 people at a time in the Gtalk embedded in Gmail too.

Well, being a computer engineer, I do not want to tell you how much I search on google code. It'll tel you too much then. :)

Well, that is how Google makes my world flat. that is how I access information from all the corners of the world today. And that is how my life goes on Google.

No dream too big

Thanks Jaypee. (Happy? Ankit ji, Jaypee wale)

For this title of my blog. Actually I realized that, of the things that felt almost impossible to me at some stage, many have come true. In time, less or more, I have achieved many things.
It was class V when I got the first big target. When I was in yet-another-school-of-my-town and I had to get an admission in the sixth class of the town's best school, which conducted a test for the admission. According to the stats of that time, almost 650+ students used to take the exam and finally 240 students were taken. Though, there were 300 students by the admissions were over, courtesy Management Quota.

I took the exam and my coach assured my father that I will pass the test easily. And when the result was out, I was second on the merit list. I was surprised, though others were not that surprised I felt. To them it was just 'good' or 'very good'. But it was not unexpected like it was for me.

Then I entered the classrooms of the school and found myself among a whole new group of students. Almost all of them new to me, except a few who had been with me during the coaching, Mostly Achal and Saket. And then, there were half yearly exams of class VI, in which they used to show us the copies before giving the results. So after I had seen 4 copies, in the interval, I was thinking how it was happening that I was on top. I was a good student. I was always on top during my last school. I had studied this time too, but I didn't know I would top here. Though I expected to be somewhere near that, as a subconscious dream at least if not in conscious.
It was going normally, I was mostly on top, once on second position in my class, till class IX. Next year was board exam and I worked really hard. And I got 72%, something too low from my expectations. And probably that was when I stopped dreaming.

I think I did, but actually I never stopped dreaming. Just that I was not that affected by things after that. I took my XII exam, got first rank in my college, missed the merit list of board due to less marks in my one of the strongest subjects, Hindi (I still was the editor of the college magazine's Hindi subsection). But it didn't matter that much now. It wouldn't even if I would have got less marks. Though it never meant I stopped studying or became lazier. Because somebody inside was still dreaming.

And then there were exams I took during my XII year, and then my drop. And I worked hard again. Though not hard enough for the IITs. I don't know who inside me was not interested in going there. I was, of course. I was preparing for it. But somebody inside wasn't. And then the result of AIEEE was there. I had got 8321 rank. I thought I will be under 12000 only. But this good, it was a bit more than my dream this time. I had expected 10-12k. Though I missed my 'favorite' college by a difference of just 2 ranks at that too, I landed in VIT, Vellore, a college my mother didn't let me apply for separately.

2000 kms away from home, near Bangalore, where my didi lives, my cousin to be precise, who currently teaches in a top engineering college there. It was a dream come true again. Because those colleges of Noida, Ghaziabad and nearby areas were too real for me. I wanted to go to some different place. Something better, and for being better it should be far away too. And I got that.

I was a student from a Hindi medium throughout my school. I didn't (and don't) speak much English in college also as I don't like to. But my aim was CAT, the common admission test for MBA, from the very first year of my college, that started becoming showing signs of some ambiguity as I started coming near to getting a job. And soon I decided I'd take up the job and postpone MBA for two years. Later, though, on my friends' insistence, I changed back my mind but I didn't give it my complete attention, that it required I came to know after seeing my results, especially XAT and even SNAP.

MBA is today my unfulfilled dream, whereas TCS, as far as I see, is going to be a dream fulfilled. As I was somehow interested in getting placed in the TCS the first day I came to VIT.
But it's not always just about academics. There have been things that I thought were not possible. And still I worked to achieve them. And then they came in my routine. Be it talking to girls or seeing my name on Google. Well, being from a Hindi-medium-small-town-semi-government-boys-school, I hardly used to talk to any girls till the end of my first year in college, when one day my friend, Tyagi said I should be talking to girls otherwise it might trouble me in the future. And today I have very good friends among girls.

And the second, more recent and comparatively tougher dream was about the Google. I started using the net properly after coming to college only. The start was from essentials like mail and the addiction came from Orkut. But I always thought how could I have my name on Google, in second-third-fourth page at least, if not first.

Then I started blogging in September '07. And resultantly I could use some interesting keywords and find my blog on Google. But one day I found my name was there on number 64 in results when I googled 'Harshit Gupta'. It was the time when I knew I was near my dream and I decided to get my name as higher as possible. Time passed and one day I reached page 1 of Google, on searching Harshit Gupta. Today my name as keyword gives my name as eighth result on Google. And if I search Harshit Gupta Vellore, the first result is my page. So, though my voter ID card shows my name wrong, I have got an identity somewhere.

And that is what will inspire me to dream.

भाषाओं से परे, इंटरनेट

हो सकता है कि आप यहाँ हिन्दी देख कर आश्चर्यचकित हों, परन्तु ये एक नयी शुरुआत है। आज इंटरनेट भाषाओं कि सीमा से ऊपर उठ चुका है। अब से कुछ समय पहले तक जहाँ केवल हिन्दी लेखों को कुछ ही कंप्यूटर दिखा पाते थे, वहीं अब गूगल की सर्च भी इंटरनेट पर हिन्दी में ही की जा सकती है। इंटरनेट पर हिन्दी का स्तर यहाँ तक पहुंच चुका है कि अधिकांश शब्दों को टाइप करते समय यह भी ध्यान रखने की आवश्यकता नहीं होती कि कहीं गलत तो टाइप नहीं हो रहा है। आज इंटरनेट पर ऐसे अनेक पोर्टल उपलब्ध हैं जो हिन्दी में समाचार से लेकर साहित्य तक उपलब्ध कर रहे हैं। गूगल में भाषा को हिन्दी पर सेट करके सर्च करते समय हिन्दी शब्दों के विकल्प लिए जा सकते हैं। उदाहरण के लिए यह चित्र देखिए।

इस प्रकार गूगल सर्च अब आपको सचमुच हिन्दी में अपनी आवश्यकता के अनुसार परिणाम ढूँढने में मदद कर रहा है। इसके अतिरिक्त अब विकिपीडिया जैसे पोर्टल भी हिन्दी में अनेक परिणाम दे रहे हैं। उदाहरण के लिए सत्यजीत रे के लिए दिया गया यह परिणाम गूगल हिन्दी से प्राप्त हुआ है।

भविष्य में कुछ और हिन्दी पोर्टल्स के विषय में लिखने का मेरा विचार है। इसके लिए मेरे बिग बिग वर्ल्ड को देखते रहें...

i-Google

Google has always been a fascination for me, ever since I saw it for the first time I saw the net in the year 2003 after passing my class XII exam. I started using Internet thoroughly from the next year starting properly from Jan '04 and becoming a regular from the July-August of the same year when I got an admission to the college. Thus, I was late to start with the google compared to other students of my age and for the reason I felt I was a late entrant for the other services of google, too, such as gmail and orkut. But later I realized it wasn't so as I had started using both gmail and orkut at the time they were barely an year old.

Today, when I think of the Internet, the first thing that comes to my mind is Google. I have not the seen the net of pre-Google age and therefore, I reasonably do not know about many search engines other than Google. But today, its not just the search engine that makes me think of the Google. Today its Orkut, Gmail, Blogger and Adsense. Today its the Google Desktop search I find my songs with. And Picasa with which I organise the bunch of pictures on my computer.

Of all the services of Google, I found Orkut the second best, after the Google search, of course. Orkut has been a contacts list, a friend finder, a great time pass and a lot more to me. I searched the names of the old contacts I had lost , and found them. I went to forums and discussed about colleges when I needed knowledge about colleges for my nephew's admission, and i have chatted scrapping endlessly to one friend or more at times when I didn't have messengers with myself. Though, I still think there are many poeple who do not know how they can use Orkut for various important purposes.

Then, there has been Gmail, providing services at a level where more secrecy is required. And an embedded messenger which must have made many people use a messenger for the first time, who have not been old users of the Yahoo messenger. In those times, the Yahoo messenger was almost the only platform for people who used to chat and as I wasn't a user of the YM, I thought I'd never been into chat, but Google guys did that, and seeing a small chat box in my mail window, I started chatting, which went on and on.

Later I started using Blogger and Adsense. Actually I had tried them both earlier too but I wasn't as regular on the net. Also, the limited availability of net has always been a constraint with me.

Anyways, however much or less of the net I use, whenever I open the browser, the first letter I type in the address bar happens to be 'O', for orkut, as long as I am not 100% conscious that I'm there on net to do something very specific and important, other than Orkut. And even in those cases, half the times, the site happens to be Gmail or Google home.

In short, I cannot think how will the Internet be and what shall I do on the net if only the services of Google are not there. And, being an addict i am, should I call myself a net addict or a Google addict?