Archive for the ‘technology’ category

Integrating you website with Facebook

July 9th, 2010

Things are changing constantly on Web and the way people are consuming information on Internet. During good olds days of internet people used to depend on Web Directories like Yahoo , Lycos etc.. to provide them source of truth on resources they were looking for and latter with advent of Google Search people started looking for information & resources by Gooogling them. Google truely became synonym for search and till date it has been serving us as good starting point for things to lookout or find on internet.

However I do believe that as we rely more and more on internet not only for information but also for doing day to day things like shopping , buying gift , booking travel tickets & hotel reservation etc.. we will need lot more than Google to help us out. Yes we need recommendations from friends or other people like us who in past have had similar experiences making similar purchases online.

This is were Facebook API’s come into play and are so useful and I have feeling they are here to stay and change the way we consume information on internet. Facebook just launched social plugins few weeks back, social plugins let you see what your friends have liked, commented on or shared on sites across the web by posting their activites on Facebook. All social plugins are extensions of Facebook and are specifically designed so none of your data is shared with the sites on which they appear.

Lets say you are trying to book a Hotel room for your upcoming trip to Seattle, before making a purchase you will want to know how many of our friends have stayed in that hotel in past and checkout what they and other people have to say about that Hotel. Making a booking becomes a hassle free experience if you have friends recommending it.

Let go over few popular social plugins
LIKE BUTTON

 

There is saying that great things come in small packages and same thing is true for Like button above, This like button is few lines of HTML code and can added anywhere on the internet e.g near your products page or your article or video you just posted to your website or the world class service that you could be offering on your website. If someone likes it gets posted to their profile page on facebook, soon their friends notice it on their news stream on Facebook and thus bring them to your site and chances are they might like it as well. Soon the they starting inviting their friends to visit your page and before you know it whole thing becomes a viral.

Comment Box

 

Simple & elegant & beautiful are the words which come my mind on seeing this “Comments Box” it easily enables your users to comment on your site’s content — whether it’s for a web page, article, photo, or other piece of content. Then the user can share the comment on Facebook on their Wall and in their friends’ streams.

More over you don’t have to spend time & money to come up with home grown solution now you can just leverage API’s which facebook has to offer for integrating comment boxes to your website.

Activity Feed

 

Above plugin displays stories both when users like content on your site and when users share content from your site back to Facebook. If a user is logged into Facebook, the plugin will be personalized to highlight content from their friends. If the user is logged out, the activity feed will show recommendations from your site, and give the user the option to log in to Facebook. Thus making content more personalized to users.

This were few of most popular Facebook social plugins,for more information on other Facebook social plugin’s and see some showcases visit this documentation on Facebook

So what do you think of leveraging these Facebook api’s with your web pages, it definetly make your proucts and content more engaging & your website more lively, rich, dynamic and interactive.

Although this plugins are easy to use but it might be difficult for person who is not savvy with HTML to understand the usage and integrate them.But don’t worry if you think if think information is too overwhelming and if you need help there few good Media companies which can help you integrate Facebook social APi’s with your website.

This Facebook page offers few companies and individual developers whom you can hire for integrating your website with Facebook and or to develop applications on Facebook. http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/User:Developers_for_hire

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Facebook Applications

February 9th, 2010

Ladies and Gentleman welcome to the world of Social networking!!

Gone are the good old days where you used to travel 100 of miles to visit a friend in a neighboring city or spend Saturday afternoon will your kids playing baseball or take your girlfriend/wife out for a dinner.

You could now virtually do almost everything online spend time and share things with your friends, find a Date , or play games with your kids. You could even be a mafia don if you liked or own a virtual farm or pet and harvest virtual crops. You could also use real money to buy virtual goods for your farm or pet if you liked. World is at your fingers tips or on click of your mouse.

Although there are many social networking site on the web. Facebook has advantage above others in terms of being user friendly and popularity.

Just in past six months their user base has almost doubled reaching 400 million users worldwide compare that to Yahoo’s 500 million users. Yahoo has been around forever while Facebook has just turned five.

Two most prominent reasons of Facebook growing popularity are

  1. It’s simple and user friendly User Interface.
  2. Launch of Facebook platform in 2007.

Facebook launched the “Facebook Platform” on May 24, 2007, providing a framework for software developers to create applications that interact with core Facebook features.Thus giving unprecedented powers to developers and also creating a greater sense of community and encouraging developers to actively participate in the sites upward mobility.There is also a crucial viral component to it as well when a friend adds an application, it is noted in their news stream on their profile. Clicking on the item brings you to the app, where you can add and/or interact with it yourself.

The payoff is two ways not only do developers get deep access to Facebook’s 400 million users, but Facebook also becomes a rich platform for third party applications.

Thus Facebook left making it site rich full of features on 3rd party developers while it concentrated on the providing the basic functionality and building the strong platform for developers. This has done wonder’s for overall economy as well since it has created new ecosystem of companies thriving and doing business by building applications on top of Facebook.One of the company which I liked to mention here is Zynga.com.Zynga is online gaming company which started in 2007 just within two years of its existence, Zynga.com already employees 750 people and already turned profitable last year.
Some of its applications like Yoville and Farmville are immensely popular and have touched by 75 million users.
I like to warn you that some of these games are very addictive; I had a friend who left a party just because she wanted to go home and harvest virtual crops on Farmville.
Without Facebook platform to support it, existence of companies like Zynga.com would have not been possible.

Here is list of few useful applications I find on facebook.

1)iLike – iLike lets you add music, playlists, and videos to your profile, dedicate songs to your friends, and see who’s going to what concerts.

2)LivingSocial is a social discovery and cataloging network that allows people to review and share their favorite movies, books, games, music and restaurants As the most comprehensive interest-based online community,

3) Marketplace lets you sell, give away, buy, ask, or search for anything you want. You can also support charities by selling for a cause.
Marketplace makes it easy to see what your friends have posted and what is available in your area.

4) SocialCalendar helps users to remember birthdays, holidays, get-togethers and other social occasions.
It lets users import, organize and receive reminders about important events.
Users can also share dates, plan events and coordinate with friends and family.

5) Training The Training application is an easy to use and powerful tool for setting and keeping track of your workout goals with friends. You can invite friends to join your training crew and help each other stay motivated.

6) Roomster is app for especially for those looking for a place to rent.
It allows users to search for apartments, roommates and sublets in the US and Canada.

7) NetworkedblogsThis application helps you Promote your blog on Facebook and to discover new blogs. NetworkedBlogs is a community of bloggers and blog lovers. You could add your blog, and connect with others who read and write about subjects you like.

8) Circle of Moms Where moms connect and address the challenges of motherhood together.Share stories and celebrate your children’s milestones with friends and family in a safe, private environment.

9)Testimonials is place to gather your personal, professional and academic references in one place from your teachers, friends, and co-workers.

10)Promotions for Fan Pages as name suggests is application for companies & agencies to run branded interactive promotions on Facebook Fan Pages.
Promotion formats include: sweepstakes, contests, coupon giveaways, and more…

11) Pet society For those of who are fond of pets or like have pets but don’t have one you can now virtually create and raise a happy pet in Pet Society!
Raise your pet and enjoy many activities together – racing, fishing, gardening, and cooking!
Make your pet happy by earning coins to shop and buy stylish clothing and cool furniture.

12) Stock Quotes Add stock prices and a look-up box to your Profile page. Check for news, financial blogs and podcasts. Then see if your friends are tracking the same stocks. Great for investment clubs

13) Collage lets you create collage of your friends on facebook.

All in all there is an Application to suit everyone needs on Facebook, There are some things which you can’t do online but for everything else there is a Facebook App !!

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Search evolution, Yahoo, Google, MSN past, present and future

December 17th, 2009

This is the story of how internet search began in early days, how it has evolved and how the key players in search industry facilitated this growth of internet search.

Google was founded in year 1997, but before Google dominated the search scene many other search engines were popular on internet like AltaVista, Ask Jeeves (now ask.com), Lycos and of course Yahoo! to name few

Picture of Yahoo Homepage in 1996

Picture of Yahoo Homepage in 1996

Yahoo wasn’t really a search engine but it started off as directory of websites organized in different categories, and all this was maintained by human’s editors who manually browsed the internet and added website in right categories.Since this was manual, it ensured indexing was of high quality as it used human intervention to distinguish between good and bad sites.

However as internet grew Yahoo’s manual method of organizing sites was becoming less efficient and less scalable so they partnered with a third-party “crawler-based” search engine to provide answers for when there are no matches within its own human-powered listings..

Until late 90’s search market was non-lucrative and Web Companies didn’t see enough potential for making big money so stayed away from it.

In late 1990 like other search engines/web directories, Yahoo! diversified into a Web portal. In the late 1990s, Yahoo!, MSN, Lycos, Excite and other Web portals were growing rapidly.
Web portal providers rushed to acquire companies to expand their range of services, in the hope of increasing the time a user stays at their portal.

Thus all of above portals (excluding Google) started loosing focus from search and started concentrating on building portals.

In February 1998, a player in Search market “GoTo.com” (later renamed Overture Services, Inc.) entered the scene and started offering advertiser’s option to bid for keywords for placement of their ads on search results, so the advertisers with highest bid got better placement on search results.This revenue model is called PPC (pay per click) wherein advertisers paid money to search engine for the clicks that were generated to their website from search results.
This program from was highly successful and it’s allowed its partners like MSN and Yahoo to monetize search market.

However GoTo.com model had one drawback, highest bidder got highest placement for keywords, so it didn’t factor into account “relevancy” of website or geographical location from were searches were being made.
Obviously if the site was not relevant, less users would click on the Advertisement and thus resulting in less money going into Search engines coffers.

Google overcame this drawback in 2000 and came up with better search monetizing algorithm with Program named “Adwords”.
As per this program, the ordering of the paid-for listings depends on other advertisers’ bids (PPC) and the “quality score” of all ads shown for a given search. The quality score is calculated by historical click-through rates, relevance of an advertiser’s ad text and keywords, an advertiser’s account history, and other relevance factors as determined by Google.

By 2000 Google as search engine was slowly growing in stature as not only their search results were more relevant, but also much faster compared to competitors.The Google search engine attracted a loyal following among a growing number of Internet users, who liked its simple design and useful results.

Google Homepage in 1998

Google Homepage in 1998

In 2000 Yahoo dumped Inktomi and started using Google to power their search results and thus helping Google to be more and more popular.Soon people started realizing that they could directly go to Google for their searches instead of going to Google via Yahoo.

By 2002 Yahoo & Google had equal share in search market which was about 30% and Google was slowly taking the search market away from Yahoo.
Yahoo saw Google as threat to its growth and started acquiring companies with search technologies.
In 2002, they bought Inktomi, a “behind the scenes” or OEM search engine provider, whose results are shown on other companies’ websites and powered Yahoo! in its earlier days.
In 2003, they purchased Overture which owned the AlltheWeb and AltaVista search engines. Initially, even though Yahoo! owned multiple search engines, they didn’t use them on the main Yahoo.com website, but kept using Google’s search engine for its results.

In 2003 AOL signed deal with Google which enabled them to not only power their search results but also used them for paid listing on their sites in US and some other countries.

In 2004 Yahoo started powering its own search, but that was too late in the game as by this time Google was leading the search traffic with 35% of share as compared with Yahoo! was 32%

In subsequent years Yahoo kept loosing the search market share to Google. In a desperate attempt to stop slide, towards end of 2006 Yahoo launched a project named Panama.

Yahoo’s Project Panama was designed to catch up with Google’s Ad placement technology.Prior to 2007 Yahoo placed a paid ad solely based on the amount advertisers are willing to pay for the keyword. Post Panama Yahoo Ads placement would be based on price and relevancy of ad.

This again was too little & too late, as by this time Google completely dominated the search market with 45% of share, compared to Yahoo’s 28% market share.

In July 2009 Microsoft and Yahoo announced a deal in which Y! search will be powered by Bing, making Microsoft and Yahoos share of search traffic close to 30% and Google’s share is still 70%.

What happens next only time will tell,but as now search game will be fought 2 powerful players Microsoft and Google, both of them trying to outwit each other in terms of marketing dollars spent as well as technology.

As of when, this post was being written Miscrosoft was running a powerful online marketing campaign to promote its Search Engine Bing. Its offering searcher’s upto 20% cashback on products bought online from partner vendors on sales originating from its search pages.

Here are Important timelines in Search Industry

1994 Yahoo founded.
1994 Lycos founded.
1995 AltaVista founded
1995 Excite
1996 Inktomi
1996 AskJeeves
1997 Google founded.
1998 MSN search
1998 GoTo.com offer advertisers option of bidding to appear at the top of the results in response to specific searches. Bid amount was paid by advertiser to go to overtime searcher clicked on a link to the advertiser’s website.
2000 Google launches adwords
2000 Yahoo begins using Google to power Yahoo search
2003 Yahoo acquires inktomi, goto, altavista and alltheweb
2003 Google launches Adsense
2004 Yahoo begins powering its own search.
2007 Yahoo rolls-out project Panama to bridge gap with Google
2009 Microsoft launches new search engine Bing.
July 2009 Microsoft and Yahoo announced a deal in which y! search powered by bing.
2009 popularity google 70% , Yahoo 26%

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H1b & Green card mania

November 24th, 2009

GreenCardBiggest issue facing Immigrants coming to U.S.A is the cumbersome process and time required for getting a Green Card or Permanent Resident card.One particular section of immigrants I want to highlight in this blog are skilled workers who come to U.S on H1b visa and work for High Tech companies all across United States.H1b workers usually apply for Employment based Green Card and unless they are lucky this process usually takes at-least 5 years.However bigger problem with Employment based Green Card is you have be employed with same company for major part of application process.

USCIS issues ~ 120,000 Green cards every year to skilled workers, now I don’t won’t to go into details of how and where those get allocated but do like to mention that there is a quota for each country and therein lies the problem.

No, No, No I am not proposing that USCIS should ban the quota system and make it available for everyone who wants one as that would be even more dangerous since it would create more problems of unemployment here in U.S which is already tottering under wheels of high unemployment rate.

But what I propose is something very simple to remove the current limitation for H1b workers set at 6 years and let them be as long as they want provided they renew their visa every 3 years.

This will be a win-win situation for everyone.

Now let face it many of us so called “permanent residents” or Green Card holders in United States had filled for Green card application due to the fear of uncertainty that once we reach our 6 years limit on H1b we will have to quit jobs and unwillingly go back to our country of origin.
Above proposal will help H1b visa workers by letting them stay here as long as they want without having to worry about 6 year limit set on their visas but mostly and fore mostly it will help USCIS and US treasury as it will not only ensure increase in revenue coming from H1b applications renewals every 3 years but also there will be huge drop in backlog for GC applications as only genuinely interested people will apply for it.
I feel all the immigrants are here for one reason or another either have better life style or better job or to make money or some kind of opportunity which didn’t exist in our homeland and given a chance they would like to return to their roots and retire peacefully.

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