Abhishek Tiwari

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Few days back I talked about the OpenSocial initiative and how I believe that it can help making the online Social experience much better by enabling interoperability. Before that I have also talked about consolidation of online social experience. My theme continues to remain the same. How do we fix “Social Network Overload”? So in this post I am going deeper to the basics of the problem.

What is a Social Graph?

The term popularized by Mr. Zuckerberg (CEO Facebook) is a better name for your Social Network. Social Graph represents your network of acquaintances. It is a graph of your contacts (friends, family, coworkers etc). Services build upon the social graph and offer applications, which let you interact with your friends and acquaintances. Check out the Wikipedia page for in-depth details.

Where does it exist?

For a typical user, the social graph is broken and distributed among various services and applications. For example my graph exists across:

• Social networks I belong to, such as Facebook, Orkut, MySpace etc
• Business networks I belong to, such as LinkedIn, Plaxo etc
• My Email contacts, which exist on GMail, Outlook etc
• My IM buddy list
• My phonebook on my mobile handset
• Finally my blog visitors and Twitter followers

For some of you this list will probably be longer. Now these services and people I interact with represent my social realm of influence. So as you can see my overall graph is spread all over the place, over various services. I am sure most users are this way.

Read more »

Share This

This is the third and final part of this series. If you haven’t read the first two, check them out here:

1. Part 1
2. Part 2

The news around GPhone has heated up in past few weeks. There have been several reports of Google working with wireless carriers like T-Mobile and Sprint. WSJ even reports that the announcement can come as early as Monday.

So it will soon be evident as what Google has in store for us. Until then we can speculate. So in this final post of the series, I look at two major components of the GPhone ecosystem, the “Application Ecosystem” and the all important “Revenue Enablement”.

Read more »

Share This

This is the second part of my three part post on the GPhone. If you haven’t read the first part, please go read it here. This post takes a deeper dive and analyzes the possibilities around Messaging, Media and Productivity applications. Remember these are simply my analysis, as if I was building the phone. This is no indication of how Google may do it. Surely, I hope that I end up being pretty close to their thought process.

So without further ado, let’s begin with the Messaging.

Messaging

It goes without saying that Messaging is such an important function of our Mobile lifestyle. Pretty much all mobile devices attempt to innovate and improve the messaging offerings. SMS, MMS and Email are commonplace now on all phones. That is not to say that they have become simpler or intuitive. Any typical off the shelf phone offers multiple modes of messaging and involves a decent learning curve. It does get complicated for a mainstream user to navigate through this.

In my opinion, the GPhone can improve mobile messaging by leveraging its exemplary messaging portfolio.

Read more »

Share This

Yes, that is the recipe for making Mojito or Mint Julep, depending on whatever you are into. No, I am not making this a cocktail friendly blog, it was just my cutesy way to discuss some feature recommendations for Mint, the new personal finance service. I wrote about them few weeks back, when they had launched. I had rave reviews on their offering and encouraged my readers to try them out. No wonder, they won the TechCrunch 40 award.

This post however takes a different angle. I have been regularly using Mint for past month or so. I am what you call the repeat customer, using it twice a week on average. The reason I stuck was due to the fact that I have been looking for such a service for a long time. I had nbeen a Quicken user for sometime but left it while moving to Mac. Apart from their crappy mac UI, their software in general is pretty complex. I couldn’t see myself using it twice a week.

Anyways after using Mint over past few weeks, I have some recommendations (the Sugar and Rum, if you will). Hopefully the team there can digest these and incorporate in a later release. I am not pointing out any obvious bugs here, only feature recommendations as a regular user.

Read more »

Share This

This is an update to my previous post on this subject. Amazon MP3 downloader does support storing songs in iTunes. It’s a preference option hidden in its menu. Thanks to Scott for catching that.

So that makes things a bit easier to deal with. I would still like to see Amazon get rid of the downloader and directly place the song in my iTunes.

Eliminate as many steps as possible and make the experience seamless. That will be a great way to compete with iTunes.

Alternatively Amazon can go fully in the other direction. They can develop a full blown iTunes replacement application. Their developer community already enables great applications with the amazing set of AWS framework. They will have to ensure that its as seamless as iTunes.

Share This