Twitter has been arguably most cloned startsups in recent times. It has the reputation of a startup that has been cloned in most languages across the globe. Amazingly simple idea, and outstanding execution have been drivers behind its success. Simplicity has helped it evolve in multi dimensions as well. However, an important factor behind twitters growth has been the APIs, which have been used by hackers to build multifaceted, useful and interesting applications. You can easily estimate a coarse number of “powered by twitter” apps by the fact that twitter api receives more than 10X traffic than twitter website (as told by twitter co-founder Biz Stone to ReadWriteTalk earlier this month. Click here for the interview transcript). Certainly, APIs have helped twitter to reach every corner of web in form of various interesting applications, and the list is increasing day by day rapidly. No wonder, it has become developer’s darling.

Twitter API scores for its simplicity, ease of use, diversity, multiple data formats, and above all simple REST architecture. Since twitter was much simpler service with its veins powered by text messages, the existing RSS feeds laid a good foundation for first API set. The API is as simple as firing HTTP requests and receiving responses in any of the four formats, plain old XML, JSON, RSS and Atom. Out of these formats, RSS and Atom are most easy to use as they already have matured parsers on almost every platform being used today. But since RSS and Atom have a predefined DTD, it has a limited footprint and does not capture much information. XML and JSON provide a better and complete view, but you need to take help of third party abstractions in order to use them efficiently. For example, twitter request for obtaining public timeline in XML is http://twitter.com/statuses/public_timeline.xml. A typical response looks like this

<status>
<created_at>Thu Sep 27 18:42:18 +0000 2007</created_at>
<id>297192592</id>
<text>i just want to know what they are doing at all times</text>
<source>im</source>
<truncated>false</truncated>
<user>
<id>8697452</id>
<name>bluecat34</name>
<screen_name>bluecat34</screen_name>
<location />
<description/> <profile_image_url>http://s3.amazonaws.com/twitter_production/profile_images/ 24378882/ mommy_marissa_normal.jpg</profile_image_url>
<url />
<protected>false</protected>
</user>
</status>

The same response in RSS, ATOM and JSON is like

RSS

<item>
<title>cc_chapman: scheduled to slide into PME around 5 – can’t wait</title>
<description>cc_chapman: scheduled to slide into PME around 5 – can’t wait</description>
<pubDate>Thu, 27 Sep 2007 18:52:26 +0000</pubDate>
 <guid>http://twitter.com/cc_chapman/statuses/297208942</guid>
 <link>http://twitter.com/cc_chapman/statuses/297208942</link>
</item>

ATOM

<entry>
   <title>petestone: longest day ever</title>
   <content type=”html”>petestone: longest day ever</content>
 <id>tag:twitter.com,2007-09-27T18:53:17+00:00:http://twitter.com/petestone/statuses/297210002</id>
   <published>2007-09-27T18:53:17+00:00</published>
   <updated>2007-09-27T18:53:17+00:00</updated>   <linktype=”text/html” href=”http://twitter.com/petestone/statuses/297210002” rel=”alternate”/>
</entry>

JSON

{“user”:{“name”:”Jessica”,”profile_image_url”:”http:\/\/s3.amazonaws.com\/twitter_production\/profile_images\/23719302\/JeffDIcon_normal.jpg”,”description”:”",”location”:”",”url”:null,”screen_name”: “MissJess”,”id”:8610542,”protected”:false},”truncated”:false,”text”:”@limespinkles: good luck, Bestie!!”,”created_at”:”Thu Sep 27 18:54:20 +0000 2007″,”source”:”web”,”id”:297211822}

You must have realized that information conveyed by different formats varies. JSON and XML give additional info, whereas RSS and ATOM just provides the messages. Now it is upto you on which format to use. My recommendation for browser based apps is JSON, as it nicely works with javascript, and XML, in case you wish to use it on server side. RSS and ATOM are not information rich, so should be use only when your requirements are fulfilled with mere message and timestamp.

REST powered API is easy to understand and all you need is a browser to play around with it. Although Twitter seems curl territory, but i feel your browser is a good place to begin with. The APIs are nicely documented on twitter wiki and twitter fan wiki. In case you are a “flashy” developer, then start using their actionscript libraries as mentioned on twitter blog. In case you speak Java, Python, .NET, Runy on Rails, php or perl, and find HTTP/XML/JSON/ATOM/RSS too basic/cryptic/unfriendly/, then there is enough juice for you to get started with twitter APIs here.

There are lots of “Powered by Twitter” apps. TwitterGram, and TwitterEarth  are significantly better ones. The most recent interesting app is twiddeo. You can feel twitter power when you go through a really loooong list of twitter apps on twitter fan wiki. No wonder how 10x traffic emerged.

Twitter is a slowly maturing into a robust communication platform. It provides a scalable message delivery system which can be utilized in number of ways other than sending statuses. Many apps utilize twitter for email/blog notifications(EmailTwitter), website monitoring(MoniTwitter), server monitoring(ServerMojo), news delivery (BBC News, Manchester United News). Some pundits even talk of twitter as a publishing platform.

Twitter API is a useful tool to have. It has built a mature and versatile message delivery network over a period of time, which can be utilized nicely provided it is integrated with other useful services. It can deliver weather forecasts, stock quotes, new arrivals in a store, public address messages, school notices etc. Time will tell where it will head, but this is for sure that it will continue to power better and useful apps each day.

The blog ecosystem has two primary entities. First, the content creators the root of the tree(henceforth Layer1), and content consumers, the leaves of the tree(henceforth Layer2). A third entity, which plays an important and significant role, is a set of content discovery tools to facilitate consumption with minimum efforts(henceforth Layer3). It could be better understood with following diagram.

An introduction to ecosystem

At the top of this tree are content creators. They consist of news sites, review sites, and other guys who write good stuff that people like to read. More and more content creators add to this layer with each day. There is a wide diversity amongst type of content available out there. Sports, tech, cooking, politics, education are a few broad categories. In short, vast amount of information is available for our consumption. At the bottom are content consumers. They typically outnumber content creators, and wish to consume more and more information. It has been proven with time that good content attracts these leaf nodes.

Looking Back

Lets move back a couple of years. Consumer created content was still an infant concept, and slowly was making its presence felt. Since the Layer1 as well as Layer3 were pretty thin at that time, so consumption of content was fairly easier. With time, there was a super exponential growth in both the layers. Producers and Consumers were growing. Content quality improved a lot with time. With super exponential growth, arose a problem of content discovery. Content discovery was not as easy as it used to be a couple of years back. You might be daily reading blog A, B and C, but 2 months back a new blog D popped up with lots of interesting content. Your earlier reading habits did not make D very visible. Thus, Layer3 started taking shape. Call it RSS readers, News Aggregations, Content filtering, Content ranking, all apps covering these realms belong to this layer. This layer is still in its infancy, and is improving drastically day by day. There are tonnes of startups working in some area or the other within this layer.

What is Layer3?

Layer3 is not the content creator, but has intelligence to deliver it to folks. As you might realize, the number of subscribers using layer3 services are increasing rapidly. Its natural to ask this question to us whether it will be defacto standard for consuming content in future, instead of pointing browser to individual blogs. Well! may be in future, but still to achieve this, there is lot of work remaining. We can visualize Layer1 as model and Layer3 as view in our layered philosophy. 

Information consumption is not a new concept. Homo Sapiens are always curious to consume information. This curiosity created newspapers and media and very internet, blogs, google everything. This created blogs. This created lots of blogs. This created Layer3. Digg, Delicious, Slashdot, Xanga and your favourite aggregator.

Will it rule out Layer1

Will this make layer1 completely redundant? Well not exactly. Remember, the fuel to layer3 still comes from layer1. In current state, it provides fuel for current layer3, and , also it presents its content with nicer layouts. Slowly, these layouts will vanish, and blogs will become what they truly are, Databanks. Visualize them as higher level databases, which feed front ends in layer3. RSS has already started providing some structure to content sitting in Layer1, and will soon evolve to provide mature database like interface for each blog. This will eventually empower layer3 and will result in lesser number of hits on layer1 with users adopting layer3 models for information consumption. But isn’t that scary? What happens to ads places on content creator arenas? Well, layer1’s monetization models have been through sponsorships and ads, which makes sense when a blog has high number of hits an users click on those ads. With layer3 taking front seat, these hits will come down, and they will have to think about alternative monetization schemes(possibly). I am no expert in business models, but surely it will be an interesting problem to solve.

Layer3 seems future! But where it stands now?

Unfortunately(or fortunately), layer3 is admist transition phase as of now. Many startups are working night and day and are building technologies to make a proper layer3 a reality. AideRSS, FeedJit, BlogRovr, FeedBlitz, Streamy, FeedEachOther, Techmeme, FeedHub, Rojo and may others are there. Still the best it does is to assist you in feed discovery. If you find those feeds interesting, you end up subscribing to those, else you read it once and say bye bye. There are some people made famous because of their humongous RSS feed list. With more and more people jumping on to blog bandwagon, the scalability of RSS Readers will be challenged. After all, consuming 5000 feeds each day is time consuming and not a good experience. I have limited time, but i need to grasp the crux of all of those, thus summarization holds the key. Some other bullet points i wish someone will provide one day, are :-

• I do not need feeds, i need content- the posts on interested topics, managing a feed. I am only interested in relevant part of RSS feed.
• I need to draw semantics from posts. Should be able to draw timelines, followups, connections between posts.
• I need content analytics(not hits etc) over blogs and posts.
• RSS readers should take an initiative to weed out or cluster duplicates. A google news look from my OPML is both necessary and desired. Techememe does this, but a personal view of my OPML’s is desirable.

Next week

Now since we have an idea about blog ecosystem, we will try to scrutinize and optimize the layers one by one. Next post will be an effort towards understanding and improving Layer1.

I am not posting from last few days. India stopped me from doing so! A bunch of inexperienced youngsters started of with a dream, a dream to win. They eventually won yesterday. And me, being a true patriot, was devoting my full time in supporting those guys, and i shifted priorities for a few days. Playing world cup final, and icing on the cake being defeating arch rivals Pakistan, and that too in a last over cliff-hanger. Amazing game play by youngsters on both sides. I’m sure hospitals would be inundated with cardiac arrest cases last night.

Since game and party is over, i am resuming the unfinished things, and will be posting some more interesting thoughts here. If any one out there reading this post wishes to contribute to the blog, they are more than welcome. Just shoot me an email on ashish at [this site].com.

In one of the old books, i came across this puzzle. Post your solutions.

Start with two numbers 18 and 19 on the blackboard. In one step, you may add another number equal to sum of any two numbers existing numbers on blackboard. Which of the following numbers can you reach using this strategy.

1. 1993
2. 1994
3. 1995

Moreover, given a number n, what will be the mathematical expression to check whether that number can be on board or not. Usual awards/rewards

You must be aware about the fine imposed by european union on microsoft in so called antitrust case, for using its monopolistic position to make an entry in server market. I wished to dig into the details about what this antitrust case is, and was searching google. But all i got were this news headline “EU fines Microsoft” from all blogs, news and other random sources. It seems people do not wish to get into details these days . Tweaking the search query, i got some info about an email exchange, which played a significant role in Sun Microsystems banging EU’s doors.

 First mail was written by someone known as Mr. Green who was VP at Sun-Microsysems at Palo Atlo, to someone known as Mr. Maritz , a VP at Microsoft on 15 september 1998. It goes like this.

We are writing to you to request that Microsoft provide [Sun] with the complete information required to allow Sun to provide native support for COM objects on Solaris.

We also request that Microsoft provide [Sun] with the complete information required to allow [Sun] to provide native support for the complete set of Active Directory technologies on Solaris.

We believe it is in the industry’s best interest that applications written to execute on Solaris be able to seamlessly communicate via COM and/or Active Directory with the Windows operating systems and/or with Windows-based software.

We believe that Microsoft should include a reference implementation and such other information as is necessary to insure, without reverse engineering, that COM objects and the complete set of Active Directory technologies will run in full compatible fashion on Solaris. We think it necessary that such information be provided for the full range of COM objects as well as for the full set of Active Directory technologies currently on the market. We also think it necessary that such information be provided in a timely manner and on a continuing basis for COM objects and Active Directory technologies which are to be released to the market in the future.

And Mr. Maritz replied something like this, on 6th of october.

Thank you for your interest in working with Windows. We have some mutual customers using our products, and I think it is great you are interested in opening up your system to interoperate with Windows. Microsoft has always believed in helping software developers, including [its] competitors, build the best possible products and interoperability for [its] platform.

You may not realise that the information you requested on how to interoperate with COM and the Active Directory technologies is already published and available to you and every other software developer in the world via the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) Universal product. MSDN contains comprehensive information about the services and interfaces of the Windows platform and is a great source of information for developers interested in writing to or interoperating with Windows. In fact, Sun currently has 32 active licenses for the MSDN Universal subscription. Furthermore, as your company has done in the past, I assume you will be sending a significant number of people to attend our Professional Developers Conference in Denver October 11 – October 15, 1998. This will be another venue to get the technical information you are seeking in order to work with our systems technologies. Some of the 23 Sun employees that attend[ed] last year[’]s conference should be able to provide you with their comments on the quality and depth of information discussed at these Professional Developers Conferences.

You will be pleased to know that there is already a reference implementation of COM on Solaris. This implementation of COM on Solaris is a fully supported binary available from Microsoft. Source code for COM can be licensed from other sources including Software AG. …

Regarding the Active Directory, we have no plans to “port” [it] to Solaris. However, to satisfy our mutual customers there are many methods with varying levels of functionality in order to interoperate with the Active Directory. For example, you can use the standard LDAP to access the Windows NT Server Active Directory from Solaris.

If after attending [the Professional Developers Conference] and reading through all the public MSDN content you should require some additional support, our Developer Relations Group has account managers who strive to help developers who need additional support for Microsoft’s platforms. I have asked Marshall Goldberg, the Lead Program Manager, to make himself available should you need it …

Following this email, Sun went to EU’s gardens on 10th of december 1998. Somehow EU was pissed off with Windows Media Player, as it was helping microsoft building monopoly over media player market, the same way they propagated Internet Explorer to kill Netscape. They sent out a letter to microsoft with their objections, and themselves started a probe in this direction. They tried to reach a settlement, by microsoft proposing shipping 3 other media players along with windows, and was not very keen to remove it from its operating system, stating “the addition of WMP to Windows was based on its business model and removal of WMP would affect the working of the O/S.” EU slapped a fine in 2004, and asked microsoft to ship a non media player version of windows from feb 2005, and not to add any other app to OS . Notably, one of the names microsoft proposed for this stripped OS was “Windows Reduced Media Edition”, which was discarded by EU . Microsoft appealed on higher court in 2006, and lost it as well. Another one of argument from microsoft against removing media player was “that removing the media player led to the loss of several functions in the trimmed O/S and deprived customers of the ability to play music provided by Yahoo! and Napster. He claimed that there were only a few takers for the trimmed version and that no computer manufacturer had shipped a computer pre-installed with this new version”

Sources

1. Proceeding of the appeal
2. Microsoft vs EU case study
3. Press releases by EU
4. Commission Decision on 23.4.2004

Aiderss proposed PostRank to measure post quality. What is PostRank? To explain this, consider this scenario. You write a post, and receive some comments on it. Then if your post is good enough, some fellow diggs it, a couple of guys stumble it, and a quite a few bookmark it at delicious. Then someone refers it on their own blogs, and technorati captures this noise. This much data is enough to build a heuristic about quality and reputation of a blog post. It can be summarized as :-

PR1 = k1*Technorati + k2* Digg + k3*Comments + k4*delicious

Now lets add a couple of more variables in this equation. What can those be? Take some popular blog search engines. Lets choose Icerocket, and google blog search. Now add some weight to these two variables, and add them to the equation.

PR = PR1 + k5* icerocket + k6* google

Now we have arrived at a very primitive post rank. This heuristic gives a course idea about popularity. There are a couple of loopholes in this, and it is easy to tame this heuristic. First of all, comments can be doctored by a person, and it is tough to validate the authenticity of comments of the blog. Also, bookmarking on delicious and stumble is a fairly easy job, and an author can play it easily. Same hold for digg. So lets give less weight to these variables, and give more weight to icerocket, google, and technorati. Out of these, google blogsearch should be left out because of its reputation (pun intended). technorati does not cover all the blogs. e.g it does not cover Paul Graham’s Hacker news, Techmeme and other aggregators, where decent discussions happen on blog posts across blogosphere. Icerocket also falls in same basket. Thus, even if you write good content, your post rank might be almost nothing.

Now what variables do you wish to be added to make this heuristic strong and better? I leave this question open for this week. You can mail me, or leave your views in comments.

To close, a small problem. Suppose there is a blog A that writes about a, b and c topics. B writes about only b, and C writes on almost anything. If B makes a new post, and A and C refer to that post, then which of A and C will get more traffic to B? If you are ready with the reasoning, then what will be the dependency on number of subscribers of A and C ?

1. Intelligent mice :- Microsoft has put around 1 GB of memory in the conventional mouse. I welcome this. Intelligent mice will be good to work, and will be a boon to people, replacing need for carrying portable HDD.
2. Cheaper office :- According to microsoft insider, they are launching office student edition for just $60. Cool. It is a welcome move from many, but it seems that office 2007 is facing some real competition for user acceptance.
3. NYTimes facing the book :- Yes, Yes – They have launched a facebook app. Looks like facebook is becoming web within a web. Now i want to have a website, and a facebook app.
4. Everyone is going green :- Green seems the flavour of season. Vinod Kholsa is known to invest actively in green startups. Now Google has jumped into bandwagon to provide a greener world. Their philanthropic inititiative about developing an eco friendly transport vehicle has also coma at the same time.
5. Digg, reddit vs news :- BBC has a nice article with a comparing digg, reddit, and other news website. An interesting read i must say. It is citizens vs journalists.

References :-

1. Memory mice :- http://crave.cnet.com/8301-1_105-9776021-1.html
2. Microsoft office discount :- http://microsoft.blognewschannel.com/archives/2007/09/12/office-ultimate-2007-just-60-for-students/
3. NYTimes on facebook :- http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/new_york_times_launches_facebook_app.php
4. Greener google :- http://blog.google.org/2007/09/drivers-start-your-batteries.html
5. Digg, Reddit :- http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6990033.stm

Each new day is a dawn and dusk for umpteen startups. If you are are regular on blogosphere feeds, you’ll simply bypass subject lines like, “We have launched a new social network for ___ (fill any random keyword)”, “we have launched a new search engine that searches ______(again a random keyword)”. Most of these are passed without any attention. A few are interesting to pay  a onetime visit, a very few more than once. Many of the new startups spend a considerable amount of time in reinventing the wheels, and then they start focusing on the real thing.

Lets take an example of a search engine. Each search engine does many common things. They crawl web, invest efforts in stripping html tags from webpages, and then index these pages. After spending considerable efforts in this process, they start building “the” thing. And these steps are mandatory for any search engine. Each one of these employ some of the smartest engineers on this planet. Individually, first few steps in building a search engines are same, and they all end up repeating it again and again. They pickup some open source crawler, and tweak it heavily to make it production ready, spend vast time crawling the web, monitoring their crawler and making it sure that it is running successfully. Compare it with a scenario, where a startup simply just crawls and crawls and crawls, and then builds a platform around it, and opens the API’s for other folks. Now you have arguably, a good crawl(assuming their smart engineers did a good job). Over time, they can even open the interfaces to improve their crawl by implementing submission model. They concentrate on one thing, and make it better. Monetizing their crawls is not a big deal if they can prove that they are crawling too much and too often. Zillion entrepreneurs will be interested in paying them moolah for API’s to access their crawls. Adding icing on the cake, if they provide html-less pages, it increases their value manifold. A good number can use their APIs to build nice apps with great ease. It serves a two fold optimization. First, it helps in concentrating on real problem, and secondly, IT HELPS IN CONCENTRATING ON REAL PROBLEM RATHER THAN REINVENTING THE WHEEL.  It lowers the entry barrier for a new idea that has dependency on crawls, and can make many ideas feasible which currently are due to these gigantic dependencies. Such analogy can be applied to various other aspects of any startup theme.

Established search engines have built much intelligence over time. As goes an adage in hindi which means “knowledge increases as you share it”. The quality of APIs from these bigshots is still not appreciable as far as knowledge delivered through their API’s is concerned. They sit on a big knowledge bank, which has potential to transform the human race, if they open it up.

Take another example of mobile devices. People are still searching for holy grail of mobile applications. Starting from scratch, you get a nice idea. You work overnight pondering over it. Finally, you choose J2ME, and develop it. You show it to your friend, and he confirms it being the next big thing. Then you decide to launch it. But wait! You suddenly realize that it does not work on nokia, sony ericsson, and blackberry. Then you take help of a porting company and get it ported over to many platforms. Porting guys take a reference build and deliver zillion builds you need to launch your app. Then it does not work on BREW phones. etc. And this process takes a cycle for every minor change and is a management disaster. This is true for “EVERY” mobile app. There have been enterprenuers who have cashed in on porting automation business. There is a better way to solve this problem. You take pains in developing a platform, say an appmanager. Your appmanager abstracts basic functions of the underlying mobile device. Through porting you make your appmanager visible on all. Then you expose appmanager API’s to developers. Since it has lowered the entry barrier, people can develop better mobile apps for your platforms real fast. You provide them a reach on most mobile devices. The moment I upload an application on your platform, all your users are notified about it. Certainly you will see more flux than earlier. Sun did a great job with publishing J2ME JSR(Java Specification Report). But the problem with JSR’s and RFC’s is that they are mere recommendations. While adopting them, vendors weak them according to their needs, and thus create a big porting problem altogether.

Facebook realized this are doing great with apps, since they launched their platform. In fact, facebook is a platform within a platform. A web browser is perhaps the most successful example of Apilatform philosophy. Imagine if a browser were not there, and you had to implement a mail client like gmail. You would have to make a separately app for windows, linux, mac, unix . Within vista, you would have to port it to vista, 2k, xp. Service packs make it worse. Firefox makes all this transparent to you. You can implement gmail on firefox, without worrying about diversity factor.

Where does facebook fit in? Facebook’s platform is second generation platform. You can term it as a semantic platform. Browser was to make things work, facebook is to make things better by injecting intelligence. They have a strong user base. Their platform gives me a two fold advantage. I can concentrate on what they call as “business logic”, and secondly, instantly i have a good crowd to attract. Take it as performing in a stadium full of folks, versus performing on a road cross, hoping people will pay attention. Again, since facebook’s platform is pretty restricted, so the use case depends on idea to idea about how feasible it is. i hope they open it further some day.

There is tonnes of intelligence within walled gardens of big corporations. Sharing it would help in constructing a better and usable internet. A person might not be good in creating text mining algorithms, but is an usability expert and might come with a better way to view google news. Open platforms will help in preventing people reinventing the wheel and concentrating on better apps, improving app quality, and reducing the effort to enter the market.

Head hunting is an interesting job. They are a bunch of proactive guys, who keep on spamming you, till you give in. Frequent e-mails and phone calls have become a regular good morning thing now. Upon enquiring about the source that leaked my number to them, i always get a familiar reply about one of my close friends doing this leak. I never give my office number to anyone. Not even “close” friends. Since i work in a business incubator, there are many startups in the nearby rooms. Once, i got a call in neighbouring startup’s office! and those guys, being friends, called me to attend it. LinkedIn has made things worse. Now i get begging requests to add them in my friends network, so that they can get access to my colleagues and some poor souls who went to grad school with me. And they are a perfect example of efficient planning. They are something CIA and ISI has to learn from. They have contingency plans, covert tactics, and a-soldier-never-says-die attitude. Once i had this conversation with someone from claiming to be from BEA systems :-

HH :- Is that Ashish?

Me :- Yes.

HH :- Hi Ashish, this is ________(some name i do not recall) from BEA systems.

Me :- Yes, how may i help you.

HH :- Ashish, we are organizing an advanced C++ workshop, so would you be interested in attending it?

Me :- Advanced C++, Whats that?

HH :- Our experienced engineers will conduct this and will be discussing about Design Patterns using C++. I’m sure that this will help you to boost your professional career.

Me :- No Thanks, I’m not interested.

HH :- In that case, can you give me phone numbers of some people in your company who might be interested?

Me :- I think you should approach the Human Resources for that.

HH :- Actually it will take some time, so it would be better if you can give me some references. I can assure you as this is a beneficial course.

Me :- Ok, Why me?

HH :- Your company works in C++ right, you are an internet startup.

Me :- How do you know we work in C++?

HH :- Ehm… Your friend told me.

Me :- Ok, call my friend, and get other numbers. Bye.

Looking at their talent in digging out the phone numbers of even dead, i think we can use these guys to dig out other information, and build a search engine for “Dark Matter”, publish the API’s for people to use those. Tag line can be “On Demand Search”, and use the mahalo model. These guys will have a consistent revenue feed, and you and me can be saved from some daily spam. Also, ODS will be better use of their sherlock skills, and consumer will be the winner. A secret search is what we all need

Following are some of the emails in my inbox :-

Hi! Ashish,
I’ve got your reference from one of my trusted networks.

Adobe’s India campuses at Noida & Bangalore are the second largest Adobe R&D Center worldwide, and focus on developing innovative and original software. We stand proud today, with over 800 engineers & several worldwide patent applications in the 8 years since inception and have complete ownership of various world-class software products. For further details Pls. visit www.adobeindia.com

We are witnessing rapid growth and to strengthen our team, are in the process of recruiting professionals with rich industry experience in Software Development (C/C++/J2EE/.Net Technologies), Program management/Product management, software testing (White Box & Manual/Black-Box) & Global Infrastructure Support at both our Noida & Bangalore centre.

What you can gain from our organization is a good career supported with best of the work environment, latest technologies, excellent compensation, stock options etc.

In case the above mentioned detail interests you and you are looking for a long term career with a growing organization kindly confirm us on mail urgently by responding with your Latest Resume, Contact No. & Location Preference so as to enable us speak with you. Awaiting your prompt & positive response…
Thanks & Regards,

XXXXXXXXXXX| Human Resources |Adobe Systems
I-1A, Sector-25A, Noida | xxxxx@adobe.com | voice: +xxxxxxxxxxx

Simply better by Adobe: www.adobe.com/jobs

Message:

Google Career Opportunites

Hi Ashish
I just wanted to touch base with you if you are keen on exploring new opportunites.please mail across your resume to xxxxxxx.jobs@gmail.com
thank you for your time
Xxxxxxxx

Hi Ashish,
My name is Xxxxxx Xxxxx, part of the Staffing team of Google, Bangalore.
I saw your profile as i surfed through Linkedin and wanted to check with if you would be interested in exploring opportunities with us. Do send me your contact details if you want to talk about the same. Looking forward to hear from you soon.
regards,
Xxxxxxx

Hi Ashish,
This is Xxxxxx from Four Interactive Pvt Ltd,B’lore. Your Profile @ Linkedin is matching our Company requirement. We would be pleased to talk to you with regards to opportunities with us.
Four Interactive is a stealth mode Product Development Company started in Oct 06.At 4i , we have set ourselves a simple goal – to make the web more useful, relevant and easy for Indians. You might say that it is already useful. True, to some extent but not for everyone. Some great companies have done great things for the Internet and the users. But ask yourselves a simple question – does everybody think of and reach for the Internet every time they want some information. Probably not in some cases and most certainly not in many cases today.
We don’t believe in mindlessly aping technology and business models of successful companies in other countries. Why reinvent the wheel even if you can claim to make it more perfect. We believe in addressing the tougher questions that will make everyone reach for the Internet every time they need any information. We believe that there is value in complementing what is already available, on the Internet and on your mobile phone.
Well, who are we and why so many fundas? We are a bunch of passionate engineers and not so engineers (the business types). We grew up in India, lived and breathed the same joys and problems that we are trying to solve for our users. We worked in India and abroad with the best of global Internet and technology companies.
Does our company sound different ? Well, it actually isn’t that different. Most of the great companies started with simple, noble thoughts. We hope to stay honest to our cause and work endlessly to solve problems for our users. The rest our users will decide.
You can watch us grow at http://www.fourint.com and join us to share our passion.
Please let us know if you would be interested in exploring opportunities with us.
Regards
Xxxxxxx
xxxxxxxx@fourint.com

1. Equal opportunity social networks, no more :- Yawn is a social network for “beautiful” people. Ah! i thought web is equal for all, but these idiots sneak in time and again. Shame on them. Does US court has some laws against this kind of discrimination?
2. Twitter API is superhit :- Twitter API is facing about ten times more traffic than twitter website. Seems like finally we will see some really good things developed over the most successful platform of recent times.
3. Facebook’s stanford debut :- Stanford university’s CS department will be offering a course on “Create Engaging Web Applications Using Metrics and Learning on Facebook”. Well, not really a facebook course, it is about using facebook as a case study. Good for Zoo-ker-borg. What does harvard has to say about this one?
4. Socializing Docs :- Sermo, is a social network for docs. Recently raised $25 million. The USP is that wall street is ready to “pay”, to listen to doc’s discussions. “Listen”! looks like yanks are looking forward to improve their medIQ. Good move!
5. googlehate.microsoft.com :- Microsoft has been hating linux for ages. They hosted websites, roadshows to kill it. Now, they have added one more server in their farm to host google hate. ReadWriteWeb runs a story on a 10 point list issues by microsoft for enterprises telling them not to use google apps.
6. Technorati and blog topics :- Technorati has introduced blog topics. Most welcome move i must say. I was bored of subscribing to static list of RSS feeds. Looks like i can discover more using it now. Give it a try.

References :-

1. Yawn :- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118938447913522114.html
2. Twitter API :- http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2007/09/biz-stone-on-re.html
3. Facebook goes to Stanford :- http://500hats.typepad.com/500blogs/
4. Sermo :- http://venturebeat.com/2007/09/10/sermo-raises-25m-to-link-doctors-to-one-another-and-investors/
5. Microsoft’s list :- http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/microsoft_10_reasons_against_google_apps.php
6. Technorati  :- http://technorati.com/weblog/2007/09/373.html