Real estate, linkedin.com and FOSS financial softwares

Hi all,
This would be a longish thread about different things happening in and around me, some things a reality check, while others having much more potential.

HTML 5, Social Networking and Gaming-V

Hi all,
The post would be about some more ideas and issues about game development specifically with HTML 5 coming and using social networking tools which are not being used so much to drive development.

Social-networking sucks

This rant is simply about how sucky the whole social-networking scene is. This is nothing to do with free software apart from the fact that they do use lot of free software while making such sites.

The case of 2 business social-networking tools

Hi all,

I have been experimenting with various social-networking fora and fauna and have to say is somewhat dissapointed to say the least. For our journey would use  ryze and facebook and both of them feel incomplete. For this shootout/rant I used the basic accounts and the most visible facets of the three networking environments. If there are some things which I don’t know feel free to point those out.

1. Linkedin :- One can find linkedin at www.linkedin.com . The good thing I like it in linked.in is the way they display your connections/contacts, very much like the tree diagrams which are used for programming.  What I find irritating though is very much the interface, there has been a delibete attempt it feels to make it sparse, uninviting. Like the other contendor it has options for groups but most of these groups seem to be in slumber or in private spaces. Nothing much haapening in the public domain so knowing how active a certain group is unknown.

2. Ryze :- This is a business social-network I joined recently. The pointer at www.ryze.com Quite a few of the social-networks are active and they do stuff in the public domain, but getting news in your inbox is a challenge. All you get in your inbox is something like this :-

some x person has posted a message at:

http://www.ryze.com/posttopic.php?topicid=xxxxx&confid=xxxxx

about:

some subject line

on some xxxxx network on Ryze.

To change your notification preferences, go to:
http://www.ryze.com/postsubs.php?u=xxxxx&v=xxxxxx&n=bcd

Note :- All names and URL’s have been changed to protect the innocent 😉

As can be seen the post doesn’t give any meaningful information your mail id. It doesn’t tell you what he actually wanted to talk about. All of this is just pushing the user to the network. Many of the other networks would lemme read any of the mails or post done at a forum or wherever I am subscribed and give me detailed posts. This way I can go back to the fora and lookup the person, send a personal message through the dashboard if he/she doesn’t know me and wait for a response. The posts like this feel like they are cheating me. Like most of us would like to do all under one interface 😉

The other thing which I would infact, love to have some responses is about moderation. Of course it depends on a particular as to how heavily or how easily its moderated or not, but also what the tools are for doing the same in both the places.

One thing to note is that most of them follow the Freemium business model which is an interesting way to go about for sure. How successful they are or not would be more with the services than just the business model.

Of course, would be playing with both the networks and provide update to the experience. Any and all comments, suggestions, brickbats are all welcome 😉

Update:- There is also whoisi.com which has some very interesting take on the whole thing. Pointer to www.whoisi.com

/me out 😉

Social-networking, Facebook and an application called Sparkey

Hi all,

Today I wanna deviate from our usual topics to something which is familiar to all of us, social-networking. Facebook has been getting lot of mindshare in recent months. Its built on a very simple premise, people wanna network/socilize with other people for variety of reasons and wanna share their likes and dislikes with each other. It also has an open platform (CPAL) so people can build applications on top and let people use those apps and the developers make some money in the process.

I’ve been using facebook for over 6 months now and as a bachelor have also been using some of the dating applications in the same time to make new friends and flirt a bit. While some of the applicatons are extremely well done some others are not. And that’s the point for today’s post.

I am going to take a specific application called aptly ‘Sparkey’ (I guess supposedly to add sparks to your life or something similar like that) . Anyways one can find this application at http://apps.facebook.com/sparkey/ The application is sponsored or made by some company called Chainn. It uses some algorithim from your circle of friends and says you have say something like ‘2000’ odd (some variable) number of potential dates from all over. While unless one doesn’t have anything to do for few hours, its going to be a pain to view those 2k people. So many people use one of the within 20 miles, within 35 miles or within 50 miles one of these choices. Let’s say one uses the 20 miles choice and goes through all the potential dates, then he should have some choices still left in the 35 miles and 50 miles which is not there. It has quite a few things which the developers need to work on to get the chinks out :-

1. It doesn’t remember if I see some profiles and don’t complete the whole gallery in one session. The application should remember such stuff as profiles and choices made within those profiles and not show them again for once a choice is made, its made for most of the people.

2. I do not know the logic for their calculation of 20 miles, 35 miles and 50 miles but something is seriously wrong there. It doesn’t seem to understand that even if you see the whole gallery in 20 miles, then there should be some gallery in 35 miles or 50 miles. Or if not, should give a message like that.

3. It does a very poor job as far as having a community built around that application as in providing support and talking to people. It does have a google group http://groups.google.com/group/chainn/ but it doesn’t seem to be talking or doing any improvements to that. A mailing list could have been used to drive change for the application and make it better.

4. They do lot of advertisements as in showing babes which lead to other third-party sites.

In reflection, this post also tells a potential social-networking dating application developer how people’s expectations are .

As always feel free to comment, suggest, flame whatever you feel 😉