Era of Keywords

A walk with colleagues after lunch is a mine of crazy topics..we were talking painting..a pro in that field made a passing reference at a technique called ..'Wet-on-wet', I made a mental note...to look it up. And it opened up treasure of fixes for all the little dilemmas I had in past while dabbling acrylic paints in awkward way.
We live in the era of keywords... an inquisitive mind can embark on insightful journey with few right words up his sleeve. Gone are the days of hand-holding and sharing the hard earned wisdom of worlds. Kids today, all they have to know is type in that bland empty text-bar and reach a particular bit of information in no time.
I get a feeling in sometime there would be some nerdy high-school competitions to find a piece of information using Google and then boasting their way to glory by how they picked those specific bunch of keywords to slice n dice and reach the finish line. No wonder MS is flirting with Yahoo for their share of search market.

Any takers of these mashups....

Being in an IT company is like leading two lives. Your alter ego works in the office which is time-matched to precision with western developed world while as you step out of office the reality hits you in the face. Some time it leads to frustration while sometimes I look at it as an opportunity and responsibility on us to at least bring into our daily lives some essence of digital world. These days my Google reader is flooded with feeds on topics like free APIs, most powerhouses exposing key APIs for the developer community to use and create mashups. I cannot help but put these pieces together in my mind. Some mashup ideas I am thinking can greatly make a difference...

1. We have lot of builders want to advertise their new projects, and people take long time to visualize the exact location of the new site of the apartment. A google map API can be used. We got to decide where this data is coming from. It can be a small news-mailer sent to key builders that will fetch the location information of the upcoming projects, or more appropriate would be government registry which is more authentic but the toughest to access place unless you have more forthcoming municipal corp. We can also ask them to upload images of the scheme which then pins it places using panoramia. Same thing can work wonder for the rentals. We are yet to build businesses around it.

2. With sites like 'burrp' getting loaded with members-and-consequently-with-visitors. Burrp is basically an imitation of "Yelp : an collaborative restaurant review site in a nutshell" an web20 venture started by Paypal founders once they sold off the cash cow to eBay. Now with lot of info on burrp we can utilize a standard toll-free number well popularized to get a query SMS from any location and throw back information of hotels in-and-around that area to that cellphone in return. Since we got this mobile revolution like never before in India; this can be a hot-cake idea for an API if not a tailored feature for burrp.

3. We are close to an age wherein Phone cameras geo-tag all the images it takes. Now with some additional voice tag while the photo is being looked at or being taken becomes a powerful metadata. This will improve the relevance for the image search from its current effectiveness.

4. More from the geo-tags: Assume you have access to the locations of the people through their cell phones; may be you are sitting in the control room of a cellular service provider. Once you know this area/pin code/lat-lang constitute an area under IMAX a movie theater. At 6:00 pm you have a bunch coming out of some XYZ movie. Now you can send SMS and do quick market survey as soon as those folks walks out of the theater. I know this flirts with privacy issues but such geo-context can lead to some interesting 'push' information flows.

My 2 cents on Gtalk-Gmail

Lately got into habit of critically comparing products I use. Case in point is gtalk and yahoo chat clients.
G-talk I felt also lagging in terms of some of the features like "show me recent conversations". Its a high time folks at Google should come up with something as base functionality is now already assumed and well digested. Now we want next course on our plate!
We share so many urls / links among the close group of people. Why not Gmail provide a way to access all those in one place. It can be a list of links shared with columns like who send it, when, etc... Same can be done by finding out phone no.s, and attachments. We are moving towards an era wherein Gmail is our Online Any Time accessible place for storing document and communication.

I have seen lot of people using it to work on doc partly at work and later imparting finishing touches at home using Google doc.s. Now unless you convert consciously each attached doc into a Google document it wont let you collaboratively edit it. It should be done by default for every document that comes as an attachment.

And above all...when are we going to have the tabbed interface for mails...