Mixercast: Create. Mix. Network.

Brajeshwar posted about Mixercast, so I won’t repeat thing. I would just request, please check out Mixercast.

Please send feedback via feedback-form or directly to me at [mail at abdulqabiz dot com]

I would probably post some examples and discuss the features in later posts.

ScobleCam on UStream.tv

I just watched Robert Scoble’s video-audio-live-stream , which was being broadcast from his car. He was using his laptop, a Verizon wireless card, a webcam, inbuilt-microphone and UStream account.
Check out the screenshot.
UStream looks pretty interesting to me, it has live chat and different social-networking features (embed, comment-engine etc).
BTW! Motvik, a startup based in India, would allow you to use your camera-phone as webcam over Bluetooth. Now imagine, how UStream and Motvik would go together?

Dekoh vs Apollo: Marketing strategy?

What is Dekoh?

Directly from Dekoh website:-

Pramati announces Dekoh, a new desktop platform for applications that can deliver integrated experience of web and desktop

I know the company (Pramati Technologies) for some time (through some ex-colleagues at Adobe who came from this company in 2004).

I know these guys have been doing good in Java/J2EE community and contributing in some of the specifications. I respect them for that.

Lately, some of the posts (listed below), from Dekoh guys, sounds like a marketing strategy, where they are trying to get popular by using words like “Adobe”, “Apollo”, “Flash”?

Some of their posts:-

• Desktop RIA comparison: Dekoh Versus Adobe Apollo
• Desktop web applications and browser debate
• Flash or Java. Which is better?
• Adobe’s love and hate for browsers
• Will Apollo go the Yahoo Widget Engines way?

It’s good idea to create products, come up with new things and give different solutions to developers/end-users. Competition is always good, though in this case I feel Dekoh and Apollo are two different things.

Anyway, I don’t get following points:-

• How can someone compare things without even understanding or knowing a technology (Adobe Flash/Apollo)?
• How an engineer from same company starts talking about Apollo-going-Yahoo!-Widget-Engine-way? and sells the idea of Dekoh?
• How can one company use other company’s marketing effort to get some focus?
• Why can’t you create your own identity without using other brands in any form (comparison, rant etc) in your marketing/PR agenda? Is Dekoh feeling insecure?

Not only that, I wonder if they have convinced some guys to write about Dekoh vs Apollo story on blogsphere (readwriteweb example, there might be more I don’t know).

I personally don’t like such strategy and didn’t like when Microsoft did something similar in past.

A good product/technology would eventually would be known and used. We need to leave things users/community to decide/use/review/conclude?

I have not seen Dekoh, except screenshots and I don’t remember of having said anything against it. I just feel uncomfortable, when I read such posts.

Technorati tags: adobe, apollo, dekoh, marketing, tactic

Gmail: usability/accessibility issue

Gmail uses mouse-down event instead of click (mouse-button-release) at many places (Compose Mail, Inbox, Chats etc) in it’s frontend.

I face following problems because of their wrong choice of event (mouse-down instead of click):

• I can’t select text while in list view. For example, if I want to select the sender’s name or subject, instead it opens the mail thread.
  
  
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• If mouse-button is pressed by mistake on any of links (Compose Mail, Inbox etc), associated action takes place and I am forced to click on browser’s back button (or equivalent) to get back to previous state (screen/view). I don’t get a chance to change my mind by releasing mouse-button outside of link area.
  
  

Technorati tags: gmail, usability issues

Twitter Vulnerable to SMS and Caller ID Spoofing

I found (via bluesmoon) an interesting article on Twitter vulnerability.

Technorati tags: twitter, vulnerability, sms, spoofing

Which Creative Commons license would you choose for your blog?

I have been planning to publish content under Creative Commons. I am thinking to choose either ‘by’ or ‘by-nc-sa’ license, little confused because of existing content.

I have some code published earlier under BSD, MIT and different license. Is applying creative-commons going to affect that?

Thought, I would seek for some suggestions by asking everyone. Which one would you choose for your blog? And why?

Thanks in advance.

Update: Creative Commons doesn’t recommend applying it’s licenses on code. It solves my problem, I guess I can choose one of relevant licenses now.

Technorati tags: creative commons, license

Not yet optimized for Firefox

I opened sms.ac in Firefox and noticed this:

I have not seen such a nice screen to warn users about browser-compatibility. It’s always better to let user know of such things rather than saying nothing.

Creating Passionate Users - Reverse engineering passion

I watched the video-recording (101 MB .ogg file) of Kathy Sierra’s talk from LCA ‘07. It’s really good and I learnt many things, which would surely me in getting better at things (building software/products or communities).

Thanks to Gopal for sharing the link.

I noted a few things (points, quotes, words etc etc).

Some of the attributes of passionate users:

• Evangelize
• Learn
• Spend Money
• Spend time
• Connect with others
• Show off / take pride (tshirts, bags etc)
• Elevate the meaning

Some quotes/sentences used in the talk:

• Where there is passion, there is a user kicking ass.
• It’s not about the tools you build, it’s about what your users do with the them.
• Being better is better.
• Being better is higher-resolution experience.
• Make right things easy and wrong things hard.
• Suck threshold vs Passion threshold.

Some screenshots of video can be seen at:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/abdulqabiz/tags/kathysierra/

Technorati tags: kathy sierra, passionate, users, lca07, talk, video

Google! My Maps - What is future of wikimapia?

Google maps has introduced a new feature called My Maps which allows users to customize/create maps by adding placemarks, lines and shape. It’s a useful feature, however, I have some doubts.

I am just wondering, what is future of Wikimapia now? In Google My Map, I can see some problems which are redundancy and accuracy of data. Wikimapia was a collaborative environment which means it allowed others to rate/review any changes/addition in content (map).\

Technorati tags: google my maps, wikimapia

Google Talk user-interface annoyance

Several times a day, I get irritated by following issues in Google Talk user-interface:-

• Moving mouse over contact list brings up the contact-info popup. Which is quite irritating and leads to another annoyance mentioned in next point.
• While accessing the scrollbar, very often, I have to go through contact-list area and that brings up the contact-info popup, which stops me accessing scrollbar. I have to click somewhere else or move mouse out to get rid of popup. I believe, there should be good amount of gap between contact list and scrollbar.

Yahoo! messenger doesn’t have these issues. I get to see contact-info only when mouse is over buddy-icon, which is on left-side. One fix, it solved two issues.