After The Dot Net

Capturing ideas is one of the difference between successful and not successful people. Everyone comes across various ideas during a day and to be successful one has to develop a system to capture ideas so that they can be referred to later.

Wridea is a service that helps yo capture ideas in a systematic manner. You can categorize, organize and share your ideas using Wridea. One can use Wridea as a basic project management tool where you can create pages for different projects and categorize the ideas in that project. Collaboration is a feature which allows you to use Wridea for a team.

Once you have an account you can upload ideas via email and different colors are used for distinction of different ideas.

Some of the key features of Wridea are

Create pages

Create categories

Get your ideas organized.

RSS Feeds

Collaborative brainstorm sessions.

For those who work in teams and on different projects it is worth a try specially if the team consists of people who are not technical.

More on this tomorrow. Seems like a partnership is brewing between the two giants and it is in the search arena. This is a big surprise and techcrunch seems to have got it first. Read the story in the link below.

Google/Yahoo Search Partnership Announcement At 1:30 This Afternoon

A new Google logo has been sited. Read about it here

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/06/12/googleyahoo-announcement-at-130-this-afternoon/

Increasingly it is becoming clear that Mobile Web or Mobile Internet the new medium that is going be used by the new generation. Google one of the leaders on the Internet has changed its logo the first time in eight and half years so that it is usable on Iphone and other mobile devices shows that they believe in the importance and the potential of the mobile web.

Opera browser is one of the most used browsers on the Mobile Internet and they have some interesting findings which they revealed in a study they released in May 2008. There were 11.9 million Opera Mini users in March 2008, almost 41% of mobile traffic now goes to social networking websites when people use Opera Mobile. The United States, South Africa and Indonesia have more than 60% of the mobile traffic going to the social networks on the mobile web. One would assume that there would not be a whole lot of web traffic on the mobile Internet but there was 33 million MB data traffic that was exchanged worldwide according to the study.

Further it is predicted that by 2012 there would be as many connected mobile phones as the population of the world. This has been predicted by a website called phonecount.com which predicts the number of phones in the coming years based on present sales around the world.

The good news is that advertising is growing in the mobile Internet market and there other markets apart from UK and US are jumping onto the bandwagon. BuzzCity has revealed the statistics for its myGamma Global Mobile Advertising Index. myGamma is an ad-supported mobile social network service that is very popular in many of the markets outside of N. America and Europe (from MobiAD). The results are

1. Indonesia: 654 million (up 13328% on Q1 2007)
2. India: 577 million (up 1522%)
3. South Africa: 426 million (up 418%)
4. USA: 132 million (up 917%)
5. Kenya: 79 million (up 424%)
6. Romania: 57 million (up 446%)
7. Bangladesh: 53 million (up 305%)
8. China: 37 million (up 6053%)
9. Brunei: 35 million (up 221%)
10. Pakistan: 35 million (up 814%)

Even though mobile advertising is still in an experimental phase at this point, the revenues generated in 2008 are predicated to be over $1.5 billion

M:Metrics which is an agency in UK and it found in February 2008 that mobile users were more likely to respond to advertising than regular Internet users, and 27% more likely to say they are tempted to buy an advertised product then the average person.

There is a video (though old) which gives you an idea of where in the world the Mobile Internet is growing.

Detractors would say that there are a lot of hurdles in the growth of Mobile Internet some of them being availability of handsets and data charges but with new technologies being released like the Iphone with 3G and the handset is cheaper things are definitely becoming interesting and no one can deny the tremendous pull and popularity of the Mobile Internet. Therefore in the future if anyone wants to have a presence on the Internet getting themselves ready for the Mobile Internet is a must otherwise soon they would be left behind.

Del.icio.us the bookmarking service which was acquired by Yahoo has some loyal followers. Personally I find it handy and interesting. It is a great way to find new services and follow trends.

One of the feature that has not been developed is recommendations by del.icio.us which are based on your bookmarks. Though the system is there I never found it useful.

Now a new service has been launched called Insuggest for bookmarks which gives suggestions based on your archive on Del.icio.us. It is very simple to use. On the home page of Insuggest Bookmarks you are required to give your username of Del.icio.us and based on your archive the system recommends other pages that you might like to bookmark.

You can also filter the recommendations by using 20 tags that you have used in your Del.icio.us archive. The interface is interesting and smart usage of Ajax makes it quite appealing. Given the fact that the system works very fast it is a sure winner.

You also have the ability to use ‘image suggestions’ and the ‘website suggestions’ based on your archive on Del.icio.us. What is satisfying for users like me is that all that labor of tagging and bookmarking in Del.icio.us is paying off. Another smart suggestion that can be used to discover more bookmarks, websites and images on the Internet is to use someone else’s account on Del.icio.us to run a query since the account password is not required.

I’m sure that other features would be added in the future to Insuggest but at the moment it seems a winner and I would suggest it to anyone who is interested in discovering new websites and services on the Internet.

InSuggest: Del.icio.us Recommendations Reborn - ReadWriteWeb

Google has changed its favicon after 8.5 years. Why? The Google blog states that the Google team wanted to change the favicon so that it would scale better to the new mediums like the I-phone and other mobile devices.

What this does mean is that Google amongst others, believes that using of the phone to browse the Internet is one of the areas where the Internet is set to grow.

The selection process was not easy as there were 300 permutations to choose from. From their post it is interesting to observe what are the things to keep in mind when designing a favicon or logo. Some of the logos which had a transparent or a semi transparent look were one of the hot runners. So was the case with some of the colorful favicons but they were not chosen because color trends do change and therefore a colored favicon might not have suited in the times to come.

The Google blog states that “By no means is the one you’re seeing our favicon final; it was a first step to a more unified set of icons.” If you are a designer and have a great idea for Google’s favicon then you can submit your designs at the submission page. Rules to the contest are posted on the page and entries close on June 20th 2008.

Those who use twitter have been finding the service down more often than up and it is frustrating.

Twiddict is a service which allows you to tweet even when Twitter is down. Twiddict constantly pings the Twitter service (adding to Twitters woes of too much traffic) to see when it comes up and then posts the Tweets you had sent when it was down as soon as the Twitter service is up.

As rightly observed on mashable, if services are started which hope to be successful if your service is down then it is not a good sign for the service provider who in this case is Twitter.

I’m both happy and sad that this service is available like most people.

If you are a web designer or are associated with website development Web Style Guide is an essential read. It is a book, whose online version is available free, gives you best practices for many different aspects of web design. While general strategies for web design and web development process are discussed there are detailed section on each of the strategies.

The second edition, which like the first edition, is centered around the functional aspects of design and web accessibility, Cascading Style Sheets and flexible design have been added. Additional sections have been added which deal with information architecture, site maintenance, and multimedia design. Another big addition are the examples of web pages that have been designed and built using the best practices for web design.

Patrick J. Lynch and Sarah Horton are the authors of the book and they have done a big service to the web design industry by making to online version available to everyone.

Some of the resources that are good reads to enhance your knowledge about web designing are:

Instructional Design Process

A Design Process Revealed

The Seven Phases of Web Site development

Web Design Workflow, Complete Process

Breakdown of the ideal web design process

Web Design Workflow 2.0

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