shyam's blog

If there is one thing that has gone awfully wrong with the open APIs for pushing and pulling data into various online communities, it is the horrible practice of plugging one thought stream through the API into another in an automated manner.

What exactly is a thought stream? Well, thought streams are more frequently updated status messages. They have been around for years known as custom status messages on instant messengers, which got spun around, made over and turned into a superstar product by the guys at Twitter. These days, status messages are there in every online networking product -- be it Linkedin, Facebook, Orkut, Hi5.

Which is all fine. A few more wisecracks a day does not really make the world a better or suckier place. What does make it suckier is that cross-pollination of these messages often lead to broken conversation threads, misplaced context and other byproducts of the law of unintended consequences.

In real life this is how it happens: You can plug in your Twitter stream to update your Facebook status message. But your replies to the Facebook status message remains within Facebook. So you post a message to Twitter, this gets replicated on Facebook. Someone replies to that update on Facebook, but unless you are a Facebook maniac (a dying breed, if you ask me, these days), odds are that you won't see the response till much later.

Killing the conversation: The primary issue this cross pollination creates is that it breaks the conversation. While the tiny updates are the core functionality of Twitter, it is not the case with the larger networking sites like LinkedIn and Facebook. When you plug in the updates from one product into another, it is hard to know, at face value, where that update originated from, leading to instances where the message origin and message response belong to different networks. The end result? Death of the conversation.

I would have loved to have summed it up rather simply as that Facebook is a story of accidental success. Zuck started the product to have some fun, and incredibly, five years down the line, the fun has not ended. But, it is not all fun and games and even with its astounding growth, the fact is that Facebook is struggling to find a clear direction in which it should head and it also having trouble finding enough revenues to offset its ever-increasing burn rate.

Facebook has zero value when it is not public: This makes for a world of a difference when you are trying to introduce a set of services on the platform that goes beyond its primary use case. Platforms that are primarily meant for public (restricted, yes, but public still) consumption never fare too well in the private world. This is the reason why you don't see social networking in your email inbox (sorry, Xobini is NOT social networking) and the reason why your online banking service does not have a 'social' aspect to it. The simple reason is that it is counterintuitive.

Facebook's main use is for people to be able to connect with each other, in an environment that allows you to pick and choose the audience. You can use Facebook without any connections, but that would also send the value derived out of using the product spiraling downward. In effect, the main use case for Facebook and the extended world it is trying to embrace work at cross purposes. Facebook is a network that functions on the basis of exclusion, while the newer things it is attempting works best on the basis of inclusion.

Google recently launched Mobile Sync, a product that allows a variety of mobile phones to sync up with Google's services. To say it mildly, Google really blew it. Even in the early days there were errors that stopped the sync from working and there was no response from Google's end.

Today, anybody who tried syncing was faced with a new error which said "unable to open database." What has happened is that the URL given for the sync (https://m.google.com/syncml) has disappeared from Google's servers and it is returning a 404 error at the moment. The hapless clients that try to connect to the URL, obviously, can't find it and errors out saying the database cannot be opened.

It is understandable that this a new product and I have often given Google a great length of rope with their new product launches, but turning off URLs like this without any intimation is really not done. Even if it is a human error, how can something as simple as this happen?

For a company that is very serious about entering the enterprise space such mistakes and lack of communication goes not augur well for its future. I hope Google will pull up its socks on this front, sooner than later.

Skia is a graphics library made by Skia, a company Google had earlier bought. The library is used in Android and Chrome and both platforms are already target deployments for Google Gears. Nevertheless, it is an interesting development as to why it was checked in. You can see the check in log here.

The check in had a bit of a horrific impact on getting Gears to build from the current SVN version. The paths are horrifically mucked up between ./third_party/skia/include/code and ./third_party/skia/include. The actual SVN tree has a lot of missing files too, you will need to manually copy them over from the websvn cached copy to get it to build.

The bad news is that, even after getting it to build, even the SVN version of Gears (0.5.12.0) does not work on anything upward of Firefox 3.1. Will post updates if I see any change in the situation.

Camino, Google Gears

Is what it will pretty soon be after I uprooted myself from where I am these days, in Trivandrum, to move to Delhi. It is sort of hard to believe that it has been that long, or that a lot has happened since, but every now and then age and memories show up in the least expected of places and manner. It is strange to live so many different lives in the same life. Perception maybe a flawed vocabulary for expressing life, but it is the only available out there.

It is hard to believe that I once called this place home, which I still do, more as a verbal familiarity and as a preemptive strike against useless chatter than anything else. I know the places, concepts and things I am supposed to know, but beyond that there is little connect. I still need tangible artifacts from my present to trace and establish my identity. Here, shining a light inwards yields only more darkness. Some tunnels are not meant to see any light ever.

The thing about being unrooted is that you first fear it, then you fight it and then you learn to make your peace with it. It is a seismic shift in understanding that requires you to wear your inside out, destroy all protective fencing and face the day in its full glory, be it even with scorched skies and a merciless sun. To be unrooted is to have nowhere to run to. To be unrooted is to find the same answers everywhere. There is no escape, there is nowhere to hide. To be unrooted is to choose to live, even after knowing all that.

Yet, should this come across as a lament, or as a statement of ire, disenchantment or anything similar, it would be untrue. The commonality of life's 99% is intrinsically tied at the hip and soldered together with its uncommon 1%. The whole is neither this, nor that. It is just a continuum of nows that could either be common or uncommon. Light (itself fairly common) lends no value to itself till it reflects beauty (which is fairly uncommon). The other does not exist till there exists this.