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Search Engine Journal writes about the new version of Gmail, which still seems to be under private testing, will include new features to the slowly progressing Gmail Chat. The features will include most importantly Group Chat, and also some fancier colorful smiley faces, even though the current ones are becoming with their simplicity a sort of nice and clean one to use. Some current IM chats are just junk from the over use of emoticons. People tend to miss the point emoticons are meant to show impression to the conversation, not a way to chat by it self!

Popularity: 34% [?]

(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

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Just when Amazon announced their new Kindle with strong front page message from Jeff Bezos, and thought they are going to change the way people look at books with their product, soon the Kindle page got flooded with bad reviews that brought it to 2.5/5! A total of 558 reviews as of now. I remember seeing it the first day and I was excited to have one thing for all, looking at the size and posted weight. Yeah I’d buy it I thought. But then the number of bad reviews was so high I said to my self: “This is an old product then! Why the hell are they so happy about it now?” But soon after I realized its all new reviews, and many from people who did not even try it.

But looking at where people are coming from, they do have a point. Several points actually, and I will add one my self also:

• Price Tag: This might be something out of their hand, I’m not sure about it. But in the end, you as a consumer are paying $400 for a way to buy and read books. A single non-transferable way!
• As I said, it’s only one way of reading. Say it got stolen, broken, or it turns out to be a piece of crap after all. Or there is a new Apple reader in market and you are just crazy enough Apple fan that you have to buy and use it, or you will lose your privilege of being called Apple fanboy. Can you do that? No, not without losing all the books you bought, as all these contents are protected by DRM and are of specific Amazon file types that you cannot move around. Most you can hope for is Amazon will send you new similar copy only working on Kindle. And you will have to wish only Kindle doesn’t run out of business. And, sooner or later, this product will have to be replaced by superior one, only God knows if it will be backward compatible.
• You can’t lend it to someone else to read. Also, you can’t resell it.
• EDVO network: I am not sure how good and reliable is that but at least in Kuwait it’s not cheap at all.
• Listed Book Price: When you enter the market with yet to be adapted technology, and you are adding another variable to the formula with the DRM and content locking to your hardware, you have to be more persuading on the outcome of it. However what you see is that Amazon tries to show the difference between Kindle and List Price as something like $24.99-$9.99 = $15 saving, like The Almost Moon for example. However this ignores the fact that the selling price for the hard-cover book on Amazon is $13.73 only! Thus the saving is less than $4. I’d say it should be cheaper as all my contents there have no guarantee if being immortal. I could lose them all at once.

In the end, I’m just thinking. What if this same exact product had the name iBook (Trademark Jobs don’t steal it as you did with iPhone!). Do you think people’s opinion and reaction would be different? I’d say it must be out of stock already and 5/5 is just not enough for it :).

Popularity: 34% [?]

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One of the most important factors for adapting to open source technology is the community behind it, and while PHP seems to be falling apart as I see with multiple frameworks and scattered focus, Ruby have taken off with their Ruby on Rails application, and Python followed them with the open sourcing of Django. Both frameworks seem pretty good. I have tried Ruby on Rails for practice and am pretty much impressed with it, while the issue of internationalization and proper unicode support remains a dangling issue, and Globalize is a nice work around but implies too much over head on the database as I see.

Anyways, all I said above is a quick shallow opinion of the matter, and truth be said I don’t have enough knowledge to really judge which one is doing better. My comparison here is based on the community and interest of people in the two frameworks, RoR and Django. A look at Google Trends comparing searches for “ruby on rails”, “django”, and “python django” as django it self relates to much more than the programming framework. This is what you get:

Sorry I had to shrink the image here to be able to display it. Click it for large view. As you say, while django refers to much more than just the framework, Ruby on Rails still is getting more searches for, thus implying a more public interest so far, and truth be said, in terms of marketing at least, Ruby on Rails are doing a great job and have strong fan base behind it as I see it. Search for “python django” falls much lower, but it’s probably not a fair comparison as most python programmers would search for Django straight. Another nice thing to note is the high News reference to Django on the other hand.

A look at the language interest it self, Ruby Vs Python shows how Ruby are drawing more attention with time, and you can also see the jump for python in 2005, when they most probably revealed their own version of Rails, Django.

The last comparison I did was for the two framework sites on Alexa, and the results again favor Ruby on Rails but with a sinusoidal weird pattern that has fallen a bit hard just at the end, compared to more steadily Django lower one.

Again, these results only reflect the public interest in the framework so far. Some people, my self included, would feel a lot more comfortable with a strong community already around, but Django has its advantages that could draw some attention. I personally am trying to master Ruby on Rails, but the lack of i18n seems to be pushing me to work with Django as well, which I am sure would be a great framework as well. Maybe then I would be able to give a more detailed comparison between the two.

What do you think?

Popularity: 39% [?]

(1 votes, average: 4 out of 5)

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Google Ads come with different size and shapes. One of them, which appeal to me the most, happen to be the very rounded corner ones. Google are very careful and enforce many constraints on the ads, do many changed and monitoring to protect the advertiser from invalid clicks, and do their best to increase the quality of the click for the both the advertiser and end user. Since it’s release I’ve been having doubts about the very rounded corner ads. If you take a look at the sample below, which a snapshot of a real ad.

Notice something? The very rounded corner ads don’t come with the display url of the site. What that means is, before the user clicks he has absolutely no idea where he will end up, and after clicking, he may just end up at the same site he clicked before. If he have seen the URL before, perhaps he would’ve not wanted to click the ad at all. For him, it was a waste of time, and for the advertiser, it was a kind of waste for his money as well. This personally happens a lot to me. I see ads similar to previous ones that interest me, but I’m not sure if I will get to the same site or not. Moving the mouse over the link ofcourse does not show the real address. Sometimes out of sympathy to the advertiser, I just copy the whole lengthy ad url and fetch the domain name to see if it’s the same or not. The example shown above is a perfect example (I somehow got it when I wanted to write the post… Lucky!). Reading both ads reveal almost the same site, however it can’t be as they are showing next to each other. Which one would I click? And if one of the ads show up again later, should I click it? I don’t know if I visited the site before or not.

I know the rounded corner eats some space, but I just wish even  snippet of the URL would be shown to give the user small hint. This would increase the value of the click I believe. What do you guys think?

Popularity: 62% [?]

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For months and months Amazon have been promoting the anticipated Assassin’s Creed video game for pre-orders. Usually, pre-ordering the item means reserving your copy for the release date to receive it ASAP. I did just that, and I even registered to Amazon prime to enjoy FREE 2 day so called shipping. I did that only to receive such a silly email from Amazon saying:

“We wanted to let you know that there is an unexpected delay with your
video game order (Order# 104-3371841-0424220) you placed on November 12 2007 02:32 PST. Unfortunately, we are unable
to ship the product(s) as soon as we expected and need to provide you with a new estimate of when
they may be delivered:

“Assassin’s Creed” [Video Game]
Estimated arrival date: 11/16/2007

We apologize for the inconvenience caused by this delay.”

What? What am I supposed to do with this stupid apology? I sent them an email to clarify why the hell the item is still Shipping Soon (as of yesterday and up till now!). Their reply came simple:

“Thank you for writing to us at Amazon.com.

I’ve checked your order and can confirm that we are currently
preparing it for shipment.

Please know that we dont offer release date delivery for the
item “Assassin’s Creed”.

We still expect to ship it in time for delivery by the date listed
in Your Account: November 16, 2007″

Very overwhelming right? The fact they still claim they (expect) to ship it IN TIME for the date listed in my account. Nov 16! Let’s just review facts here, as they seem to change the shipping date however they like and then refer back to it as evidence. The item was pre-ordered, expected to be shipped on Nov 13. On Nov 14 only, it’s status changed to Shipping Soon. Today, and as I am writing this post right now, it’s still shipping soon. I.e., almost 24 hours and it’s still shipping soon. While in fact, today should’ve been the worst delivery estimate, they are still hoping to make it the best shipping estimate. And since it’s shipping soon, I cannot even cancel the order. I wonder why they listed it for pre-order if they don’t have enough of it.

Also, for me, it’s not only a matter of convenience. I am grouping my items as one shipment for the courier forwarding company to send over to Kuwait. Alas, now I am paying an extra over $10 for the previlige of receiving late shipment. But you know what? I think it’s my mistake I didn’t listen to my friend’s advise about GameStop. I’m just not sure how they will handle delivery to US courier forwarding companies, and international price is high.

[UPDATE]: They did come back to me with a bit long and polite email offering $5 credit. It’s not much, and won’t cover the delay and separate shipment cost as they know and stated it, but what can you do? Fine. At least they admit the problem was from their end this time. The item is out for delivery now. Can’t wait to get my hands on it :)

Popularity: 33% [?]

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I came across this piece of news today about the White House being ordered by the Federal Judge to preserve all emails disallowing the deletion of any email “The Federal Records Act details strict standards prohibiting the destruction of government documents including electronic messages, unless first approved by the archivist of the United States.” . Hmm… interesting. Did you read that last underlined part? Even the White House is not allowed to destroy government documents, referring to all emails that are exchanged inside the White House.

Where are we from this? We want e-Government. We want everything online. Yet, for every single transaction you want to do, yo have to see at least 4 or 5 people who will blindly sign and stamp it, and then you have to find a 1 KD bill to buy a physical stamp from those ministry machines. Nothing can go or happen without piles and piles of signed-up papers which later get archived in a place where no human can find. I used to work in the banking sector, and we had to fax and print everything as a proof. If there is a technical problem with another company, we would have to fax a piece of paper officially informing them of the situation. Otherwise, we might get the fire back! This was banking sector and we still had to do those things, so I don’t wanna fill up paragraphs about government nightmares.

Only one law right now is in place regarding the electronic crime. A very vague law with no specific penalties assigned shall such crimes occur. Years and years of demand did not move the government a bit. Not until the recent incident that they immediately pushed for new law that treats internet content as publication, and a person is responsible even for other people’s contributions to his site.

Popularity: 40% [?]

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The clock is ticking for the Firefox 3.0 release and people are looking forward to it. I was afraid things are slowing down a bit at Mozilla after the huge market share Firefox gained, but this preview from LifeHacker gives me huge relief. A group of new features and enhancements are presented with screen shots (Don’t miss the screen shots!). The features that appealed to me are:

• Better Page Zooming: Not only text zooming, but images now change size accordingly as well. So you can browse normally by the zoom level you want.
• View Recent Content: This could be useful. It allows you to list most recently starred pages, visited starred pages, most used tags, most visited pages and more.
• Stars marks bookmarks: From the address bar, you will see a star nearby bookmarked URLs so that you don’t double bookmark it.
• Tags!: YES. Bookmark folder is not enough. So now, you can tag a bookmark with as many tags you want. A site could be both Financial site, and an Online Service for example.
• Default Applications and Download Actions: Now, not only you can specify which RSS Reader to use, but through the Applications Tab, for each file type you specify the action you want to do. Be it Save, Open with Adobe Reader, or Ask upon click. This could come real handy for frequen file types. For example, Save all ZIP Files and use Foxit Reader to open all PDF Files.
• Tweaked Notifications: Less annoying now, when you submit your username and password, you won’t get a pop-up asking to remember your information, but rather you get a header above the page asking if you want to make such action.
• Addon Management: FINALLY, you can request to Restart Firefox from Plugins tab, not only through Installation Tab when you have installed new plugin. It’s simple, but I always wanted it.

Don’t take my words for it, please take the time and go through the screen shots made available for you there. A side from all of that, I would be interested to see how their memory management behave. I still have to close my browse after a long busy day to free up memory.

Popularity: 37% [?]

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