Apparent Google wave invite dupe scheme

So after i recieved my google wave invite i just happened to search the tag #googlewave on twitter to see what other people were saying about google wave. Surprisingly a major number of tweets went something like this :
"Just requested my Google Wave Invite! Get yours at http://www.google.com-wave.info - #googlewave #googlewaveinvite" Have a look at the image

Now this looked surprisingly fishy so i went to the site http://www.google.com-wave.info/ and found that apparently you give your twitter username and your gmail id to these people and then tweet the above mentioned tweet and you get your invite.
I dont know about you guys but this looks like a huge scam to me.
If this is indeed a scam and you were scammed a googlewave account is not a fashion statement. Most people dont have a clue of how they will be using google wave even after getting an invite. Wait till google comes up with a wider audience with more of your friends/family on it and then get on the wave.
Till then stop coming up on my #googlewave search please.

to you, from me

photo by :Kr.b

it seems a lifetime ago since you were with me. a lot has changed since then. you. me. the world around us. with some letters you painted the memories of yesteryears in such a way that i dont quite recognise them any more. I was in denial for a long time, i was a car wreck. i still am. I have morphed into a stranger. People dont change, their intrepretations of yesterday and themselves change. the happiest days of my life are now my most tragic days. i know you would say, that siddharth you were always this way.Perhaps thats true. perhaps like i dont know you,you dont know me. You were the only girl i said i love you to. it may not have meant anything to you but now, today at this moment it means everything to me.

So i wrote this for you.only for you. i love you and at this moment i dont deserve to say this to you but its true. You were my scarlett, my dominique ,my dagny taggart and my jenny.and you always will be. I hope that you are able to love again soon and able to forget the dreadful chapter in your life story that i was. i wouldnt wish it on anyone.

I knew you would want me to get over you and get on with my life. I am trying. Thanks to my friends today i have hope in my life. i am able to dream again. but i still think of you whenever i listen to coming back to life, whenever i am happy or whenever i am sad. Whenever i feel lonely, whenever i talk to dipen. whenever i watch a lot like love( i know, i know you hated the movie :-))

Maybe some day you'll be able to smile when you think of me and i will be able to stop crying when i think of you. For my sake i hope both of these days arrive soon.

Google SideWiki - What do you think ??

I am not a google fanboy, (well i work in microsoft, so that makes sense) but cant help saying that they come out with interesting products. The latest in line is the Google SideWiki . It comes with the google toolbar and is basically a sidebar which allows you to post comments about the site. The comments that you make are connected to your google account and so there are no anonymous comments. Plus the comments that you make are also sorted according to relevance so that the topmost comments make sense. It works with IE and Firefox currently and also allows you to share your sidewiki exploits via Facebook and twitter.Pretty cool right ?

However this has managed to irk some people. The content is owned by google and not by the website. So you cant modify what will appear to be a part of your site and google will effectively change the appearance of your site. It also can eat away at the monetization models of some sites. Plus the potential of having derogatory/inflammatory comments on sensitive topics is also something people are concerned about. Leading the charge is Jeff Jarvis the author of What will Google do ?

I think its a pretty interesting development. It takes a step further to socialize the web ,however i think the concerns of people like Jeff jarvis need to be answered. Well what do you think ?? Do you think Google's moving away from its "Do no evil" motto ? Or are you excited by this latest goolgle exploit ?? Let me know for sure.

Your ideas are your new resume

A lot of people at my office ask me what's twitter ? And what's the big deal. Most of the times i have given them the usual microblogging definition, but most of them were not convinced. And also i wanted to convey why i am so interested in tweeting and the whole social media thing. Then suddenly it struck me its a way for me to share and come across ideas. That is why i am so excited about this. I love thinking aloud something on twitter and then have a great discussion with my tweeps. I come across new things, terms and perspectives.

Which brings be to the point i am writing this blog, Your ideas : How you polish them , present them and whom you discuss them with is your new resume. It may not be mainstream right now, but i have seen instances of this happening. A good presence on the web in terms of blogs, forum discussions etc allow potential employers to get a peek into your thought process and depth of knowledge. Which ideas you tweet or blog about and how you conduct yourself on the websphere while may not be always enough to land you a job but it will definitely get people interested and imagine the width of the audience - potentially the entire web.

That is why i was quite impressed by brazencareerist.com .Not only they focus on the traditional way of marketing yourself, they also encourage you to share ideas through your blogs and friendfeed. And its available to everyone. People can read your ideas and then comment about it. Finally a site i guess which combines your professional and social networking perfectly. The interface is also not as drab as linked-in (no disrespect intended) . And it will definitely appeal much more to today's 20-somethings.

Anyways, so back to my point, your ideas are your new and improved resume. Get them out, refine them and let them do the talking for you. So that's whats so amazing about twitter , getting your idea out in precisely 140 characters to potentially the entire world and thats why i tweet, my friend .

Why do i need a college degree ?

After 4 years of college and nearly one and half years of working, i havent yet found out how what i learnt in college was useful to me in my professional life. Everything i learnt in my college i easily could have learnt from the right book or from the millions of how to tutorials available on the internet. Most of my friends work on technologies that weren't on our college curriculum ,which was probably last updated in 2001. I guess this is the case with most colleges. Take any field, what is is that a college degree gives you which you couldnt have learned on your own. Its more probable now than say 15-20 years ago, what with the amount of knowledge that i available to us. All you need is a laptop and a broadband connection.


Critics to this idea may point out to my total disregard for teachers. My counterpoint to this is that i believe hands on training is much better than pure pedantism. Also with the web we have easy access to people with the same ideas and interests. Facebook groups and tweeps could replace your traditional classmates.

Then specially in India comes the question of jobs. Why will a company hire someone without a college degree. What i suggest is nothing new, introduce an internship program and give your intern/apprentice sufficient time. He will be as useful to you as any college graduate you hire after six months and also you will have a chance to correct a mistake if you hired the wrong person.

I still understand the reason for degrees in something like medicine, you cant directly intern at an hospital after a self reading of Grey's anatomy but does the same hold true for a computer programmer or even in the field of management.

Do you think i am wrong or you agree with my ideas. Do let me know.

How do social networking sites make money ??

I was quite stumped when someone asked me this question and of course the first answer that came to my head was advertising, but i wasnt quite convinced with my own answer. So i did a little digging around. And i was quite surprised with what i found.

Most of these sites (twitter,facebook) dont even have a decent revenue model. In fact Twitter hired their first business development employee just last December. And there is even a competition on for twitter's business model. Most of these startups follow the model about generating a huge critical mass(read user base) and then worry about making money. So where do they get the money for cost of operations?? Well these are the major sources of revenue for these startups. Well here's the answer

1. VC Money : Well yeah venture capitalist money is the major source of money for all these startups.

2. Advertising : Well the usual suspect is also another major source of income. Google's horse for all courses Adwords is used in Orkut and facebook also primarily depends on ads.

3. A giant doing a deal with you : Case in point Facebook.

Well that covers the most conventional ways of raising money for these sites.

Now the problem is its not working. The more number of users is translating into more operating costs and not more revenue because of the cost of holding all that data and setting up servers in countries outside U.S. and most of these increasing number of users come from Asia and South America where online advertising is not that hot and hence not generating that much revenue. Everyone from facebook to myspace to twitter is looking for that killer revenue model.

Well a problem equals an opportunity. Maybe there's another adsense/adword lurking around the corner.

By the way, this is what i know. Let me know if there are more sources of revenues for the social networking sites.

P.S.: Another question that had baffled me was How do ipl franchisees make money. Here's how.

Choices

Life is about choices, isnt it. And when you think of it like that, life somehow seems so simple. You make the right choices(ofcourse who is stupid enough to make wrong chocies or so you think) and wham! your life's awesome. Except its not really that simple. I was watching this movie yesterday night, Lions and Lambs and a collge professor tells his student that the worst part about adulthood is you dont know when it starts, And by the time you realize that you are an adult and responsible for your choicesyou are already 4-5 bad choices in it. And that got me thinking(pardon me if you think i am using the word too many times) about my life and adulthood. About how non chalantly and without thinkingtoo much far into the future i have made some decisions and lived to regret them.The funny or the not so funny part about this was that i always thought, if anything goes wrong i will be able to fix it or correct itand i always chose the thing that first came into my mind, i never thought about an alternative to those choices,never evaluated them because i always thought if anything goes wrong i will fix it. What i have come to realize since then is that some choices are for life and that sometimes you never really get a second chance and you have to live your entire life regretting the decisions that you made.I have made a hell lot of wrong ones. And what those decisions eventually did was they tinged the memories of my best moments with a bitter aftertaste which always remind me how i screwed them up.But hopefully they also left me wiser . I just wish there were one thing i could change, cos that would change everything but well life is unforgiving in this regard and we have to live the choices that we made.