Something about Nothing

These days, the Web 2.0 companies are very considerate about your blood pressure, they have used their innovation even when it comes to the dreaded “404 - File not Found”, or “Under Maintenance” errors. Listing some of the errors that I stumbled along when I was visiting the sites.

I think everyone has said “Hello” to the Bloglines plumber one time or the other. This was one of the initial Error 2.0 Message that I saw, and I was very impressed. Not for long though, he gets on my nerves now. I have found many better error messages than this one. Although I think this is where the “cool error message” thing started (correct me if I am wrong).

Jaiku has a humourous one liner.

Technorati tries too, but apart from “brb” nothing can be deemed Web 2.0 classy Wish they had tried a bit harder…

Twitter’s lolcatz. After all lolcatz is the current rage…

Flickr is getting a massage. You get massage, and more RAM… That is one swell deal There was another website where I had seen an error that said “Out on a coffee break” or something on those lines… Seemed to me a direct lift of the Flickr error message and so I did not include that in the list.

These errors were okayish… You read/see, smile a wry smile at not getting the page you wanted, and move on… Then there were three errors that could be deemed really funny.

Reddit’s alien is one of my favourites, and so is Reddit. Reddit has a bookmarklet “Serendipity” which comes to my rescue whenever I am bored - which is quite often A click, and I am instantly taken to some random page. If the page is not available, Reddit does not hesitate to poke fun at itself. There are multiple variations of the same…

Google Reader team would have banged heads to come up with this limerick By the way is this a limerick? What ever it is, I liked it…

But the best of the lot is WordPress. With a short story titled “Confessions Of A Server”, WP takes the cake, and the cherry too… Click on the adjoining image for a readable version of the short-story, the 15 seconds of your life that you give to read that is properly utilized

Technorati: Web 2.0, Error Messages

Talk about irony… Anytime I go into my gmail spam folder to check if there are any non-spam mails that have been marked as spam (of which there have been a total of 2 mails in the past 2 years), most of the mails I encounter these days are regarding “obesity” and “getting slim” and “perfect weight”. Going on a tangent, surprisingly these days the perfect-weight spam are out-numbering the “body-parts-enhancement” spam by a huge margin. Seems the spammers’ target audience is changing.

Anyways back to the topic of irony, majority of spam mails are regarding perfect-weight as is apparent in the screenshot.

But the ads that are displayed in the Web Clips, on top of the messages (in this case on top of the spam messages) those ads are nothing related to losing weight, instead they all would help in gaining weight. All ads are from some recipe site and they use Spam (processed meat) as an ingredient.

Going on another tangent, yesterday I noticed that Yahoo Mail includes the ads that it displays in the inbox while forwarding any message. So whenever I get any forwarded message from a Yahoo! account, the Yahoo ads are displayed right in my gmail inbox, but the Google ads are blocked by Adblock. Adblock is not able to block the Yahoo ads, as they are now a part of the message. Seems Yahoo! have a sneaky way to earn revenue…

A, D, G, J, M, P, T, W

These may be the most used letters for naming the websites/home-pages for the startups coming up. The reason for it is simple enough - most startups are targeting mobiles in a big way and these letters are the easiest to type in any normal cell-phone keypad (I am not considering the Qwerty keyboard as normal in cell-phones).

Yesterday I was playing around with a friend’s cell-phone which had GPRS/WAP activated, and trying to access Yahoo! and Gmail had a big difference. Typing Yahoo took 12 keystrokes with some waiting between the two ‘o’s; whereas typing gmail took 9 keystrokes without waiting. Not a huge difference, you would say - but given that the website makes an effect on the user in initial 50 milliseconds (yes, you read it right - 50 milliseconds [BBC Report]) this minor difference of 4-5 keystrokes can be considered huge. And the only way to earn revenue is by building an appreciable customer base - why take a chance over such a trifle thing as the name of website; but then is the name that trifle - you could lose a customer over his laziness to type out the name.

I may be very wrong, but then what use this blog would be if I do not put out my neck once in a while Shoot me people!

Technorati: Startups, Web2.0, Domains, Cellphone, Mobile, Website Naming

Google Reader has improved - now that would be a tautological statement. I have finally shifted all my feeds from Bloglines to Reader, but I sorely miss one feature of Bloglines.

Check these two images, they are images of the same feed in Bloglines and Google Reader.

Feed in Google Reader

Feed in Bloglines

Click on the images for larger size

They are almost the same, except for one small thing. In Bloglines feed, the category chosen by the author/writer is shown, whereas it is not displayed in Google Reader. The category being shown is especially useful when the feed is of Blog-Filters like Desipundit. There are so many posts linked to by DP that knowing the category helps a lot in filtering the posts.

Google introduced labels in Blogger Beta, hope they start showing those labels in the Reader.

Technorati: Google Reader, Bloglines, Labels, Categories

Rediff is playing it safe, very safe. They are not sticking their necks out with reviews of movies of big banners & star casts.

Recently they have adopted this trend of having ‘alternate’ (whatever that means) reviews of all big movies. Check these out:

Umrao Jaan: Good & Bad
Don: Good & Bad
Jaan-e-Mann: Good & Not-so-Bad
KANK: Good & Bad & Bad

The only movie that has two reviews and both are good is Lagey Raho Munnabhai: Good & Good

I need proper reviews of movies before I shell out money, not ‘alternate’ reviews.

Technorati: Rediff, Umrao Jaan, Don, Jaan-e-Mann, Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna, Lagey Raho Munnabhai, Review