Scoble, Facebook and Zoho

I’ve just been reading Scoble’s latest post. Its a long rant about Facebook (and maybe Social networking in general).

Now I don’t use any Social Network (Gasp!Say its not So! 🙂 )and its mainly because I prefer handling my friendships the old fashioned way – face to face. Any contacts go either on my phone, Outlook (Another gasp!! Outlook? OUTLOOK??? 🙂 )or Gmail.

But that’s not the point of the post.Its abut contacts in general. Outlook doesn’t do any sort of tagging. Gmail has tags. But not to the degree that Scoble suggests:

Let me define different behaviors for each tag. “LOVER” tag might go into one page with a password, for instance, that isn’t publicly available. That way Maryam and I could use a social network to send sweet nothings back and forth (I can’t use any of these networks for THAT kind of social networking). “BUSINESS ASSOCIATE” could have a form that includes why I care about that person, business wise. So I could put Fred Wilson there, add that he’s a VC, add his blog, add his Twitter account, etc.

Which is pretty clever.

They say genius is lightning across the brain. And as I read the above paragraph, a tool to do the job jumped instantly to mind –Zoho Creator.

Raffic Aslam, of Zoho, left this comment to my last Zoho post:

Dear User,

Thanks for your compliments )

I hope you would have checked out our scripting language – Deluge, which helps users to build powerful applications easily. I request you to try out Deluge Script and share your valuable thoughts.

Check out Deluge Scripting Video here –
http://static.zoho.com/creator/v2/collateral/delugescript/index.html

Thanks Again
~Raffic Aslam

 

The link is actually to a video of said scripting language in action, which you can view below (thanks to YouTube):

Its quite incredible. So this whole post is essentially a note to self reminding me to have a crack at this problem the next time I have a free afternoon. It’ll be more of a mashup than anything, but its a good idea to test Creator’s limits on.

Zoho Strikes Again

(via LifeHacker and Scoble’s link blog)

I’ve never seen something quite like this. I moonlight as an ASP.net Developer and this had me shaking my head in wonder:

Advice to Microsoft Corp. – buy Zoho before Google does (whatever the price, it’s worth it to beef up Microsoft’s web services). Imagine the power of Creator when merged with  SQL and Longhorn Server (err, Windows Server 2008), for example.

Advertising

From Tim O’Reilly’s Post What Does It Mean For Public Space to Go Digital?:

When you put together all the possibilities for the future of advertising, you realize how little we’ve seen yet as digital life truly spreads beyond the computer and becomes pervasive. As digital display surfaces proliferate, so too will portable sensors (and your cell phone is becoming one of those) and controllers (your cell phone is becoming one of those as well). As David warns, we’re going to need some public discourse about how much is enough. But there are also going to be huge opportunities for companies to do what Google did with its early, uncompromising stand on relevant contextual advertising rather than blaring display ads, and to find ways to use those new digital environments in a way that is consumer-friendly and ultimately empowering.

Just take a look at the way Youtube has just added Ad’s (take alook here as well).

I think Youtube has taken the path of least resistance when it comes to ads. I’d keep an eye out for the whole idea of the user choosing to watch the commercial  changing once people have gotten used to the idea. And on that note, I’d like to repeat what Tim said:

we’re going to need some public discourse about how much is enough

April Fools (Updated)

To all MSDN Subscribers. The Microsoft Penguin Adoption Program 2007 is now open to new members. Further details are here.

In other news, Google has gone public with their Pigeon Rank System (via the Radar – thanks guys).

Update: I found new stuff….

Scoble has some….

The Register has some good stuff…

Google has two, here and here

GottabeMobile has a few…

By this point, my tea is all over the floor 🙂

Update 2: Just found this (via Codeing4Fun):

Clint Rutkas decided it was a good idea to drop 1000 super bouncy balls onto his CTO. 

[YouTube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IflN4daL8w]