It’s been over a week since I have started using Google+ and till now it has been a brilliant experience.  This is a set of features I really like and could differentiate it from Facebook, it’s biggest competitor, even if Google acknowledges that fact.

Circles – People might really like the idea of Circles because of privacy implications, but for me I like because of totally different reason. I don’t keep a lot of things private, but I always worry about spamming a set of people who are not concerned with the kind of things I am sharing. For example, I have these two best friends who I really want to talk and share a lot of information, but I don’t like to share technology related news/analysis with them as they are not techies. Now, I have a way of spreading the news to set of people I want to share with and neglect others.

Circles also help me categorize the news that is important to me. I created a Circle Geeks2Follow and am using that feed page as Google Reader shared items. Google Reader shared items had a problem that it did not contain the comment thread or could maintain the real time feedback. Now, I see the immediate reaction of people and don’t have to wait till one needs to write a full post. This is same that could be achieved at Friendfeed, but combining both experiences makes it great. It also solves the issue of now having threaded conversation on Twitter.

Huddle & Hangout - I see a lot of advantage of these two features, both of them deal with groups and that’s where most of my conversation takes place. Hangout would be one thing that I would surly like to use on my podcast, this way we could capture audio and video in a very synchronized way. Hangout is also useful in doing some group meetings, because this does not involve installing clients, changing firewall settings and so on. Another feature of hangout that I use most is watching youtube videos with friends. This has given a totally new experience of watching videos and has taken it to social level.

Huddle is useful for communicating while traveling. We do a lot of our business communication via N1 and always had issue of not having group chat functionality on phones. Huddle solves it and also makes it more SMS like, thus solving the issue of not wanting everyone to be online to start the conversation.

Search – One thing that will improve drastically is search results and I have already started seeing the impact of  social graph. This morning I searched for ‘Google Plus Features’ and third search result was from Matt Cutts, and it read – Matt Cutts shared this (image below). Definitely as more users build in, we will see a lot of improved results.

Improved Search Results

Everything else is more or less the same, similar to other social networks like Facebook. I drastically reduced using Facebook because of lack of energy there and most of the people spending time on Zynga. One main feature that I liked about Facebook was it’s event system. It used to work well when I was in grad school. Was very useful in planning events. Google+ needs to add that into their system as well, Calendars is already a good feature just it needs to be integrated with Google+.

Feature Wish List

Mute should permanently mute the post and I don’t need to see any comments that have been put after my comment, I also don’t need a notification mail for that. I am using mute post as a ‘read post’ feature, to clear of my stream. One way to solve is to add another feature called ‘read’.  So, if I have read and commented then I should get notifications and if I commented and muted, then I should not get any notifications.

Android client for Google+ also needs a mute(and read) functionality, as I am consuming most of the content on my N1.

Similar to Picasa integration, we should have YouTube integration too. I have a set of videos on Youtube and none of them got imported to Google+ and I added few videos to Google+ and they are not on youtube. If that functionality can be added, it would be perfect. Of course here an option would be given, if you want to make the video public or not, as youtube does not have same privacy settings.

Overall, it’s been a very experience with Google+. Surely early adopters like it a lot, we will have to wait and see how masses will react to it.

The post and spreadsheet provided by Amit Agarwal on How to Create a Mail Merge with Gmail and Google Docs is extremely useful.  But for last few days, I have been wanting to send attachments along with the mail merge. I tried many options but was unsuccessful, finally a set of combinations worked for me and I am sharing that spreadsheet so others don’t have to go through the same trouble.

Follow the above provided link for understanding how to use Google Docs for mail merge, after that is working fine, you can use the following spreadsheet. This is the spreadsheet which can be used to add attachments to email. I have an editable column F13 where you will have to provide Document ID. Once you provide the document id, the steps to send emails are exactly same as mentioned by above blog post.

How to get Document ID:

Step 1: Upload the document that you want to attach on Google Docs.

Step 2: While uploading the document make sure that the option ‘Convert documents, presentations, spreadsheets, and drawings to the corresponding Google Docs formats’ is checked. If you do not check this option, your documents will not attach properly.

Step 3: Open the document and go to the URL. You can to use the id value as document id. Example: If URL is

https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=explorer&chrome=true&srcid=0B_7_CbUovM_8YWJhYmQxNjktOTdiNS00ZWMyLTg3MzEtNGE3MWVhMjQyYTc4&hl=en

then the characters in bold are document id. Copy and paste them into the F13 box. When you send the mail, document with id will be attached.

I have added another feature of getting the remaining mail count of the day. That can also be accessed from the menu and count is shown above on the spreadsheet.

Update: I have updated the script to provide multiple attachments. Now columns F13 to F17 can contain different attachment IDs, or can be left blank.

Since you joined as CEO of Yahoo you have been on one mission – call it downsizing, righsizing or cutting fat. The mission is clear to cut off all the services that are not generating revenue for the organization. Over last two years we saw a lot of services go down and some were for good, for example Geocities. May be world does not need geocities anymore but there are services which we all love and could see potential for Yahoo.  World does not need another social network or a clone of twitter in Portuguese. And that aligns with my understanding of working with your core competencies.

Delicious has been my favorite site for long now. Without it, arranging the links would have been a very tough task. Those tag clouds that we have created help us day in and out. You had bought this company and did not change much in it, except integrating with yahoo id and creating some nice Firefox plugins. That was great, the site had worked well and we didn’t want to change it. And that Firefox plugin made the site more useful then ever. I believe the content generated via delicious is very precious, where else will you find curated data in such format. How else can you have hundreds of thousands of geeks working for you and arranging the links from all segments. This could be a perfect way to utilize it into your search (or anyone else’s search).

An Offer

It is inevitable that Yahoo would let delicious survive, but we want it to work. Lets have a deal, pass us the code and data, we are ready to maintain it and keep it alive. We can collect donations and host the system on our machines.

- Del.icio.us Fanboy

Much anticipated game from Zynga seems to be very addictive in first

sight but loses it charm. I would keep this review short, because usually people don’t write reviews about Social Games. This is sort of review of Zynga and their games.

Zynga seems to be one of the hottest companies in Silicon Valley these days, with venture capital from Google and great reviews from everywhere, it seemed like Zynga had found the secret sauce of making money in “social”.

Ctyville seems like the mix of the games Zynga brought last year. It is a cross between Farmville, FrontierVille and Playdom’s Social City. Actually, it would be better if I say, Zynga copied the idea of Social City and added aspects of FrontierVille and Farmville into it. This is nothing new for Zynga, they get the idea from some other company’s game and incorporate it with a lot of social feature. But this time they missed the trick – they could not expand on the idea on ‘we build the city’. And then what, this is the problem, a city would be build in couple of hours and player would have nothing more to do. Seems like the game was hurried and creativity was missing.

This game is too social. Zynga games always had the element where people need the help of neighbors, and if one does not have enough friends playing the game they can buy virtual currency with real currency. Here at every step one has to either ask help from neighbors or has to buy currency. They had over done it and it irritates the players too much. That makes the games bottom line as either spend real money or wait, there is not fun aspect to it, or something that can keep player interested.

Games seems like a lot of waste of time for accomplishing nothing, as compared to Farmville. I would like Zynga to use that secret ‘book of social gaming’ that is talked about and how Zynga has cracked the code. If they continue to roll out games like these, I don’t see the future of social gaming getting anywhere. May be times have changed and we like to Jump the Doodle or use Anger of Birds to kill the pigs.

I was listening to This Week in Google where Jeff Jarvis, Gina Trapani and Leo Laporte were discussing the issue of Google’s social strategy. The main point of discussion was what Facebook and Twitter are doing. Facebook has more than half a billion users but still not able to provide proper recommendations, while Twitter had over 180 million users and it has an excellent recommendation system. The topic that skimmed up was it’s not the users that matter, it’s the relationships that matters the most for any social strategy.

On the other side, Google has a lot of users but not a successful social strategy. Google has shown it’s capabilities by providing us ‘Priority Inbox’ which is a testimonial that with enough data, Google can mine excellent relationships and eventually recommendations. How does Google get into the game? They have money, engineering capabilities but a lot of failed social attempts too. One thing is they can harness the fire hose provided by Twitter but that would not suffice all needs of Google.

One of the options is for Google to have it’s own Social Network (Google Me?), but we know form past experiences (Orkut, Buzz, Latitude) that Google cannot build a good social network. Then how do they get all the data they want? At that time I wondered what if we bring Android into the picture. One of the most fascinating things about Android is it’s contact sync. Google syncs all the contacts from Phonebook, Facebook, Twitter, Skype and other application into one phonebook. They do an excellent job of figuring out which users/handle/userid belong to same person and bundle it together.

I see it as opportunity for Google; by capturing a large market in Smartphone they have a system where they can capture a lot of data with just one primary key – gmailid. With more and more usage of mobile platform people use twitter, Facebook, Skype and voice calls, all from one device. If that device is capable of capturing all the data and building a social graph internally then I see Gold for Google. Google can have it’s own ‘Friend Rank’ algorithm which will rank friends based on number of calls, frequency, twitter replies, wall posts, picture messages, email threads and many more small parameters. Once friends are ranked, that data can be passed to Google servers. And that data can be utilized to provide better “social” search results.

Main part about this is privacy implications. That is why I think building of Social Graph has to be done on mobile. That data should not be sent over airwaves. Once the platform calculates the graph, it can store on Google servers, as reverse engineering of that graph is not possible. It’s just an idea, where I think Google can be headed to.

I found out about this quiz from American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on This Week in Tech (TWiT) and thought sharing this information is important. This quiz (yep, its a quiz to demonstrate how harmful they can be) tells you the data accessible to third party applications when you give these small quizzes. Worst part about this is, you do not just give your information but also provide information about all your friends. Even all the private information like political view, birth year, preferences, current location about your friends is accessible to these third party applications. To prove the point ACLU displays some information as you can see on the screenshot below.

As you notice private information about my friends is accessible to them and these third parties can be anyone, not have to be a reputable organization. That’s why These quizzes should be avoided. Even Facebook does not have control (as of now) on how this information can be used/misused.

Update: here is an article on how to secure some of your data after recent FB policy changes.

Update:
Facebook has added the privacy settings option so one can select what his/her friends can share about him/her. This setting can be found under ‘Privacy settings > Applications and Website > What your friends can share about you‘

Part II of The Unfinished Internet. Here Vint Cerf discusses the new challenge, how to extend Internet to different planets and what are the issues associated with TCP/IP that does now allow that.

10:51 AM – Vint Cerf is already here, presentation is up and hall is almost full.

11:01 AM – Introduced by someone from Computer Science department. Widely recognized as father of internet because of his contribution to TCP/IP. Currently holds position of Chief Internet Evangelist at Google. Pioneering work in packeting technology and won many awards,. I believe all information about this is on Wikipedia.

Earlier this year I did a podcast on Facebook platform and why it is attractive. But since then I am losing interest in Facebook’s capabilities and thus this blog post. In that podcast we discussed how Facebook connect/Google connect are going to be used as openIDs and would help build communities around  external sites. Those things have not changed but my understanding of social communication had changed.

Everyone indulges in few types of communication – private, public, official and collaborative. As I see, I have better tools for everything that I mentioned. For private communication IM suits perfectly, a one on one real time communication. Public communication can be achieved via Twitter, especially its capabilities have enhanced with excellent clients like Tweetdeck and Seesmic. Twitter also changed the default settings of ‘replies’ going to all your followers, and that has helped in improving twitter experience. Official communication can be achieved via emails and collaboration via Groove, Google docs or Wave. These all makes you wonder the importance of Facebook?

I use Facebook for three purposes – Photo sharing, Social calendar and Social games (yes, I used to play Farmville). Facebook has grown to be the biggest photo sharing site, since it has advantage of tagging people it is attractive but one cannot upload hi-res photos and that’s what bothers me. Secondly, how many photos one wants to share, I think I have hit my limit (not FB’s limit). Social calendar has been a really cool feature and I used it a lot too, but integration of Google Calendar, Gmail and iPhone calendar has worked much better for me. This combination does not tell me who is attending or not attending an event, but if I care about that I can always use email/IM. No comments about social games, they are addictive but scandalous.

My usage of Facebook has reduced drastically, they tried to bring together the experience of IM, but its broken; email, but it has limited capabilities – no forwarding/adding of new recipients, just reply not reply-all, no attachments; calendar, but its not open to exchange (microsoft or other formats); real time updates, but not as efficient as twitter. This does not mean that Google or Twitter has taken market share, it just means that Facebook is losing its capabilities in keeping people at hand. We cannot see it now as it has reached critical mass and growing rapidly, but as I see, people will start (or have started) losing interest in Facebook.  Its main strength was to bring people back to site but that seems to be weakening, combined with the advertising fraud, no proper source of revenue, I see Facebook will have to come up with a plan to keep in this business or they will be the Friendster of 2010. 

A set of tweets in a language I don’t understand made me think of about the problem of twitter groups. Many a when I tweet I face the problem that I am going to annoy my followers who are not interested in certain topics such as F1, Cricket or Web2 technologies. Since we have been waiting for long about Twitter groups, we have come up with hashtags and clients such as Tweetdeck to resolve most of the problems. But last month twitter turned on the feature where a ‘reply’ would be visible on your timeline only if your follow the person who the ‘reply’ is addressed to. So, here is the idea how we can harness that to simulate group feature.

I will demonstrate this idea  with an example: I am interested in formula1 and own the account ‘fakeF1’. People, who need to see tweets from me about F1, should follow ‘fakeF1’ because whenever I want to post a tweet, I would be replying to ‘fakeF1’. So, none of my followers who are not interested in F1 will get my F1 related posts till them come to my specific page (which is very rare). For people who do not follow me but just ‘fakeF1’ should put a search filter in their clients to get all the details about F1. We can have handles like CricketTweets, WCT20, OnlyFootball, GeekTalk etc.

Only one person has to create a dummy twitter id and it would resolve problems of many. I believe in wisdom of crowds and think this id can work brilliantly.