Facebook apps are rapidly growing its popularity among the users and here I am reviewing an application I like the most and its called iThink. iThink is an application (a social tool rather) that lets you Express and Share your opinions with your friends as well as other users who cast their Vote in favor or against it. Opinions can be created under various categories like Careers, Global Issues, Relationships, Politics, Technology, etc. Thus you can get a clear idea what the rest of the world thinks with respect to your opinion. Another nice feature of this application is that it lets users to comment apart from just casting their votes. So if you disagree with an opinion, you may opt to comment and explain why you disagree.

A ranking system is also in place to excite the users to use the app on a regular basis and climb the ladder but I don’t feel its the power to build opinions and interact rather that excites me to use this app. Not to forget its excellent interface, completely in sync with the default interface of Facebook.

Here is a nice example that explains what I am talking about
(to get a glimpse inside Facebook you need to Add iThink first which hardly takes half a minute I guess)

On 5th of January, I posted an opinion: Firefox is better than Internet Explorer.

No. of votes casted (till now): 200
People who agreed: 64% or 128
People who disagreed: 36% or 72

(You may also get a social breakup of the voters as per their Gender, Age group under the ‘Insights’ block)

Conclusion: A majority of the Facebook-iThink users feel Firefox is better than Internet Exporer which to me seems gr8!

A few of the most popular opinions @ iThink:

1. Pepsi is better than Coke. (428,306 voted, 28% agreed, 809 comments)
2. Long distance relationships don’t work. (413,938 voted, 59% agreed, 354 comments)
3. Osama Bin Laden is still alive. (407,391 voted, 87% agreed, 113 comments)
4. No sex before marriage. (3,458 voted, 12% agreed, 67 comments)
5. Men cheat more than women. (406,463 voted, 54% agreed, 185 comments)

Blogging at Blogsome is getting easier and more exciting I guess. Previously I used to have this cache problem a lot. Let me explain it in brief …

Say you create a page (thats where I face this problem a lot) or a post in your blog. Now when you attempt to make certain changes and republish, you cant seem to see the changes in reality! You may wonder if this has something to do with your browser. Well yes it may be.

How to clean browser cache?

Whatever be your browser (Firefox, Internet Explorer, etc.) just press Ctrl + F5. There are other ways (pretty hectic yet useful) to clean the browser cache .. just take the help of Google/Yahoo to find it. Now does that solve your problems? Yes?? Gr8! If not, read on ..

How do I clean server cache of my blog at Blogsome?

Previously I used to do this. I used to rename the page from /page-name-1/ to /page-name-2/and republish, open the page in my browser, rename the page from /page-name-2/ to /page-name-1/ and republish it. Grrr .. too hectic and often it didn’t work too smartly.

But now I have a simpler way to clean the server cache of of my blog hosted at Blogsome!

Now, I simply ..

1. log in to my account
2. Go to Manage tab
3. Click on Hacks tab
4. There you will find the following line .. If you make a change to your blog and it doesn’t take effect (which shouldn’t happen very often) try clearing the cache. (Screenshot) Yup you guessed it right .. I just have to click on the clearing the cache button! Thats it!!

NOTE: If that doesn’t solve your probs, keep experimenting or simply post your probs in the famous Blogsome forums (famous cuz I have learnt a lot simply reading the old posts).

» How to create a customized 404 error page at Blogsome?
» Test your website for cross browser compatibility
» Stop visitors from leaving your blog early

Want to know more about web cache? Read this doc.

Download this talk (480p)

I am associated with an industry where we try to understand human emotions/feelings .. but never in my life have I thought like you! Thanks a lot for such a fascinating speech!! I am feeling refreshed!!!

BTW .. in the Yahoo Time Capsule blog (cant find it anymore though), I remember I asked you a question .. Whats next? I think I have got my answer

Thanks TED!

2 out of 3 UK internet users (~ more than 2/3rds of the 33.7 million) loose 2 working days a week for wilfing, a newly coined term. Wilf is the abbreviation of the phrase What I was Looking For, meaning aimlessly browse the web. Someone who practices wilfing are called wilfers. For example, you go to digg, from there go to a website and then to youtube to watch a video tutorial, and from there go to orkut and so on .. Sites which are most likely surfed include shopping, news, music and travel.

The poll conducted by YouGov also revealed the fact that a third of men had damaged relationships with their partners for wilfing through highly seductive adult entertainment sites using popup mechanisms. Again people aged 55 or over are three times less likely to browse aimlessly than those under 25, the poll found.

Many organizations have already blocked social networking sites like myspace, facebook, orkut, etc. and gmail which additionally facilitates online chatting (I love tat ). This is done to stop employees from getting distracted unnecessarily and reducing overall productivity.

What about you .. do you consider yourself as a wilfer?

Till now most of the keyboards available in India are specially made to suit the needs of US market. Or in other words, the default tones that we get are piano, organs, harmonica, strings, etc. plus auto accompaniments like hip hop, club, dance, pop, jazz, etc. Of course very few Indian tones like Sitar, Santoor, etc. are also available in some ranges. Few keyboardists (pro level) additionally purchases Wave Expansion Board like Music Asia to suit their needs.

But Casio CTK 810IN comes with an array of Indian tones like Sitar, Santoor, Tabla, Harmonium, Sarod, Tanpura as default tones plus a wide range of auto accompaniment rhythms including Bangra, Dadra, Garba, Keharwa, Dandiya, Teen taal, Bhajan. This 61 key keyboard is also equipped with equipped with SD memory card slot, pitch bender and USB interface along with touch response keys and 32 registration memory features.

Well you cant ask for more I guess . Thanks CASIO for all the hard work!

Not the toughest job by any means. Paul, the developer, was a programmer of a British automated testing software company. As a first timer he have been pretty successful in making the game popular. Herez a few stats for you (source):

• Launched: March 2007
• Number of times played (till now): 15 million times
• Revenue earned via adverts and donations: $12,000
• Maximum number of players ever online: 4,000

Isn’t that a m a z i n g !!

The most interesting thing about this whole game is to score as much points as possible. A nice and healthy competition among the players is enough to drive huge amount of traffic to handdrawngames.com. Have a look at their alexa trends:

T.Y.P.O.R.G.A.N.I.S.M, a flash based site focused on interactive kinetic typography, provides some fabulous tools and demos based on typography. Whether it be Description, DNA, weight, ASCII-O-Matic or Good News, Bad News, everything carries a unique signature. All the above items can be browsed at the right menu of typorganism’s home page.

The ASCII-O-Matic tool is pretty interesting. Once you upload a JPEG image of 60px x 50 px dimension, it converts the image into fab ASCII art and even gives you a html version of the same for your website or blog. A few output options are there for customizing the output. To get the HTML code of the image, click on the Generate HTML button, copy the source code of the popup. An alternative to ASCII-O-Matic may be Toolpanel’s ascii generator tool or this tool; though the flash powered interface of typorganism is pretty cool.

Some more info: Trust factor is HIGHEST when it comes to .edu sites. I am not an expert SEO, just a newbie trying to learn the rules of the game.

Today while I was browsing this SEO Chat forum thread I was pretty shocked to notice something. In the Affiliate Marketing forum, Misterdh asked: Porn - Is it worth it? I never peeped deep into this thing in the past. Out of utter curiosity I thought to try out a search at Google.com

What did I search for?

I typed FREE XXX CLIPS in my favorite Google search box and hit the enter key.

What did I get?

I noticed .. Results 1 - 100 of about 3,040,000 for FREE XXX CLIPS. (0.12 seconds) The competition is pretty tough I thought. I scrolled down. And then .. OMG I was shocked !! The 9th result was of campus.murraystate.edu (Be very careful .. TURN OFF JavaScript from the tools menu of your browser or else you may end up landing in some crappy site.) But Googlebot is blind to javascripts and so it crawled the page on 10th June, 2007 at 14:34:11 GMT.

Whats the problem with the page

It is stuffed with XXX keywords, a trap for the bots to crawl the pages. Yup .. you got it right. They love fresh content and they trust .edu sites like all of us. If you watch the source code very closely (cummon .. just search for the malicious .js file), you will notice the http://agp-one.net/XXXXX/movies.js file which redirects you to the crappy site. But it doesnt redirect googlebot since (as I mentioned earlier) they are blind to .js files.

Some more observations ..

As I scrolled down the SERP, I found the TOP 9 out of 20 results are of .edu sites. As I scrolled more and more I found some 50 odd results from .edu domains. Yup they are all spams and in some way or the other spammers managed to flood the forum topics, blogs, etc. with all sorts of craps with the intention of getting visibility in Google and consequently getting some huge traffic.

Two Qs

1. Are the maintainers of these sites are doing enough to ensure that their invaluable sites are not spammed/defaced?
2. Is Google taking enough measures to ensure that its famous SERPs are not spammed as well? Hey Matt are you listening?

Time will tell ..

Disclaimer: This is just an observation. Please don’t think we are promoting pornographic materials anyways OR trying to insult any website intentionally/unintentionally.

But at first lemme share a tiny shortcut to open MS Word. Go to Run and type winword and click Ok/hit enter. Well thats the way I start my MS Word app. Open a new Word document and type = rand (200,99) and hit enter. What did you get? Yup .. if you are using Office 2003 you will get this ..

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

repeated in 200 paragraphs, with each paragraph saying it 99 times. Since the sentence covers each and every character of the English alphabet, its presumably a built in macro to test out fonts for generating sample texts.

But surprisingly, if you use MS Office 2007, you wont get that result. Instead you will get a nice paragraph that starts with ..

On the insert tab, the galleries include items that are designed to coordinate with the overall look of your document.

which is a kind of manual of exciting new features of Word 2007! An uninterrupted effort by Microsoft to popularize their product I guess .

BTW, lemme share one more MS Word trick with you ..

How to change a selected text to all caps, small caps in MS Word?

Well herez the trick for you: Select the text you want to change and press SHIFT + F3 key. Press again. And again .. Enjoy!