Doomoo's Blog

This piece of mine about the recent Twitter outage was published in the Indian Express today.

The silence heard around the world

We mail, we blog, we twitter. Yet, it is on mornings like that of August 6, that we stop taking for granted how dependent we are on technology. I’m talking about the social network meltdown, of course. As several sites were attacked, Twitter went down due to a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack leaving millions of users without the ability to communicate in bite-sized pieces.

DDoS is the technological equivalent of a human brain freeze. A teller at a bank counter can easily process one or two customers’ transactions at a time. Two or three hundred simultaneous customers, however, may lead to extreme confusion. For the sake of analogy let’s say this leads to unconsciousness, making it impossible for any more customers to be served. This essentially is what happened to applications in the online social networking world last Thursday. Malicious attackers bombarded websites from different locations (thus the word distributed) with seemingly legitimate messages causing some of them to slow down, and knocking others like Twitter out cold. Twitterers using the website, their mobiles or other means weren’t able to tweet as well. It was a brief, complete blackout.

The attacks that shook the online world this time around are reported to have political motives. Mashable.com reported that social networking sites including Facebook, Google and Twitter might well have been attacked to silence just one person – a blogger in the republic of Georgia, underscoring the role these sites play as a medium of expression. This wasn’t the first time Twitter was down, either. Earlier this year, a cracker got control of Twitter accounts giving him the ability to impersonate, among others, President Obama. Wonder what would have happened if that attack was politically motivated!

Motives notwithstanding, reactions to the outage were varied. Given the duration of Thursday’s attack, we were far from a Die Hard 4.0 like situation of technology-initiated anarchy. Prem Panicker, a journalist by profession and a twitterer known for his live tweets on cricket says, “I heard about the outage on Twitter and followed it on Twitter. So — what outage?”. For most casual users, it was merely a temporary loss of another source of information. At the other end of the spectrum, for those whose social lives are conducted online in a large part, this was akin to being marooned on an island. Given the entangled nature of the web, India was also affected by the turmoil as ‘tweeple’ from across the country faced issues in logging in to Twitter. Netra Parikh, a popular twitterer, thought at first that her internet connection was down. “When I realised that Twitter was not working, I felt like I ran out of oxygen” she recalls. “I immediately went to Facebook and posted that Twitter is down. I received close to 60 messages within the hour.”

The generation with probably the shortest attention span was left without its newest toy. We didn’t just miss out on opportunities to know what others were doing, browsing or eating. We also got a taste of what we take for granted in the otherwise stable world of technology. As the social web saw cracks erupt that fateful Thursday morning, the blackout of one of the world’s most used services reinforced the reality of the virtual world in our lives. We realised that we have come a long way from a few years ago — a time when social networking websites were the flavours of the season and ‘nice-to-haves’; a time when a new website mushroomed every few weeks and our e-mails reminded us of not having added a stranger as a friend on an unknown social network.

Today, we are at a stage where these networks are an integral part of keeping in touch with friends and family, an effective marketing tool and a way of killing time. Twitter itself isn’t limited to sharing information about the weather or pictures of funny cats. Brick and mortar businesses rely on it to reach their newest consumers. Bloggers, celebrities and politicians have all leveraged Twitter’s enormous reach to rival established modes of communication. In this context, downtime today costs money and service providers are answerable to why even their ‘free’ services are down or slower than usual.

On a lighter note, the outage generated a lot of fodder for humour in the media. Talk show host Jimmy Kimmel said, ‘For two hours this morning (Thursday) no one could find out what breakfast cereal Ashton Kutcher was eating.’ taking a dig at the world’s most popular Twitterer. Another user commented on a CNN website, “Horrors! People will have to communicate face to face!” Hopefully, it won’t come to that just yet.

I was linked recently on a website called Pocket Cultures. Trying to imagine a poor sod learning about Kerala through my post. The one-quarter Mallu in me giggles with delight. Mmph.

I know, I know, I’m a little late on this one. But the shedding of the ‘beta’ tag for GMail co-incides suspiciously with the announcement of the Chrome OS, don’t you think?

Also, it’s not just GMail, but a whole host of products that are being stripped of this rather pointless little tag. This was required if the big bosses at Google were serious about selling Gmail/Apps to corporates. No one spending hard-earned / stolen money would want to buy ‘beta’ products for their organizations.

Trying to integrate these things into one saleable package, maybe, Google people? Buy Chrome + Apps + Chrome browser + Calendar for next to nothing? It’s possible, I suppose – most of these are free, supported by Google Ads right now anyway.

Our times are about to get interesting.

Check out the greatdrivingchallenge.com – an ingenious way to use the internet to promote your brand. You can register as a couple too if you think you are upto this sort of thing. Me, I’m not much of a driver and would not get 12 days off if I were dead.

And this is definitely my favourite couple. Voting for them is mandated for Daily Humor readers.

Worry not, regular blogging shall commence post this weekend. Been overworked and overstressed, but I shall come back like a blogging phoenix. A bleenix even. Ok off to bed now. Good night bleeple.

And no, I wasn’t paid my Mitsubishi for this post.

My first Op-Ed was published in the Indian express today. Do check it out and leave some comments. Constructive criticism welcome.

Microsoft’s much-touted search engine is here and it’s got a catchy, onomatopoeic name — Bing. It’s the closest thing to a Google challenger we’ve seen so far and yet, strategically, Bing isn’t taking Google head-on. At best, it hopes to take a bite out of Yahoo’s search market share. After years of failed attempts, one is relieved that the search category is finally being given serious thought by the folks at MS. A successful search product can also turbo-charge their online advertising platform adCenter, translating to revenue. A first look at Bing with its large background image and otherwise bare pages suggests that Microsoft has applied its ‘make it pretty and have an 80-million dollar marketing budget’ theory.

Make no mistake though; Bing is not a pig wearing lipstick. It scores highly on speed, features, usability and performance. Google itself has been forced to re-invent itself many times to retain its number one slot. In doing so, it has stood its ground in the face of competition from established search engines like Yahoo as well as innovative niche sites like Dogpile (meta-search), Clusty (categorising search) and even the recently hyped computing search engine Wolfram Alpha.

The heart of a search engine is its algorithm – the logic behind displaying search results in a particular order from a given set of keywords. Google’s ‘PageRank’ is stable and proven and it is this that will be the biggest mountain to climb for a tyro like Bing in the search space. Bing counters this by organising its results based on what other searchers found most relevant for a particular keyword. Whether this provides meaningful search results still remains to be seen, and will be the single largest factor that determines the rise or fall of Bing.

For regular web searches, the number of search results that Bing displays is considerably lower in comparison to Google, although you’re probably unlikely to notice the difference. For example, a search on ‘Sampras’ yielded 720,000 odd results — over a million less than Google’s count but still large enough for the average human being. Interestingly, Bing also plugs its own ‘related searches’ into the results page, and displayed results for ‘Sampras Blog’, ‘Sampras Movies’ and ‘Sampras Posters’ as well. Performance-wise, Bing fared excellently and unlike Google, it doesn’t really go out and show this off by displaying how many nanoseconds the search took.

There are other hits and misses for Bing. A glaring miss is the easy access that Bing currently provides to pornographic material. Admittedly, you do need to turn off the safe search option, but that is just a matter of three clicks. Also, Bing redirected my Indian computer to the UK version of the site. Currently the non-US sites are not nearly as good as the US version, so for now only the US version is worth really checking out. In terms of usability, Bing avoids the mouseclick like the plague. For web searches, a nice little preview feature lets a user see more content from the target page in addition to the regular ‘snippet’ without actually clicking the search result.

Bing’s image search replaces pagination with infinite scrolling. Essentially, this implies that every time you scroll to the bottom of the results page, new results are appended and the scroll bar is reset to somewhere in the middle. Video search is even better — you can preview the video simply by pointing your mouse at a thumbnail in the search result. This is a nifty little feature given how bandwidth is ceasing to be an issue in today’s YouTube age. There are also a number of other features such as instant answers, shopping and health related search features and a session history that is maintained without you having to login. While some of these are exciting, they are merely accessories to a search portal, not central features.

Bing doesn’t quite change the rules of the game just yet, but Google-centric small businesses in the area of search engine optimisation (SEO) will do well to stay on top of its developments. It is a great opportunity for these businesses to invest in some Bing-related SEO strategies at an early stage and learn the ropes in case Google loses some market share in the near future. Microsoft may integrate Bing into the next release of Internet Explorer and Windows in some way or the other. This means that even if Bing is a close match to Google, its market share could potentially explode.

En fin, it’s a close call, but I’d stick with Google for now for a single reason — PageRank. Microsoft has taken giant steps in the right direction to get people ‘Binging’, but as the recursive acronym itself suggests, Bing is not Google.

The writer is an IT services consultant and blogs at http://blog.rohandsa.com

Everyone has their dirty little secrets. Here’s mine – I love Archie Comics. They’re a great read on the pot and on a lazy Sunday afternoon. But if teasers are to believed this freckled, ‘world’s oldest teenager’, will never be the same again.

Rumors of Archie proposing to Veronica are making front pages of newspapers because of Archie Comic’s latest news item titled ‘… ARCHIE PROPOSES TO VERONICA!’, where it is stated:

In fact, we’ll even go so far as to call it the Archie Story of the Century. With a title like “Archie Marries Veronica Part 1: The Proposal,” how could we call it anything else?!

…this will be the biggest wedding Riverdale has ever seen…

Now, I don’t care so much about Archie and Veronica and the others, but I will just be distraught for Betty Cooper if that happens. Hey, who knows maybe they plan to make the comic franchise into a tragedy-comic of sorts? Hang in there Betty, we’re rooting for you.

This post is so against my macho image. Ok, end of dirty little secret. Over and out.

Battle of the North Indians was won by Punjab tonight. And everyone took a chance to hug Preity Zinta. A low total by Delhi ensured that they lost their third game, and made the points table much more crowded. Chennai’s suddenly not hot tonight – and not only because it rained. Why did you lose, Delhi? Do you not like Chennai? Why so cocky, capital?

And speaking of South, check out this nice short story called ‘In the South’ by Rushdie – based in Besant Nagar, Chennai. There are some brilliant lines as usual, I leave with you with one of my favourites passages that talks about old age:

The old move through the world of the young like shades, unseen, of no concern. But the shadows see each other and know who they are.

Good night!

Amazingly accurate results. I am Amitabh Bachchan. And my yousuck.com account has been notified. I wait.

Of course, image credit goes to The Times of India’s website.

[Updated]
Funny video about Twitter.
Courtesy: Fly, you fools!

Ok I give up, you’re right Saad, the fail whale so got me. Take a look at the purported video here. Maybe, I could have just tweeted this. There’s a faint irony in this somewhere. Hmmm…

Randall has outdone himself again!