Saad Kamal

News Aggregator from USA Today

Saad — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 03:00:07 +0000

Techcrunch today reports that The USA Today has launched a site called “NewsDeck” that sort of aggregates the top news stories from their site and nicely puts them in different categories/Sub-section. Currently the site features stories on 8 different topics, including News, Trave, Money, Life, Sports and many more.

Each of the section on the page works like a widget that allows you to auto scroll down with your mouse for more headlines. The widget cards can also be flipped by clicking on a ‘flip’ icon on top of each widget to view headlines between the USA Today’s top stories and most popular stories. USA Today says they are looking to test products like this on the web to see what users really need from a news site when it comes to finding headlines and top stories from a news site. NYtimes has a similar service called Article Skimmer, that lets you quickly skim through their stories.

Personally I don’t know whether these sort of services are that useful for the general public. Honestly, If you have a good RSS reader like feedly and you have subscribed to USAToday & NYtimes via RSS, you actually get even a far better reading experience in one single place.

But do try Newsdeck, it does look pretty cool.

Government Intervention in Search Won’t Save Your Business

Saad — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 16:29:38 +0000

Techcrunch (one of my personal favorite tech blog), posted an article today about Search Marketing. The title (”The Time Has Come To Regulate Search Engine Marketing And SEO”) really caught my attention, but later I realized that the article is not from the usual in-house Techcrunch editors but from an “Anonymous” writer, who is the supposedly a well known executive of one of the largest sites on the Internet. Techcrunch writes: “The author wants to remain anonymous - because of the backlash he would receive from the SEO industry and possibly Google itself…” [Yeah you bet..]

Anyway so whats the deal? The author goes on and rants about how “search ranking” is not fair in general. He writes -

Through an uncontrolled set of factors search engines determine which listings appear at the top and bottom of any individual query. In addition, consumer behavior dictates the top three results on any search page are all that matter. If you happen to own an online business, unless you exist within those top three, the amount of individual traffic you will obtain from organic listings is very, very low.

Its funny that even though search has been there for over 10 years, many people still don’t get search! The author says that unless you are in the top three of an individual keyword you get very low traffic — I just find this statement completely ridicules. What he is trying to imply here is, if you sell cars and you don’t rank in the top 3 for the key phrase “car”, you are done!

But if any of you have done Organic or Paid search for a while then you would probably agree with me that ranking for the phrase “cars” might not give you the best ROI, when compared to ranking for some other terms related to cars. Search is no longer a ‘keyword game’ like it used to be in the early days. Many people still live in 90s and looks at search as a Yellow page or Web directory (which it is certainly not!).

A Search engine is not a place where people comes and just throws in a generic word and find a bunch of address to buy stuff. Yes, that was search when Yahoo was “Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web” and Google did not even existed. But now search involves more than just a bunch of keywords. Search engine is a place where people does their online research. It is like a huge digital library of anything and everything on the web. Search was never intended for ‘advertising’, but Google sort of found a way to make search more useful by showing relevant ads (of products/services) that you search for. The model became successful and thats why Google is in its current position and has so much money that they could really afford to continuously evolve search by making it better and doing new things with it. If they couldn’t make any money out of search then this industry wouldn’t have come this far!

Its not a Search Engine’s job to help your business to make money on the web. A search engine is there to provide its user the most relevant information when a user searches for something. Now if any advertisers could just pay $100 bucks and get into the search engine then that ‘relevancy’ and ‘quality’ wouldn’t be there and people wont trust and find the search engines any useful! Just imagine if this model was actually practiced, who would have been the winner? Google! Because then they could just control the search ranking in any way they wanted and they could just decide that — ranking for #1 spot for the word “cars” would be say $22,339 per day. But luckily no major search engine (including google) followed that model and did a pretty good job of keeping the organic search ’separate’ from paid search so that “We” (users) are benefited and the search results stays non objective and useful rather than being like an online version of a Yellow page full of paid listings.

The author goes on and writes…

…. As the proprietor of that business you may hire search engine optimization companies to assist in increasing your rankings on organic results, with or without success. And at any one time, the controller of these borders (that is, the search engine itself) can change and manipulate those rules – and that can substantially decrease or destroy all organic traffic coming to your website, without notice and without your knowledge.

Certainly a search engine needs to often ‘tweak’ its algorithm to make things better and to keep all the garbage out. If someone ever leaves a spammy comment it my blog, its very likely that I’ll notice it during the comment moderation and remove it straight away. Even if it by chance gets in, as soon as I find it out during my weekly/monthly housecleaning, I’ll definitely take all the actions that is required to keep that ’spam’ out of my blog and also to further prevent that from happening.

Search engines crawls billions of pages. If they were to rank everybody Number #1 then a search engine wouldn’t have the same level of usefulness as it has today. If I have a question that I don’t have the answer to - I can pretty much guess that I’ll get something after I “Google” or “bing” (lol) it! This assumptions has not built up in a day - it has built up from our past experiences with these search engines.

Google really have set the standard of search pretty high right from the beginning, which eventually got the other search engines like Yahoo & now Bing to improve their results as well. Now we really take it for granted that no matter what it is, If it ever existed, It can and will be found via the search engine.

If Google and other search engines didn’t do those ‘tweaks’, search engines would be full of SPAM! And if those tweaks took your site out from the index, then definitely you were doing something that you shouldn’t be doing. And if there has been a mistake, you can always request for a reconsideration or invest money on Sponsored Search. I’m not saying that Google is a saint here, But I don’t think that we should generalize a few bad experience here to call a search giant ‘evil’.

The question that you should be asking yourself is - Why your business needs to depend so much on Google that if they stop showing your site in the top 10, you are out of business?

What happened to - the other search engines? Display Advertising? Social media? Your Branding?

If your ‘business’ is really that good, I don’t think that you are limited to getting traffic only by ranking your site in the top 3 for a search term. If I need an antivirus software today and I go on to Google to search for one, I would probably come across tens and thousand of reviews that vouches for AVG to be a very good one. So even if AVG somehow gets removed from the Google index, the reference of AVG being a Good antivirus will always be there. And that is exactly what search is all about today. People mostly does ‘research’ on the web, and the advertising/marketing opportunity is just like a bi-product of search. Right now I can think of at least a dozen queries that I’d personally use to search for a new antivirus -

antivirus review
best antivirus
top 10 antivirus
free antivirus
free antivirus download
top antivirus software
Antivirus for home
virus removal software
remove ‘x’ virus
PC Antivirus
Windows Antivirus
Buy Antivirus
Antivirus 2009
antivirus with firewall

and the list can go on and on… and the opportunity is almost endless!

He writes:

…. if you haven’t successfully obtained enough traffic to your site from organic listings and you decide to rely on paid search, you still face a situation where regardless of how much you bid per click you may or may not show up at the top of the paid results. That’s because paid results that are displayed on any query are not only determined based on the price the buyer is willing to pay. Unlike other auctions that are completely priced-based, these results are determined and sequenced not only on price but also on quality of advertising and click-through volume.

Tell me why its not a good thing? Do you think it would have been really fair if everyone could just bid their way up to the top? Being a Google searcher for almost 9 years, I do find the advertising that is shown in the SERP useful! And why is it still useful? Because Google didn’t make it a solely auction based advertising network. If anybody could show up there by paying ‘more money’, then eventually businesses would just end up paying more and more and Google would have been the ultimate winner!

But due to the fact that they came out with a metric like “Quality Score”, it has sort of kept all the bad seeds away making the ads as useful as possible and at the same time maximizing their own earnings, which is pretty smart in my opinion. So If I sell a product/service that is really good and i have targeted it to the right audience then I should eventually get a good quality score. (More people would be interested in my product, they would click on my ad and they would convert). I think that’s fair, right?

The second factor is that the search engine can, at any time, determine that either company A or company B may or may not buy traffic within its index. And without notifying the company and with no path toward recourse and statement, the search engine can disable the paid search account from either business.

Well, Personally I never had my paid search account terminated nor that I have heard too many legit users who had issues with their Adwords account. But yes I can certainly understand if you were trying to run “poker ads”, running arbitrage, doing sneaky redirects to adult sites or just to put it simply — doing things that are against their TOS. If you break the law, you are to be punished - there is no escape, anywhere.

But certainly Google won’t bother to terminate your account for any competitive reason. I see both Bing & Yahoo search marketing ads in Google all the time. If they wanted, they could have said that “We wouldn’t allow any of our competitors to purchase ads on our network”. But thats certainly not the case.

Google, just like any other search engine does care about their users. Because the users is all they got. They don’t want to give them a bad experience and lose them forever. Pretty much all advertising network that are out there has something called “Terms of Services”, and if you break any of the terms - a temporary/permanent ban is inevitable.

Try to think from Google’s prospective — If you are spending money on Google’s ad network, its Google’s benefit (because they are getting your money). So unless you do something really ‘bad’ to piss them off - its on their best interest to keep you in the network so that they can drain your advertising budget. They are very aware that if you don’t to spend your advertising budget in Google, you would probably spend it somewhere else.

He further writes:

I’ve worked with many businesses who feel they are playing in Google’s world — behaviors from product decisions to marketing strategies rely completely on appeasing these undocumented and often mystical Google desires. I’ve seen companies choose to not work with Google’s competitors for fear that by building those relationships, they’re damaging the ability to be indexed properly on Google and are anxious that result sets will be compromised. Many likewise believe that by having a monetization relationship through Google, they will somehow achieve higher quality listings through organic search. I’ve also witnessed companies who, in addition to using Google for monetization, have preferred relationships with purchasing traffic through Google Adwords. By supporting this dual relationship, they appear to want to live by two sets of rules – those that exist within the Adwords marketplace and those that apply to the Adsense product. And because they’re walking on both sides of the (Google) street, they feel they have a strategic advantage — as though the Adwords product will enable them to acquire traffic at both a lower cost and with a looser rule set than their competitors.

Nice theory but unfortunately these are just speculations. People has the right to believe what they want to believe. Unfortunately thats not how the world does business. And I can’t think of a reason why people won’t speculate the same about Yahoo & Microsoft’s bing? They both have search, Ad network (serving ads in search and contextual ads running on publishing sites).

He ends his article by saying:

…. traffic generators that use rule-based algorithms to determine result sets must publicly disclose their methodologies. That is the means by which all businesses can compete freely in the organic and paid search marketplaces. If we lived in a world where Google didn’t hold sway over such a significant portion of consumer behavior, this kind of regulation wouldn’t be necessary. The market would be self-correcting, and we could trust the individual decisions of a healthy and competitive search industry. Regrettably, due to search dominance, the industry can’t be left to its own devices.

Today if a Search engine tells you exactly how and why it ranks a particular site, tomorrow there will be thousands of spammers, spamming the hell out of all search engines with their viagra and adult friend finder sites and make them rank #1 for every keyword on the planet. Is that the type of transpharency we need today? I don’t think so.

What is the Actual Problem with Search?

Well in the whole article, the author didn’t really identify any realistic problem with search. So I thought of adding few myself:

Lack of competition- Search is definitely not a very competitive industry at this moment. Even though Bing looks promising, but it is still far away from where Google stands today. I believe a lot of problems will go away when people stops thinking of Google as the only search engine out on the planet. Have you ever tried Yahoo Search (http://search.yahoo.com). Sometimes it does return a lot better results than google.

The problem is not with Google, the problem is with us! We like to stay dependent on Google (because probably they are currently the best in search), and are afraid to try other alternatives and use them. If all the 4 search engines today had the same quality standards, and same market share - Google (25%), Yahoo (25%), Bing (25%) & Ask (25%), then we wouldn’t be having this conversation.
Lack of Technological Advances- We are still sort of sitting in the Web 2.0. Unless some ground breaking technological change happens anytime soon with new web technologies, search is going to stay pretty much the same. But isn’t Google always trying to make the difference? Let me list down the few things that I can remember right now, that Google introduced in search –
- Personalized Search - Google now personalizes your search results, thus a search results page that you see is sort of customized to your preference and past web history.
- Search Wiki - Google has given more control on User’s hand. Users have the ability now to perform certain social interactions on the search results page. They can leave a review on the page, move it up/down in the search results page or even remove it (and hear it ‘explode’.)
- Geo Targeted Search - I’m located in Malaysia, and when I search for Pizza Google shows me results that are relevant based on my Geo Location.
- Universal Search - As web has evolved over the years, people are using search engines more than just to find 10 plain links. Google’s Universal search is now showing maps, news stories, blog stories, Videos, pictures etc. right in the search results page.
- Search options - Google also introduced several search options for filtering and refining your results
Lack of Innovators - It took many years for people to understand the power of social media & the viral web. We are always late to innovate and adapt things. If blogs existed at the same time when web first came along, a lot of mainstream media wouldn’t have existed today. If Youtube and Hulu was there earlier than when they came in, we would have less TV channels and More “talents” today. Innovation and adaption evolves over time, Just because something isn’t perfect at the present time doesn’t necessarily make it ‘bad’ or ‘evil’.

I’m not favoring Google here. But I’m just laying out the facts. Is Google perfect? No! Do they sometimes do things which are ‘unexplained’ and not by the book - Yes, Probably! But being a user of Google Search when I ask myself - is any other ‘better’ search engine today that does the job any better? My answer would be -No, Not As yet!

So obviously search needs more competition, which will eventually make things better. But I don’t understand how putting regulation on SEO / Search Marketing or Google by the government is really going to help someone to rank in the search engines any better.

Instead, Try thinking out of the box and look beyond “keywords”. If your sole way of marketing your business is your organic or paid ranking in a search engines for a keyword that
100,000 other businesses are competing for then its not a very viable marketing plan, IMHO.

You need your Purple Cow …

On top of everything, Google is one of the most ‘transparent’ when it comes to Organic & Paid Search. Their online help documentations and training materials & also several online help groups are by far the most extensive and detailed. (Look at the documentations of other engines like Yahoo. Ask & Bing). Google also have dedicated blogs on almost each areas that they cover on the web. They are also getting involved in the social media by officially announcing their 45 twitter accounts. So it really sounds kind of funny when we get mad at Google for “not being transparent” on the other hand we don’t really complain about anybody else who are probably doing things even worse.

And lastly this is exactly WHY government shouldn’t be regulating search….

Do more with Twitter Favorites using Favstar.fm

Saad — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 05:36:22 +0000

Twitter always had a functionality to mark a tweet as “favorite”. However, I personally never even bothered to use it that often because it just didn’t have any good use. I only used it more like a “tweet bookmark” tool to save certain tweets which I wanted to come back to later.

But it looks like that Favstar.fm is going to change the way Tweet Favorite is being used. Favstar is looking at twitter favorites more like a social vote. So basically their main home page currently shows tweets that has been voted (a.k.a favorite’ed) a certain number of times. If you sign in via your Twittter login information, favstar also gives you a whole range of functionality, including the ability to follow people from directly from Favstar.fm and see what tweets your friends are favoriting. Also, by signing in it is very easy to see who is favoriting your tweets which in my opinion is an excellent insight for any twitter user.

Apparently there is another service called Favard that does something similar.

(via Techcrunch)

4 Tools for Finding Photos on Twitter

Saad — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 10:07:05 +0000

If you love images then you would appreciate some of the tools that I’m going to cover here that lets you search and view images from twitter. There are plenty of tools out there that lets you search twitter for text and hashtags. But twitter is now a huge source of pictures as well and sadly there aren’t that many tools out there that lets you search for images on twitter.

After a little digging i found four Twitter Image Search engines that does a really good job of indexing and displaying all the photos on twitter. But before I go any further I must warn you that the content that you will see on these photo search engines are all ‘user generated content’ and not moderated by anybody. Thus, you might come across pictures that are potentially dangerous for you and your children.

1. Twipho - Twitter Photo Search

Twipho is a relatively new twitter photo search engine developed by Mark Goddard. It has a very simple and straight forward interface that lets you search for pictures on twitter. Simply pop in your search query into the box at the top of the page and wait for your results. No need to press any buttons or hit the enter key. Twipho starts piling up images within seconds of you typing something on the search box. You can also change various search parameters such as image host selections. Twipho also gives you the ability to send images to your friends using email, retweet the images you like the most and view full size images as well as quick thumbnails. Take a look at their results page:

2. Picfog - Realtime Twitter Image Search

Picfog is a real time twitter image search engine, which keeps on popping images on the screen in real time as they get tweeted on twitter. Every second 5-10 new pictures gets added and shown in real time on the home screen. It has also a search box where you can specify keywords to make it only show pictures related to that word/phrase. If you move your mouse over in any of the images it shows you the complete tweet along with any message/text that was included originally. Picfog also gives you the ability to follow that particular user or Re-tweet the image to your own followers. Here is a screen shot of how the home screen looks like:

3. Twicsy - Top Twitter Pics of Past Hour

Twicsy is a twitter picture search engine that particularly shows you the top twitter images of the past 1 hour. They also have options to show you top pictures of - 2 hours, 4 hours, 12 hours, day and week. Basically they keep count of how many times a picture gets re-tweeted to determine the popularity of an image. Twicsy lets you see who has re-tweeted the images and also lets you do the same. Here is a screen shot of how their homepage looks like:

4. Twitcaps - Real-time Pictures From Twitter

Twitcaps is yet another real-time image search engine for twitter. Twitcaps allows you to search, browse and capture the latest images posted to Twitter via any of the popular Twitter image services (Twitpic, yFrog, Twitgoo, etc). From the Twitcaps interface, you may capture an image for later use, re-tweet the image on your own Twitter feed, or share the image on any number of social linking services. The feature of letting user “capture a picture” is something that I haven’t found in the other twitter image search engines. Basically capture in this context means that - while browsing images on Twitcaps, if you come across a picture that you really like, you can capture the image and save it under your own twitpic service. This means that if the user who originally posted their image should later decide to delete that image, then you will STILL have your copy of that image available to your Twitter account on both Twitcaps and Twitpic.com. This way, you can feel safe in re-tweeting the image or posting the image to any number of social linking services. Because you now control the image, you can be confident that the image will not disappear and the link to that image will never go away (until you delete it from Twitpic.com).

Twitcaps also has some advanced image filtering options. You may filter image by image host (e.g. Twitpic, flickr etc.) or you can also filter by language. Twitcaps also has a built in translation functionality that will help you to translate tweets on the fly. Here is a screen shoot of their home page:

So did I miss any other cool twitter image search engine? Let me know via comments!

Here are some of the other reviews of these four Twitter Image Search Engines:

TwiPho Your Ultimate Twitter Image Search - Blogging Tips

TwiPho - twitter image search with a nice UI! - Twi5.com

PicFog Displays the Strength of Real-Time Image Search - Mashable

PicFog: Search For Images Shared On Twitter - MakeUseOf.com

Twicsy Is A Killer And Kind Of Creepy Way To Search Pictures Shared On Twitter - Techcrunch

Twicsy.com - Search Pictures Shared On Twitter - KillerStartups

Twitcaps - see what photos are being shared on Twitter - DownloadSquad

TwitCaps: Watch the World in Images, Real-Time! - Tnerd

Official Google Twitter Accounts

Saad — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 05:54:32 +0000

Everyone loves twitter and it seems like Google as a company is not an exception on this case. Earlier today Google posted a list of all their official twitter accounts.

Karen Wickre who is from Google’s Blog & Twitter Team writes:

Like lots of you, we’ve been drawn into Twitter this year. After all, we’re all about frequent updates ourselves, and there’s lots happening around here that we want to share with you. Of course, we enjoy watching, and contributing to, the tweetstream (we hope you find our tweets useful, too). Because there are many programs and initiatives across the company, we’ve got a number of active accounts. Here’s a list of the current ones. We’ll update this list from time to time.

Here is a screen shot of the list since it was last updated:

I initially counted a total of 44 twitter accounts on that list, but according to Techcrunch, Google may have missed one of their own account from the region list. So that makes the total account 45!

Its really great to see that a company of Google’s size is open to change and adapting new (3rd party services). I mean just think about it, they are one of the biggest media company out there, why should they even care about monitoring and contributing to the twitter space?

Twitter has millions of users now, and its growing at a rapid rate. I think its really important for the companies to realize the importance of establishing a relationship with their customers. Undoubtedly twitter really makes this process very easy. Hopefully we will see more and more companies using twitter effectively in the near future.

Feedly - RSS Reader Review

Saad — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 20:25:42 +0000

Read Me First: I was initially writing this post to do a review of my favorite RSS Reader - Feedly. But I sort of ended up explaining the whole concept of RSS which took out nearly half of this article. If you already know what RSS is you can skip the first portion of the article and jump right to my RSS reader review of Feedly. However, if you are not an active user of RSS, I’d urge you to read what I have to say about RSS.

Background of RSS

OK, now let me start this post with a simple question - How do you normally browse the web for the latest news? Do you like to go to specific websites individually (e.g. Techcrunch, Mashable, CNN) or do you go to some of the news aggregator sites like Google News, Techmeme, Yahoo News? Or Maybe you prefer the news to come to you via sources like Twitter, Friendfeed and RSS.

Well traditionally most non tech-savvy people browse the web in a very old fashioned way. They fire up their browser, enter the URL, click enter and they are on! And they do this everytime they are hungry for new information/news. Well visiting websites manually to check for news does serve the purpose and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. However as the web has evolved in the last couple of years and more and more information is cluttering up the web - it has brought in a new problem, which is “information overload”.

There are now so many web sites on the web today that you can’t even remember their names straight without scratching your head. And relying on the main stream media like (CNN, BBC, ABC), too much doesn’t always bring you the right news at the right time.

Ask yourself, when and how did you hear about the Iran election issues first or say the tragic death of the king of Pop - Michael Jackson? Most likely your answer would be either from friends, social media or from the blogosphere. Because on both occasion the main stream media was kind of late to cover the story. But I don’t really blame them; Due to their corporate ‘red-tapes’ they have less flexibility when it comes to bringing on the news at the right time. This is the reason why, many people (like myself) keep ourselves attached to the blogosphere quite a bit.

Anyway going back to the original topic - How do you keep track of all these big/small websites that are out there? Like for instance, I am interested in Technology, Gadgets, Search & a few other things. In order to keep tabs on my industry I need to keep an eye on about 100 different blogs/websites. So everyday early in the morning, if I can quickly scan over all the stories/posts that these blogs has published then I’d pretty much get an idea of whats happening on my industry. And because web is not like the old media, morning is not the only time I’m checking for news. A new story may pile up every 10 minutes depending on what you are interested in. If i were to check all these 100 different sites everyday even once at a time and go through all their stories then I probably won’t be able to do any other job because even thinking of opening 100 websites from my bookmarks really scares the hell out of me!

This is exactly where RSS comes in pretty handly. RSS, which stands for Really Simple Syndication is basically a technology that sort of makes it very easy for you to ‘digitally subscribe’ to a website or a blog. It works exactly like a newspaper/magazine subscription. For example - if you like a particular magazine a lot (e.g. Readers Digest), you may just buy it at a book shop every month physically (just like browsing a website manually for news), or you can be smart and just subscribe to it! So the benefit of subscribing is - you don’t need to ‘remember’ when to go and get the new issue and you will always get it at your convenience (they usually ship the magazine to you).

The concept of RSS is exactly the same. You sort of pick the sites/blogs that you like and mostly visit at all times. You know for sure that you’ll keep on coming back to these sites everyday to check if there is anything new on there. But do you know that most of these websites offers something called “RSS” that actually lets you to subscribe to that website for FREE? Yes, thats right! And every time they have a new article or information the news gets delivered to something called a “RSS Reader”.

RSS Reader is like one-way email program. It has the ability to receive things, but it can’t send anything out. So basically using your RSS Reader, you are going to subscribe to your favorite blogs/websites that you visit frequently. Your RSS Reader then keeps track of all those websites for you and automatically displays all the latest news all in one single place. So you don’t need to go to 100 different websites, but you can just open one program (Your RSS Reader) and get all the updates there!

Now RSS Readers doesn’t necessarily has to be a software that you need to install on your computer. There are also many web based, and simple browser based RSS readers that just works fine, in fact great! Personally I’m a huge fan of Google Reader, which is google’s web based RSS reader. But there are also other desktop RSS reader that you can install on your computer and have access to all your feeds (your subscriptions). My favorite RSS reader for desktop probably would be - FeedDemon . But anyway I sort of dedicated this post to my current and most favorite RSS reader - Feedly!

Feedly - RSS Reader Review

Feedly is basically a Firefox addon that you can install in your Firefox browser to read and manage your feeds. It basically uses your Google Reader, in conjunction with Twitter & Friend Feed and gives you the most amazing feed reading experience that you have ever experienced anywhere else.

Feedly takes your boring RSS reader and gives it a very shiny magazine like look. It has several different viewing options that you can choose form - Magazine, Overview, Summery, Picture grid etc. - each having their own advantages. The main problem with most of the RSS readers that I have used is, if you don’t check it for few days, hundreds of stories gets jammed up and you tend to miss out the important ones. But with Feedly and its social integration with twitter, friendfeed & Google Reader - it is more intelligent to understand what is hot and what is not. Based on your previous reading pattern, it sorts of guesses your favourite feeds that you can’t get enough of. It also has easy ways of reading the full stories on screen or even quickly scan through the title and a brief summery of hundreds of stories all on one single page.

The best part about Feedly is the way it organizes and displays your feed. Reading your feeds inside feedly is genuinely pleasing and takes very little effort compared to any other web-based or desktop based RSS reader that are out there.

Other than handling feeds, it also lets you to integrate your twitter and friendfeed account inside feedly so that you can keep track of what is happening in the social media. When you are browsing a page or searching for something on a search engine like Google, it looks at your keyword and pulls up the recent stories about those topics from your feeds and nicely overlays a list of stories at the bottom of your screen.

Feedly does so many things, that as I’m writing a review on my favorite RSS reader, I just can’t think of words that will convince you enough to try this awesome free firefox addon. So if you use RSS and have firefox on your computer, I’d really urge you to give Feedly a try! You will love it! In case you have never used RSS before, don’t panic! I have already sort of explained the whole concept of RSS at the beginning of the post which, I believe is sufficient for you to get started with RSS. So try feedly and see how it goes!

By the way, don’t forget to subscribe to my blog via RSS for more great resources. Let me make it very easy for you, click on the huge button below to subscribe -

So have you tried feedly yet? Share your experience!

Microsoft Office 2010, The Movie

Saad — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 06:52:23 +0000

I never really understood the way Microsoft handles their PR. They spent millions on advertising when they launched Bing (Microsoft’s Search Engine), and now it looks like they are out with yet another promo video, but this time for Microsoft Office 2010!

By reading some of the comments about this video, it felt like everyone hates the idea of Microsoft spending so much money on advertising which they could perhaps use to do other things (Hint: Make their product pricing more flexible and not sky high?)

But Anyway, I must say that the video is really amazing. Microsoft gave the job to YouTuber Dennis Liu of Traffik Film Works.

Watch the video and I bet you will be amazed too-

After seeing the trailer, I kinda wish if they could actually try making the movie. It would be so damn funny!

Google Maps Directions Widget for Your Site

Saad — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 06:23:24 +0000

If you are advertising online which complements your offline business, its very important for you to make sure that your customers to how to reach your store/office.

It can be a real pain sometimes to write out and update multiple sets of directions from the North, South, East or West. And it also gets very confusing for the customer as they are only looking for directions from their own specific location and they may not even know from which way they are coming from to your location.

Luckily, with their new Google Maps directions gadget, you no longer need to worry about all these anymore. With a simple click of a button, you can now have a widget like the one below:

Simply enter your location at the top box (try palo alto) and Google maps will automatically display a map and give direction based on your location that you have entered. Here is a screen shot:

Not convinced? Just take a look at how Stanford university is using the Google Maps Direction Widget on their website to give visitors the direction to their visitor center.

Source: Inside Adwords Blog

Google Updates Location Based Search Results

Saad — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 05:53:25 +0000

If you like traveling and rely heavily on a search engine like Google for your travel related research then you would probably appreciate Google’s recent efforts in location based search.

For over two years, google is displaying maps of location via Google Universal search directly in the search results page when a user is searching for location based keywords. (e.g. New York, Melbourne).

But now Google has taken this one step further and started displaying pictures alongside the map which gives users a sense of what the place is like in real.

I searched for Kuala Lumpur (the capital of Malaysia) and I was presented with a map of Kuala Lumpur alongside some of the pictures from the city. Clicking on the image took me directly to the google maps page and sort of graphically placed each of the pictures on the map.

Bing Cries Out Loud at Google

Saad — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 15:02:17 +0000

Little Background: Bing was down for over 36 hours which is why Google sort of indexed their “Error” page for one of their domains - Bing Travel. Many days has passed, but it seems like Google hasn’t updated the search snippet. Matt Cutts replied in Techcruch with a screen shot saying the problem has been fixed — But apparently the issue is something else. Read on…

This morning when I was reading this story on Techcrunch, I initially thought of blogging about it, but as i scrolled down I saw Matt Cutts’s responses in the story where he pretty much cleared the air stating that this was just a fluke and certainly not intentional (well these were not his exact words, but I think I sort of made it up). But anyway that’s not the point. The point is he actually showed everyone a screen shot (http://www.mattcutts.com/images/bing-travel-snippet.png) where the problem seemed fixed:

Based on Matt’s screen shot I did a search for “bing travel” in Google and found the snippet to be back to normal. I noticed that the last date of cache was indeed 9th July, just like what Matt said. But many people were still complaining that they can’t see the ‘updated snippet’ and at that time I thought that this may be a DC issue (Google has many data centers and they take time to propagate).

However after 6 hours or so, I noticed that Andy Beal is covering the story in Marketing Pilgrim. So I became a bit curious and tried the search again this time only with the key phrase “bing and to my surprise I got the same old snippet -

Then I looked up the cache of both pages and it seems like Google has two version of Bing Travel page indexed -

Version 1: http://www.bing.com/travel
Last Cache Date: 4th July

Version 2: http://www.bing.com/travel/ [This one basically has a forwarding slash at the end of the URL]
Last Cache Date: 9th July

Hopefully this is temporary and both Google and Bing looks into it rather than playing the blame game.