Mark Zuckerberg, as quoted in TIME, “Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.”

When Google launched its own social networking site last year, they too stuck with the real identity thing. Which didn’t go well with the users and Google too made few mistakes like booting Violet Blue out of the social networking site even though that’s her official name on her passport.

Recently, Google seems to have started accepting virtual identity on Google Plus. I am not sure since when but this is highly confusing to users. Why can’t Google just stick to their decisions. I can’t help but think they are not sure about anything when it comes to being social.

I appreciate the Zuckerberg guy for at least knowing what he wants and sticking to it.

Btw, I have two identities on Google Plus. Does Google allows that?

First to follow this new rule is France who are furious after losing their AAA rating.

“In a ruling Tuesday, the Paris court upheld an unfair competition complaint lodged by Bottin Cartographes against Google France and its parent company Google Inc. for providing free web mapping services to some businesses.The court ordered Google to pay 500,000 euros ($660,000) in damages and interest to the plaintiff and a 15,000 euro fine.
The French company provides the same services for a fee and claimed the Google strategy was aimed at undercutting competitors by temporarily swallowing the full cost until it gains control of the market.”

The French company is rumored to utilize the penalty paid by Google to start other similar services offered by Google like Gmail, Google documents, etc in order to collect penalty on them as well.

In December 2011, the Opera Mini browser saw increases in unique users, page views and data consumed. In all, 152.6 million people used the Opera Mini browser in December, 103.15 billion pages were served and 14.9 petabytes of operator data were compressed for Opera Mini users.

That’s impressive.

And mind you, Opera can provide these numbers only for the app individually installed which means the install base is much more higher than reported.

Before running off to Ratnagiri, I updated Opera Desktop to version 11.60 Build 1250. And I was surprised to see their start page offering Opera for mobiles instead of previous feature page. Opera surely seems to be more concentrating on their mobile strategy.

The firm said that smart devices costing less than US$100 would have the “look and feel of smartphones, sporting touchscreens or full qwerty keyboards,” but with “weaker processors, less memory, slower connectivity options [and] lower resolution cameras” – a trade-off it suggests most purchasers of these devices are willing to make.^

Sure, for someone who is jumping from a Nokia 2600 to a low cost smartphone, these doesn’t matter. But these are the same people who later get frustrated cause the phone is slow or doesn’t respond. Camera quality is so low that it’s embarrasing to click photos. These are the people, who after using a low end smartphone switch to high performing Smartphone. These phones are just a scam by manufacturers who promise to be a smartphone but aren’t really.

So why even call them a smartphone? Because they can do everything that a smartphone can do but without giving any kind of satisfaction of doing it or with extremely low quality. Why not just call them scam phones instead?

Now with manufacturers aiming to target 5,000-10,000 INR segment with Android devices these scam phones are going to be everywhere, at least in India.

Idiots they are.

I used to think.

Last couple of days, I tried your approach. Sugar coat stuff. Never stick to the point.

It worked. And wonders.

From now on, I’ll just follow the path that’s sugary. Though long, at least it gets the fucking work done.

I never previously had to comment using my personal FB account on our Facebook page, but today I had to. And guess what? If I upload photos on Facebook page using admin rights for that page, there’s no way I can comment on it using my personal account. Facebook assumes that I have to comment using my admin access.

Dear Facebook, please fix this?

Nothing on Opera Mobile or Mini was discussed until QnA session.

 What’s Opera Desktop concentrating on?

Since Håkon Wium Lie is more of a CSS, HTML guy the discussion remained on the same topic. Yet, he demoed how using HTML5 Opera would be rendering news sites in future. Instead of scrolling users will not have to flip. Sounds cool.

He also demoed how Opera is way ahead of its competitors on HTML5 support. But with only little over 2% of global browser market share does it even matter? Unless the browsers with major marketshare starts integrating the new developments, web developers are not going to adopt new change (See with IE6?). Sometimes being ahead of time just doesn’t cut through.

Marketing

Upon asking why Opera doesn’t go for traditional marketing, I was given the same old rotten answer of budget problems. Personally, I do not believe that Opera doesn’t have moolah for advertising in traditional media. I am trying to get to their financial history, I’ll get back with you when I do get my hands on it.

But whatsoever, Opera needs to understand that marketing their product right now is not spending but an investment.

Bug reports and feature requests

Again, I am greatly pissed, and always, that I can’t see any progress for the features I request. Shwetank, however, has promised that Opera is working to tackle the issue. The reason that they do not make it public is because Opera works with lots of vendors and can’t make their private data public. Currently, Opera does not have any separate system to file bugs/requests for Opera users and vendors. Hopefully, we’ll soon see it.

Not quite surprised that Path has crossed 2 million users. The app is just so brilliantly sexy that I somehow even managed my not-so-tech savvy cousin to start using it.

The number of people starting to share photos on Path has also increased astonishingly. A shift from Instagram, I notice. I would like to know has Path affected Instagram’s usage.But calling it a Facebook killer is still blindly shooting an arrow. I still find it difficult to use Path since my close friends and family members still don’t use it. They do use Facebook.

If you still haven’t used Path, do give it a try. The app is damn gorgeous.

Android – iPhone

Lately I have been disappointed with Opera desktop on multiple levels and although I haven’t really completely migrated to some other browser (No FF for me), I find myself using Chrome+Opera combination all the time. I wish to ask the same during the meetup.

The meetup is at Aqua Spirit Lounge Bar, Sun-N-Sand Hotel, Juhu, Mumbai on January 7th from 4 to 6PM.

You can register here.

Windows Mobile? Ugh.