[Note: Some of my related popular posts are: 1) why mistakes are often mistaken - It talks about what are real mistakes. 2) Orkut used for crime, is orkut responsible for it anyway? ]

After doing a scrutiny on wink.com I got another invitation from another social networking site. Gosh! I am sure now we need a complete directory (Hedir guys do something, Help!) to list all these social networking sites. This time it is with a weird name lovehappens.com. Thats not all, in last 24 hrs I got another invitation, one from linkedzone.com. I haven’t even opened these sites to explore it. I am sure good rain has started causing bad flood. I have already tagged tagged.com for crossing the line.

I wish I could ask them following question?

• Why you exist?
• How are you better than orkut?
• Is there anything in you that orkut can’t copy or develop? If they can, I am sure they will, why should I shift my base then?

Do read my post “In social networking flies attract flied not honey“. Guys please answer the above questions that I can explore your site. Thanks keep spamming me.

I spend many hours infront of my computer with online world and every site that becomes a part of my daily life needs to go through a close scrutiny. Today I decided to do a scrutiny for “The People Search Engine - Wink”.

My First Impression
(Call it my first 30 sec impression) My First Impression based on the mail from Wink Staff and an example profile of David Beach (Director of Product Management at Wink).

• Wink can be the much awaited platform to consolidate one’s online activities.
• I might use wink only for consolidating my online activities.
• It will allow people to search with my name and using my profile they can find my other web presence point. Kind of better lens than squidoo.

Surface level Scrutiny
Someone once said, “What matters to the visitor is what they see”. I was surprised when I saw the unusual options for few fields. Look at the Gender, “Undecided”????? (Haven’t seen something like this, I would rather have put optional radio button. Also I had to click on the status to understand that it is about “Marital Status”, it is ok to put status but better to have marital status. As the book says, “Do not make me think“)

I was impressed with this section (It was fast and impressive)

Oh, why this happened (I am sure Wink team can find a better error message, I was happy to see Kolkata on my Map, a smaller message, sorry unable to track deeper would have been better. I am impressed here though, good work).

Next Step is scary one (sorry its not a bug but a perception problem, thanks to all the poping social networking sites), so I decided to skip this. I did not want to send the mails to our alumni groups and other common groups, have you guys taken care of it? At least the famous groups account (like googlegroups, yahoo groups and other famous ones) should be taken care of.

After skipping the above steps I came to the page which attracted me the most, the consolidation of all my social activities.

I filed a lot of my accounts where only the url was needed. I did not put the username and password (just to give it a test first) for some of the social networks. Also all the sections were pending an approval (I did not get this approval part, an explanation would have been appreciated more).

Bugs
The mybloglog section is not working properly, it is taking the url wrong (it is taking it as myblog, did I do something wrong?). Rest of the sections are working fine. Atleast faster than Squidoo lens.

Final words from the marketing dimension

• I am still not sure, how will I use it on a day to day basis. I have consolidated some of my online activities there. I can only use it as my web lens, or the starting page for reference. Here you made my life a little troublesome, why not have a url like http://wink.com/ajinimc? Current URL is http://wink.com/ajinimc–profile (oh my God two hypens, you failed the telephonic test for urls). If this feature is the strength then you need to make the urls more simpler, I do not want people to search for me before getting to my profile. Look at other social networking sites, everywhere I have a url like /ajinimc and it works.
• As I said in one of my previous posts that in social networking, it is the flies that attracts other flies not the honey. With orkut’s simplicity, myspace, youtube and other social networking site you need to define your area of service precisely, else no one will invite others.
• I am doing some research on search, Google is not the solution, Adsense and Adwords not the ultimate products. There is more to come with a human intelligence layer but not completely human based like wink. Such searches will not work enough.
• Each page is taking too much about too many things. Same problem as that of myspace.

Best of luck to the wink team, I hope to spend some more time next weekend with all the social networking sites as a part of my research, “Online Social behaviour”. Visit my profile at wink.

I am a member of Wink for many months but I have hardly used it. Then one day I got an email for their staff and I decided to know a little more about it.

Wink is a people search engine. Under the scheme “Spam the Spammers“, I decided to add another level “Selling to the marketers”.

I got a mail form the Wink Staff

Welcome to the New Wink!
The Biggest People Search Engine

Who Do you Want To Find Today?
Now you can find yourself, find your friends, and search for other interesting people online with Wink, the most comprehensive People Search Engine in the world!

Wink searches over 150 million online profiles worldwide. Wink searches people the major social networks and communities, and we’re adding more all the time.

Now you can find someone’s online profile across these communities, and many more!

The new Wink helps you find people immediately by:

* First and last name
* Online profile / nicknames
* Location
* Age, schools, gender
* Shared interests

How to get the most out of Wink:
1. Go to wink.com and search for your friends, co-workers, old classmates, etc.
You may find people you haven’t connected with in years. You may also find that they have on-line profiles you didn’t know about.

2. Fill in your Wink profile and take control of your online life.
With a Wink profile you can manage and organize what other see about you on-line. It’s also easier for your friends to find you - what’s the fun of posting things on-line if people can’t find it?

Also:
Your user name is: blogtintin
If you’ve forgotten your password, just click “sign in” and then “forgot your password?” and follow the instructions.

3. Make a Wink Widget!
Get the Wink Widget and put it on your blog, MySpace, Flickr, wherever you can. It helps you promote all the great stuff you do on-line.

Thanks we really appreciate your time!
- The Wink Team

I then decided to throw them a query

looks good, how is it better than orkut?

Regards,
Aji

–
http://www.idealwebtools.com/blog/ - My blog

I was VERY VERY glad to get a response from their team

Hi Aji,

Thanks for taking the time to write to us. We’re always happy to talk about Wink.

Wink is actually quite a bit different than Orkut. As you know, Orkut is a closed community of users who are all interacting with each other based on common interests or personal friendship. Wink is a very open and public tool that you can use to find people across several different communities - and a way for you to control your online identity using our profiles and widget.

For example, you can use Wink people search to find people near to you geographically, or with common interests such as “World of Warcraft” - and connect with their profiles on MySpace, Friendster, etc. You can also create a Wink profile to share your online identity with your friends or to build your own personal online brand. David Beach has done just that on his profile: http://wink.com/beach–profile . Here you can see that he has quite a few online identities and he is using Wink to claim all these and display them to help others keep up to date with what he is doing online. You can see more examples of the widget in action by visiting our widget page at http://wink.com/winkwidget/.

So you can see that Orkut is complementary to Wink, in that you can use Wink to claim and promote your Orkut identity to friends (new and old).

Does this answer your question? If you would like additional information, please let me know and I’d be happy to talk with you further.

Have a good weekend!

(I have sent them an email requesting their permission to blog about Wink and to publish their response).

I was a little impressed with this email and decided to do a further scrutiny. Let me post the scrutiny in next post. Looks good, happy weekend.

[Note: Some of my related popular posts are: 1) why mistakes are often mistaken - It talks about what are real mistakes. 2) Orkut used for crime, is orkut responsible for it anyway? ]

You may be getting hundreds of mails from a domain called taggedmail.com (which is owned by tagged.com social networks). After the success of orkut, facebook and myspace everyone is starting a social networks. It is good to start one but any system that frustrates the world should be blocked forever.

I am blocking tagged.com and taggedmail.com from all my mail servers. Join the movement to teach the owner a lesson, “RESPECT USERS - Present and future”.

Some of the comments from my friends,

>Sirjee…Maine bhi pareshan hoke hi join kiya hai..?

(In English: I also joined this network after getting frustrated)

Dear Santosh,
Please send these messages to individuals and not to the group (just a suggestion).

The above message from our common groups (Alumni groups are getting such invitations), as every time you provide access to your email account they will keep mailing all your contacts. THE KEEP MAILING TILL YOU DONOT SIGNUP, FRUSTRATING FOR SURE.

Lets Tag tagged.com with “BLACK LISTED“

(Note: Please add your experience and take on the Erroneous perception of web by top Indian Job Seekers)
Why is that the top Indian Job seekers do not want to join web industry when in other part of the world people respect web related jobs? I do not regret my decision of rejecting the offers for “complier designing job”, “backward reservation protocol for wireless networking, a research type” and accepting an offer from a web start up with a great vision of winning the world with innovation. In India many have a wrong perception (but rightly so) towards Indian web industry, what are they,

1. Web industry means making websites, graphics, multimedia.
2. Its more technical kind of jobs.
3. It does not have a wide reach or a career path.
4. It will be quite boring, what will I do sitting in front of computer all day? (I had one MBA chap resigning after two days as he did not find the job interesting, sad he did not even give it a weeks time to experience the real web)
5. I am not interested in web type jobs, I think I am born for marketing.
6. SEO is a chepo work to do.

Many wrong perceptions like these but why did I say rightly so? Rightly so, as we only see what is shown to us, blame it on companies, blame it on university culture and blame it on _____. Let me take point by point that why these perceptions can be challenged :-

1. Many feel that web industry means making websites, graphics, multimedia as most of the Indian companies does these kind of outsourcing work relying on the “cheap labour factor” of Indian economy. I have seen some of friends working on similar signups for 100 websites and charging 100 website owners and earning their daily cakes.
2. Many feel that its more technical kind of jobs. Yes, it needs technical knowledge but it is nothing that you can’t learn. It is just a matter of 6 months. You can get the basic technologies in just few months. There is a huge marketing options available including my favourite, behavioural marketing.
3. Many feel that it does not have a wide reach or a career path. Absolutely crap, we are never ahead of the demand resulting in producing outdated manpower. Do read my post on alpha of Indian Web business. It is just going to gear up, the gen Y is more web savvy than gen X, so will be the market.
4. As one of our MBA recruit many feel that it will be quite boring. I am in this web industry for over 15,000 hrs and I still work on new things every single day.
5. May feel that they are not interested in web type jobs and they prefer marketing. Were you interested in marketing before joining your B-School or your last course? Where you interested in marketing before meeting the Marketing guy? Its all about developing the taste but it cant happen if you are not introduced to it. This Jan I had a plan to visit some 20 B-school with the same mission of introducing Indian web industry but I got busy with unusual company affairs.
6. Many feel that SEO is a chepo work to do and SEO is all that a web marketing can do. The best SEO is to focus on visitor experience. I have written articles on GE matrix and BCG matrix for online marketing and there is plenty scope for such conversion. The web product cycle, shelf life and everything has an interesting twist. Its more fun to be a Kotler for web industry that to be a Kotler’s disciple in offline marketing.

Remember, the time is going to change and the below picture will not longer be a reality

PhpBB is the biggest community board application available. I am big fan of phpBB as I understand almost all the modules and have tweaked as per our need. From the personalized url to different templates for different post. Special quick replies, integration with other systems e.t.c. We always failed to do the proper documentation to release any module to the phpBB. I have tried phpbb 3.0 beta, which has an amazing user management system (which was missing till now).

As you might have noticed that phpBB site was down for last one or two days with the following message,

Ouch! RAID array failure…

We’re sad to announce that during the switch of a failed harddisk to the hot-spare and the planned 2 hours required for the array to re-sync, we’ve been hit by an extremely unexpected double-disk failure which leaves us with a dead array.

Now they are back with new phpbb3.0 enabled forums and new template to the whole site.

Within this step we also updated the main forums to phpBB3 Olympus as well as using the new phpBB default style, named prosilver.

Some of the new sections that I liked,

• Author’s images to right, giving content more importance than the author. It is a debatable topic but for forums like phpbb it is a good move. I liked the template.
• /phpBB/ url change to /community/, very good move. Case sensitive phpBB url was an hindrance for natural communication tools WOM.

301 redirections
What happens to existing urls with /phpBB/ in it? Now there is a 301 redirection happening for such url, see an example www.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=407112. It will be interesting to watch how Google, Yahoo and MSN reacts to the changes. I am keeping a watch over the whole scene including the ranking for some of the pages.

Current count

1. Pages indexed: 72,600 in Google , 4,323 in Yahoo (Sorry MSN not opening for me )
2. 7808 links to /phpbb/ page in Yahoo
3. #1 in Google for “Cookie pollution causes Hacking Attempt” (without quotes), the URL thats ranks high is www.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=407112 . Yahoo, i am not able to find any ranking, also I see that titles are missing from the listing (very strange)

Mark Jen was fired from Google for Blogging and we thought the era has changed till when we heard about Drew Townson. Drew Townson an employee of Mercenary Audio got fired for blogging. Click here for the complete story. I think its time for a corporate blogging rule, a general one and then different companies can change it accordingly.

What should be included under Blogging laws (for a working blogger under a contract)?

• Can he mention his/her company name on the blog?
• Can he mention his/her day at office? In what detail then?
• Other rules

We need some time and hopefully the bloggers fraternity can come together and define some laws to help ourselves. Please add on your suggestions.

We all loved orkut. The most talked social networking in India, from school going kid to senior citizen everyone enjoyed it. Also some of us enjoyed other social networking like myspace, or for that matter even mybloglog. Also linkedin is a great network for social professional relationships. Overall social networking was appreciated and loved like first and season rain. We had romance in this rain, we sometimes had wet eyes in this rain and overall a very useful rain.

Now there is over raining in social networking site, from goyaar.com (Indian version of Orkut) to tagged network. Friendster is also growing, so is Bday groups. With over 100 mails to handle everyday these invitations are killing me. Everyday you will get 2 or 3 minimum. As I said, in social networking flies attracts flies not honey. Do we need so many social networks, what is that you miss in orkut? Explain Google and they will do it for us.

Are you joining these new social networks? Don’t you think it is over raining, hinting a unwanted flood?

I was reading the curriculum for “Fog Creek Software Management Training Program” where I saw the list of books for Techno-Managers. It has the best business books of all time, the best software management books of all time and every worthwhile history of a software/computer company that we can find. I have another list which I am going to forward to our company library. There days I am reading “The Google Story“. This is a wonderful book.

The reading list (I have gone through some of these books and will be going through all in due time)

These days my Posts on orkut are attracting more and more traffic. Orkut was known (introduced) as platform for creating a social circle (supposedly good and healthy ones). For last 3 months (an increasing trend, some of my close acquaintances involved as well) I am hearing various scandals where orkut played an important role. From Photo scandal to hate groups, now the latest Pune drug case.

The Pune Police claim they have evidence that drug parties like this particular one are organised using social networking sites like Orkut and isratrance.com (Israeli Psychedelic Trance Experience). …………… Users began posting their reviews and pictures and more invitations for other drug dos began to pour in till a user named Indiandawg posted the bad news that the Pune party had been busted by the police and all the invitees arrested.

Then came the shock and the anger and users like Cosmic Tandava, phazed, twistedfunkie and N’euroToxic began cautioning fellow members to be more careful when posting invites online

Click here for complete story.

Other Orkut stories

• Google gets court notice for hate group on friendship site
• Orkut: The new danger
• Fake Orkut Profile of Delhi Schoolgirl as ‘Sex Teacher’ posted
• Orkut in Trouble Over Flag-Burning
• Google’s Orkut Gets Legal Trouble in India for Running Anti-Indian Community

I am sure there are many other cases which I am not aware of (I haven’t put down few latest ones as it is not published in any newspaper).

Should we blame Orkut for it?

I will put my opinion in next post.