MohanArun.com

Whats Next with Twitter?

OK so you can share/update your status in 140 characters, let your followers know the things you are up to, add hashtags to your tweets and so on. My comment posted on Read Write Web’s story, “This is what a tweet looks like” which contains a view of the inner workings of twitter and anatomy of a tweet.

Twitter API developers could probably use the new metadata fields for something one can visualize as ‘connected tweets’. Twitter lacks a way to create connection/coherence among tweets originated by different people right now (the only means available to connect related tweets is by adding a hashtag but a hashtag takes precious space from the 140 char limit and anybody can use any hashtag – even for irrelevant tweets – so prone to abuse), and connected tweets could be an interesting new idea. Think about it. The web is essentially hyperlinked from-link to-link navigation. Similarly what would happen if we could navigate back and forth among related tweets?. Tweeters can allow fellow tweeters to ‘tag’ tweets as ‘related’ with their specific tweets (even without a common hashtag). Then one might be able to navigate among related tweets like a link list, back and forth horizontally, or like a ladder, scrolling up and down. Tweeters could receive requests on the lines of ‘link exchange’ requests – ‘Will you allow me to tag my tweet as related to yours?’ If you imagine this, we could see things like ‘6 tweets have been tagged as related with this tweet’.  We could soon start seeing things like who is able to make the longest/tallest chain/ladder of related tweets (depending on whether you are looking at it horizontally and vertically, respectively). Each such ladder of tweets would be a meme worthy of propagation. It would also promote social interaction among twitterers, so this might be something worthy of attention and further development.

One can also imagine a ladder of tweets to be in the form of a tree of tweets. Twitterers could eventually be able to upvote and downvote the order in which the ladder appears (frm top to bottom). The higher the votes a related tweet gets as related to the original tweet, the higher up in the ladder or tree it would appear. Thus it provides ’something to do’ – promotes interaction with the site (like voting on digg). If you have seen a reddit conversation with its + and – votes you can get the idea.

Currently twitter is centered around people. If you follow one person, you get all their tweets. You cannot further filter their tweets and save the tweets you want to keep (but you can mark a tweet as favorite) organized by topics or groups. One cant follow a group of people and get all their tweets by choosing to follow a ‘group’ rather than individuals. This way one wouldnt have to worry about maintaining their twitter accounts by following and unfollowing people joining and leaving the groups. You would simply follow a group, and whoever posts/tweets in the group, you would start receiving their tweets.

Update 06/19

Threaded twitter conversations may be coming : read here

Twitter Threaded conversations

Made a comment on this techcrunch article as follows.

For Twitter – threaded conversations with unlimited nesting – see TWEETBOARD.com. i am not sure how Twitter would, if ever, implement threaded/connected/linked tweets, but this could be a way worth exploring.

@Dee Agreed this would make twitter more like a forum promoting flame wars and such.

BUT…
There needs a way to ‘pin’ conversations started on twitter so you can refer them- like a bookmark but this bookmark would connect multiple tweets somehow. If you currently bookmark a tweet, you can bookmark only 1 tweet (i.e., 1 tweet 1 page). If this tweet were a question or this tweet solicited further information, how will someone know if someone answered? How will someone share a page containing tweets showing ’see this is the question I asked on twitter, and these are the responses I received’? Thereby people need a way to view a tweet and its ‘related’ tweets on the same page. People would ‘connect;’ the tweets of their interest in their way. They would choose which is a parent tweet, and attach/stick nested tree-structured tweets with this tweet and allow other people to attach their own tweets to this ‘tweet tree of favorites’. If you double click on one of the leaves (tweets) in this tree of interconnected tweets, you can ‘drill down’ on further tweets which people have tagged as related with this tweet.

Twitter would also become better by allowing notifications if someone in the ‘following’ cluster/’follower’ circle marks some tweet as favorite (these may not necessarily be yr own tweets but when someone you follow or is following you finds and marks a favorite tweet, then you shall be notified). A great way to come in contact with new tweeters/twitterers of interest. If someone marked some tweets as favorites, then surely the person favorited would probably be of interest right? such a setup would motivate more people to produce more quality tweets, as if someone ‘bookmarked’ or favorited their tweet, their visibility goes higher.

If you can imagine connected tweets – leave comments below – i would be interested to know how you imagine it.

For me, it would look like EYEPLORER interface – groups of tweets organized curated and connected by people based on relevance and form factor. You could drill down the path of a tweet and see all its related tweets like a cluster of tweets around it, then zoom back up (drill up) and pursue another path exploring related tweets. It would be a superb waste of time drilling up and down stuff like movie reviews, restaurant reviews, etc. from people, as they try to condense themselves into 140 chars or less. Currently you can only ‘look up’ tweets of your interest based on search.twitter.com and rely on the original tweeter having inserted an appropriate hashtag in order for it to be found later.

i would also like to see someone changing the form factor of the ‘incoming’ twitter stream altogether from the current one endless vertically scrolling infinite mess. Tweets from important people abt whom you want to check on their last 3-4 statuses are getting drowned from the methodical squishy-squashy madness and verbiage from more twitterers who gurgitate mouthfuls. The old fashioned email inbox way would seem like a better attempt at organizing the never ending scrolling stream of updates lest you dont miss out on important updates frm the people who matter the most, for it organizes incoming messages by sender. i think third party twitter clients already have a way to do this, but the few i tried only tried to pretty up the twitter interface, nothing ground-breaking or ‘out of the twitter box;’.

i imagine i would want something like this:

Groups of people

================

Group-1 (5) -> 5 being the number of inmates of this group

Friends (3)

If you expand one level then you get all the members in the selected group, listed one below the other with the number of new updates in brackets next to their names. When you click on the name of a friend, you get their last couple of updates with Previous and next links for viewing more. This way, friends who tweet the most frequent will not be able to drown you with their updates. The small guy with even one update would still matter and gain visibility in your attention radar.

There needs to also be a way of receiving an email digest of daily tweets, retweets you got, favorites you got, etc.

in short, i would want a ‘better twitter web interface’. I am wary of using twitter client programs that need things like .net framework and Adobe AIR runtime.

One more idea is allowing people to actually click on a link labeled ‘Have read this’ which clickable link would appear with every tweet. Majority of the tweets which people think someone is actually reading, are in fact unread, not even eyeballed, drowned in the constant stream of updates from the 1000+ ppl following. By providing this kind of link, ppl would know, getting your tweets read is actually a privilege, and it would provide statistics and insight into who’s reading who and who’s the most read. Currently the only metric available is most retweeted or most favorited for measuring the reach of tweets. Even for obtaining those kind of stats you need to use obscure third party services. (Services like klout come to mind but i guess even these are based solely on number of retweets/favorites – what if ppl ‘read’ but do not want to retweet or favorite a tweet). If twitter implements a ‘have read this’ link the original twitterer will quickly know, at a glance, what are the tweets that people are actually bothering to click on this link, so you will know stuff like, 100 people have chosen to give this tweet the privilege of ‘read’, though they didnt think it worthwhile enough to retweet it.

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One of my pet ideas for the direction that future electronics could take is the concept of ‘formlessness’, I would call this ‘Formless electronics’. By formless I mean shapeless and probably invisible, like the air around us. Lets think: could we make connection circuits out of thin air? Could we possibly weave circuits in air with finger gestures like a spider weaving a web when the spider is lodged with our fingertips?

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Democracy has now evolved to something I would call ‘money-o-cracy’. Everybody wants to make sure that they have enough money on which to retire upon and pursue the path that will give them the greatest freedom and happiness. This is because in our current societal setup, money once given cannot be taken back by the employer or by whichever source it came from (under normal, legal methods). Is money-mindedness good? I would suppose so, because with the availability of money comes self-confidence. Money is the means to improve societal status and prestige. Access to money buys whatever one wants, wishes and hopes for in life. Restriction on access to money at the right times can be the most crippling factor in an individual’s societal progress. As such, the distribution of money among members of society needs to be controlled. This is to make sure that the right people with the right ability to contribute to a common good are able to get access to the right amount of money at the right time on their own, without asking for help from others. This leads one to question both the concepts of capitalism and socialism/communism. Both have their drawbacks. If you have some comments about the drawbacks of these economic models, please leave them in the comments section.

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I think I am affected by ‘Science-Fictionitis” for want of a better name.

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When we are able to produce formless disposable electronics that are able to be weaved into air, able to be controlled remotely, we could have things like wireless massages. Imagine a hypothetical scenario: Person A would like a massage so he orders a ‘wireless massage’ from the ‘Wireless Massage Company’. The company gets his location coordinates and weaves a wave of circuits in air from a remote location surrounding the human body presence of Person A.The circuits produce mild pulses that energize the body. When the session is done, the circuits are ‘dissolved’ in thin air. Thus we would have disposable connection circuits in air that are able to be programmed/constructed and dissolved/disposed of from a remote location.

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If we imagine science fiction as a circle, then both Reality and Magic would be tangents. They would meet at some point along the circumference, and satisfy the criteria partially of what science fiction had in mind in the first place.

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If we had the ability to weave connection circuits in air, what would we weave first? I think I would weave a personal data bank, the contents of my note-taking application so it becomes available anytime anywhere without needing to carry a physical device like a PDA or an iPhone or even an iPad. Next would be a ‘window’ to a ‘public knowledge bank’ which we are currently experiencing in the form of ‘Internet’. We could browse in thin air in this window, public knowledge banks and data archives and blogs and what not, with letters and symbols appearing in thin air like a hologram. All these basic circuits are already available in a ‘formed’ way with our current state of technology. We have LCD and LED displays, we only need to be able to translate these circuits into air, so air can serve as a display medium. Then we wouldnt need bulky articles in our person, the gadgets and electronics which we call PDAs, pocket browsers, ebook readers and so on and so forth. When we feel the need to do so, we can look up, access and consume knowledge and information as we please without getting exposed to the harmful electromagnetic waves emanating from devices like mobiles, TV and computer displays, ebook readers, and so on.

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Everybody has selective amnesia: people want to remember the good parts and forget the bad parts when it comes to their lives.

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Life gets a new operating system – Jason Chin of the University of Cambridge has devised a way for amino-acids (part of genetic code) in cells to be read in quadruplets instead of in triplets – Chin’s team has created 256 blank four-letter ‘codons’ (genetic words) which can be assigned to amino acids that dont even exist yet. – Link. This reminds me of the periodic table. What could be the implications of such an advancement? Life could become ‘programmable’, while evolving to the next step. This has implications in the fields of genetic engineering. We can possibly genetically engineer artificial bacteria for good or bad (just as the AIDS virus has been genetically engineered). If it falls into the wrong hands, it could be used for things like bio-warfare. On the plus side, eventually we should be able to ‘print out’ skin tissue to cover burn wounds by programming cell division itself and controlling the pace at which cell division happens. For example, you would be able to print out a single cell and then artificially program it to multiply rapidly until a certain area of skin is covered, thus artificial skin grafts could improve.

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100 Ways to Screw up Your life – Link. It says ‘working harder than you can’ is one of the ways to screw up your life. The author advocates working smarter, not harder. If we look at our evolution and the path we have since left behind, human labor has been simplified with the help of machines, so we only need to know how to operate machines and machines can do the work for us. The only area where machines have not kept pace with us is in the area of infrastructure and construction. Construction work is still done manually, by hand, by real humans. If it is made possible that robots can take over the construction of buildings artificially, then we dont need to do this job by hand. This is one area we are still working harder, not smarter, even with the availability of latest machinery aiding the construction industry.

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What happens when facts can be googled at will and ‘in a snap’ with minimum time lapse between the time of query and the time the results are returned? Facts need not be remembered or by-hearted anymore; they are available for the effort spent on a query all the time. If the facts that you learn or come across, stick in your brain then fine and good, but it is not a necessity, for facts can be queried if and when the need arises to look them up. For example, lets take the example of a calculator. While we by-heart the multiplication tables, simple addition tables come up as second nature for us, we need not by-heart them. Nobody tries to by-heart what is the value of 178654 * 543412, such a thing is a waste of mental energy, time and effort. (I am reminded of people who try to memorize the digits of the pi). While it can be a mental exercise or a thing to do when you have nothing better to do, one can think that such a thing can always be calculated by a machine. The only thing we need to concentrate on now is to make sure that, such a machine is made available wherever calculations are required to be made, and the machine is easy to interface with and is always under human control. I would call this the ‘philosophy of interfacing with machines’.

The author of this piece – Is Google killing General Knowledge – gives an example of a quiz where a woman always googles answers to quiz questions. It is not necessary to learn the answers byheart, what is necessary is to know where to find the answer(s) and whether such a machine is reliable enough to produce accurate data/answers on querying. It is simply not possible for us to by-heart and learn all facts that are getting generated via scientific advances and via blogs all the time, it is simply impossible to keep pace with information and knowledge growth and sync the same with what is on one’s mind. The best one can do as at present is knowledge specialization, i.e., specialize in a particular topic and ignore the other topics and then rely on collaboration and trust other people to help you out when you need to know facts in an area which you are not familiar with. What we have been doing so far these days, with the advancement of knowledge economy, is that, instead of trusting these other people for your knowledge and look up needs, why not that part can be abstracted into a ‘knowledge machine’. This knowledge machine – its first step has already been taken in the form of a ’search engine’ that answers queries as long as it can understand the intent of the search. There are patents granted to companies like Google, Yahoo, etc. where the ‘user intent’ is felt, gripped and calculated as a ’signal’ and called ‘intent based search’. If our ’search engine’ can evolve from its current state towards a ‘knowledge machine’ then there wouldnt be a need for learning and specializing in one particular subject alone. Everybody can be masters of all subjects and be all-rounders when it comes to dispensing knowledge. It may disprove the saying ‘jack of all trades, master of none’. One can still be master of all trades as long as the knowledge ‘factoids’ can be recorded in a retrievable medium – in this case, a digital medium which is conducive to query by a biological machine (i.e., us).

Lets for a moment think about how a search engine can evolve from the present state. Search engines need effort in the form of human typing, so there is that part that can always be done away with. We can eventually ‘think’ to drive a search engine if we can get a brain-machine interface correct. We can carry Google as a chip in our brains, a biological implant that is no different from natural brain tissue, except that it has a specialized function: that of storing and returning knowledge factoids based on user intent in real time. Then comes the need where we need to be able to distinguish what could be a normal thought and other thoughts directed at ‘operating’ such an embedded chip to be still within our wish and control parameters. The set of such hypothetical commands could start with a simple operation like a standard search engine. A single command – ‘SEARCH’  will be the only instruction set (to start with) for such an implant. The next step will be that such a chip will need to be able to store knowledge factoids as they travel through your perception window (through the senses of touch, hearing, vision, smell, etc.). For example, lets say you read in a newspaper that the distance between place A and place B is 1347 miles. Obviously this information may or may not stick in your brain when you read it, so you want to make sure you are able to recall and remember it as it may be required in the future as it is a ‘knowledge factoid’. A whole research paper can be written on how to identify these ‘facets of knowledge’ or ‘knowledge factoids’ from a knowledge database or brain dump. (Some steps have already been taken in this regard: Google aims to provide answers to search queries within search results pages, without requiring a click through, and you can take a look at the site facterylabs.com – Get facts not links). The ability to classify which is an opinion, which is a fact, which is knowledge, is the next step in text analysis systems. So coming back to our previous example, we could issue a thought command: STORE ‘The distance between place A and place B is 1347 miles’ and then proceed to forget about it. The information may still stick in our brains normally, but we dont need to make an effort trying to remember the same, because we know, it is always available at our beck and call just by the ‘power of thought’ from the biological brain implant. Another research paper can be written on what empirical set of commands can operate on a biological brain implant chip apart from the STORE and RETRIEVE commands. Can the machine eventually have creativity on its own? Can it be possible to mimic human creativity at one point in time with this chip? Can it learn by heuristics by itself, without issuing explicit STORE commands? For example, can it store ‘knowledge gleaned from the eye’ as different from ‘knowledge from hearsay’. The machine would probably write to a database of knowledge factoids where SOURCE is a column. The SOURCE would be a type of sense. Where did this knowledge come from? ‘Learnt by hearsay’ or ‘Learnt from printed matter using the power of vision’ and whether the source can be marked as TRUSTED or UNTRUSTED. Anything learnt by hearsay is by definition untrusted. These days, what appears in printed matter is also mostly untrusted! Companies have false histories and timelines made up, and events and news are made up just to capture and invigorate public attention spans using the power of prestige, power, sex and money.

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Our vehicles for transport can also drive themselves if they can interpret our thinking, subject to external rules such as road rules and the other vehicles plying the same route. Imagine thinking a destination and being able to issue a ‘magic wand’ command in our Jetsons brains and your choicest vehicle for personal transport comes up from the garage on its own, looking up its own pathways, making decisions on speed and acceleration subject to road rules and plying traffic.

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A good presentation about teaching Maths – “Math is not linear“. The presentation says Math cannot be taught in a linear sequence (one chapter after the other) but a ‘holistic’ approach is required in order to see the big picture – just like the presentation itself as it zooms in and out. Interesting and valid points.

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Inborn talent doesn’t explain high achievement. Researchers say high achievement is due to ‘deliberate practice’. It is not as simple as a ‘practice makes perfect’ adage. Deliberate practice is neither work nor play. Researchers have decoded the pattern, and the path to top performance is becoming much more accessible. Read full article: The conventional wisdom about “natural” talent is a myth.

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Related topic article: Why are some people smarter? – smarter brains seem to have more efficient networks between neurons – in other words, it takes fewer steps to relay a message between different regions of the brain. Another key factor is the insulating fatty sheath encasing neuron fibres, which affects the speed of electrical signals (transmitted inside the brain).

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We all know about artificial intelligence and robotics subjects. What has remained elusive to scientists so far is ‘artificial consciousness’. Machine consciousness is a grand challenge. The “hard problem” of consciousness is subjective awareness. No one yet knows how to design the software for that. Read article: Can we make a conscious machine? by Celeste Biever.

A model of human consiousness proposes that perceptions below the threshold of consciousness are processed in relatively small, local areas of the brain. Broadcasting this pre-conscious information to the global workspace — a network of neural regions — results in conscious experience. Read full article on H+ magazine: Are we Zeroing in on the hard problem of explaining consciousness?

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Newspapers are what I see as ‘information middleman’. I feel they will be around for a long time contrary to reports that ‘newspapers are dead’ etc. Newspapers will continue contributing to the information collection and distribution arena. They are easy to read and within reach of the common person. They can be folded and taken along with you when you travel. They can be read as you sit in different postures and poses. which is not usually possible with electronic gadgets like ebook readers, netbooks, etc.

For cave women, farmers had extra sex appeal – NPR – Link.

By 2040 you will be able to upload your brain – Link.This article is about Ray Kurzweil and his contributions towards emerging visions and technologies. The title is only supplementarily related to what is spoken of in the article, but I had a vision for myself when I read the title – imaging being able to upload your brain onto a storage device which could be network-connected also – what are the characteristics that would be required for such a storage device or service? Ability to store memories, smells, tastes, opinions, values, etc. in an infinite dimension kind of way – this could be a difficult task that science is attempting to solve – for example – how could you store things like smells and tastes digitally? Even if scientists succeed in such an operation, how would that data be ‘read’ back into a new brain? A person’s brain and its feelings are closely related to what he or she experiences in life, could it be possible that such memories can be ‘implanted’ and ‘read back’ from networked storage devices or storage services?

7 Resume Lies Employers Will Never Check – Link.

Four valid reasons to hate mathematics – Link. It is hard to learn mathematics, let alone practice it for a living. But proponents of mathematics as a subject of study and as a vocation *(mathematician) say that it improves analytical thinking and problem solving abilities (using step by step derivations). Personally I would just rather use Mathway.com.

Is it possible for a virgin to give birth? – Melinda Wenner – Slate Magazine – Link. The article says the answer is yes, in theory. But such occurrences are very remote and rare, as a number of events will have to coincide.

To boost your memory, take a break – Link. If you want to retain something new you have learnt, it is better to take a period of ‘active rest’ to enable information seepage into the brain. After learning new information, if you continue to learn even more new information, you may be interrupting the memory you want to strengthen.

The value of physical touch – Get your users to touch your product – They will buy it – Link.

9 Tactics for rapid learning that most people have never heard of – Pegging, Metaphor, Diagramming, Speed Reading etc. – Link.

My comment on the above page:

I forgot to add, you can use visceralization and visualization for learning the meanings of new words (for improving your vocab for competitive exams like SAT, GMAT, IELTS, etc.) Simply construct a story around the phonetic representation of the word and associate the story with the meaning of the word. See the site MnemonicDictionary.com they have ready-made memorizable stories that can help you remember meanings of new and difficult words. You can also add another learning technique to this techniques of rapid learning list: that is, Mnemonics/Acronyms where you take the first letter of the things in the list you wanna remember and form a coherent sentence or acronym with it. For example for remembering the order of planets in the solar system, you could use ‘Mother Very Eagerly Made Jam Sandwiches Under No Protest’. The first letter of each word would represent, the planets Mercury Venus Earth Mars Jupiter etc. in that order… More mnemonics for learning are here: http://www.fun-with-words.com/mnem_example.html and here: http://www.mnemonic-device.eu/mnemonics/. I am not affiliated with both these sites (standard disclaimer).

The mind ‘actively erases memories to create space for new information’ – Link.

4 simple principles of getting to completion – Zen Habits – Link.

How I was able to ace exams without studying – Link.

The Internet will make you smarter, say experts. – Link.

Top 5 new rules of productivity – procrastination can be good and happiness can be the ultimate productivity enhancer and more – Link.

The effects of luxury on human behavior – Link.

Everyday acts of innovation – talks about five key ‘discovery skills’ – associating, questioning, observing, experimenting, networking – Link.

Is it only me that would first see the capacity of the hard disk rather than how many songs it can hold, etc.

For example I came across this page Western Digital Studio 2 TB edition and saw that they have put this in the description

Up to 571,000 digital photos
Up to 500,000 songs (MP3)
Up to 50,000 songs (uncompressed CD quality)
Up to 150 hours of Digital Video (DV)
Up to 880 hours of DVD quality video
Up to 240 hours of HD video

I thought it would have made more sense to me (by way of being able to imagine the storage capacity) if they had put “2 TB storage capacity” along with this number count of which type of file and how many such files will fit on this disk. It may be because I am used to computing vocabulary more than speaking ‘ordinary-ese’.

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I recently explored what Mozilla Ubiquity is all about, and decided not to install it. Seems it is something like Activewords, where you can type in verbal commands for the browser to act upon. For example, if you type “map placename” then it goes and fetches the google maps for that place. I am also reminded of Yubnub that also does the same thing.

Now my thinking is that, there is already a search box at the top right of every browser made these days. Instead of typing ubiquity commands to the browser, the same command can be issued to the search enigne, and search engines do produce appropriate results. I think there will be more and more merging of command-line and the search box in search engines, where search engines operate in some sort of navigational dimension also.

For example, I often visit the SAT Question of the day and Museum of Modern Betas. I have memorized neither of the urls for the two sites I often visit. Their URLs are not conducive to easy rememberance and recall (i.e., they arent easy one word or two word dotcoms). I havent bookmarked them either. Instead, I just start a search whenever I feel like visiting these sites – with the keyword phrases ‘SAT question of the day’ and “MoMB” and the first result is usually correct to click on to be taken to the site. The Domain Naming System (DNS) was invented because people would have trouble remembering strings of IP addresses, now it has become difficult to remember the DNS text name itself, so search engines to the rescue! You can simply type whatever you remember from the main title of the web page and typically within the first few results should be the website you want to navigate to. This gives a new perspective to search engines – search engines are there not only for searching, but also for navigating. I have been using this technique for quite some time now until I recently read about the “facebook login” issue where some other site ranked at the top for the keyword phrase “facebook login” in Google. Then I thought of writing a blog post about what I thought of the subject.

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Links

5 mistakes smart people make – Link.

100 ways to develop your mind – Link.

At what age do children recognise the difference between sarcasm and irony? – Link.

51 ways to become a better entrepreneur – Link.

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On the topic of search engines trying to improve themselves constantly, I was recently thinking about how search engines would match ‘list posts’.

For example, lets say you are looking for list posts about wireframing resources. How would you frame a search query that returns only list posts covering wireframing resources? Interesting thought. This is because, you need to match various articles like the following:

25 Wireframing Resources

20 Resources for wireframing and prototyping

List of Wireframe resources

50 Wireframing kits and resources

The best search query you can form is “wireframing resources list”. I think search engines need to provide a value like ‘n’ or ‘x’ to match ‘any number’ so you could match posts like these with the search query ‘n wireframing resources’ or ‘list of n resources for wireframing and prototyping’.

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My Comment on Dan Kennedy: Michael Moore is a Big, Fat Anti-American as follows

First of all I am not anti-capitalist or pro-socialist. I am not pro-American or anti-American either. I am all for any type of economy that brings prosperity and wealth to the greatest possible number of people. While Dan gives some examples of people succeeding and striking it rich in America, Moore is also right in showing that there is no ‘universal tautology’ that if you try to strike it big in America, then you absolutely will win and become rich. There may be few cases of people who worked hard to succeed, luck by their side, and became rich in America, but that doesnt mean everybody in America is going to be rich if they only start putting in some effort. Some will still be poor/mediocre while some will make it big. I agree with Moore about the prevailing idealogy in America though not to the extent he has made it out to be. Take Bill Gates for example. Had Bill Gates been born in anywhere other than in America, today being a college drop out like he is, he wouldnt be anywhere near being rich legally. That is one plus point for America. But consider the fact that, even inside America itself, will Microsoft, the empire that Gates founded, hire a college drop-out just because ‘he or she can potentially become the next Bill Gates’? Striking It rich all depends upon luck and perseverance. Luck is an esential element that cannot come to everyone who tries to strike it rich, be it anywhere, irrespective of inside America or outside America.

Links

Should the word ‘retard’ be stopped from usage because it offends ‘intellectually challenged people’? – Link.

Equation: The difference between girls and guys – how girls rate guys and how guys rate girls infographic – Link.

Why One Way Of Learning Is Better Than Another – Link.

How ‘cognitive fluency’ shapes what we believe, how we invest, and who will become a supermodel – Link.

Dating preferences and age – the case for an older woman – from OKCupid blog – Link.

Dan Kennedy: Michael Moore is a Big, Fat Anti-American