My good friend Navin(http://smriti.com) has been constantly telling me and some of our other colleagues about Web 2.0 and how cool some of the technologies really are in the web world today. Slowly but surely some of the folks around are beginning to explore it, including me. For sometime now I have been exploring Facebook and it amazes me to see the number of applications being developed there. And these are developed by people like you and me in our own time.
I remember my professor Gopinath at IISc always used to say that "Whatever you do, you should become famous on the internet". I am sure he was talking more in terms of research papers and presentations in conferences and stuff, but Web 2.0 is brining in another avenue to become famous on the web. The mad scramble to write apps for Facebook is one such case in point.
Then one day Navin said 'Twitter" and I looked at it and thought "Gawd what a silly little thing" and then I came across this (http://wtips.blogspot.com/2007/04/twitter-tools.html). As the Gauls would probably say "These Earthlings are crazy!!". And lo behold I have started to use one such tool (http://rss2twitter.com/). What this will do is as soon as I publish this blog post, the rss feed for this post will be used by rss2twitter to post a small summary to my twitter account which will be also seen on my facebook profile and on my blogspot page (which means on the right hand side of this page) and to all the people who have volunteered to follow my twitter (using IM.,cellphone, email, etc). Now that is "cool". Just look at the dissemination of information and that too so quickly. There could be interesting business models built around it.
And moreover I am simply exploring the tip of the mountain. I have found an easy way to get to all the cool stuff (ping Navin). And moreover I am pulling more people into the web. If Anupam and Shridhar read this they will be vigorously nodding their heads. Kamlesh would be easily sucked into this.
And now for the Big Fight. It is coming and I can see it. My wife has carefully calculated the time I spent on Facebook and she drops in snide remarks about How I used to discourage her from Orkut. So I can see the inevitable. Probably I can avoid it. Time will tell.
