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The idea of writing a series like Human Technology provides me to reflect on my own journey through the IT age that is so central to my life. Technologies that have been featured so far on iRohit.com have today become so ingrained in our fabric that it’s easy to disregard the fact that till the mid nineties, most of us didn’t even know how a PC looked or what Windows was.

As I write this, the 4th chapter of my ongoing Human Technology series, I have to mention, none of the previous topics have brought a bigger smile on my face than this one. Before the BitTorrent, LimeWire, Kazaa; there was a lone pioneer, who unlocked the gates to a whole new world of sharing, sharing of music to be precise. Napster!

Napster was a brain child of 18 year old Shawn Fanning who I guess, was very passionate about his music, like most of us. But unlike most, he was brilliant with computers and coding. So he created a piece of software that would allow him and his colleagues to search and download the music of their liking from the computers on his college network. Little did he realize at that time that, what he had created was a piece of code that would change the music industry! We all are aware with the history of course. Napster changed the way we got our music. One was able to search for music on any computer located anywhere in the world and download it on to his computer. Foul, cried the music industry, but that didn’t stop this phenomenon of sharing music. Napster doesn’t even exist anymore. Well, definitely not in its original form. The original Napster has mutated into many things. Today’s it most successful form is the BitTorrent.

For many people, around the world, Napster provided a way to listen to music without actually owing it. It helped people to find that most obscure of artist in a jiffy. All it required was for some patient person to rip the cd and make mp3s of the album and share it. The copies then just grew in geometric progression. Today one can share not only music, but books, movies, software, documents, presentations, well almost any file on the computer. Of course there are legal suits going on, preventing such peer to peer sharing. But then that is a topic for another blog. The point of this blog is to acknowledge the place of Napster in Internet folklore. It added a whole new dimension to Internet. Music is one thing that unites the world, and sharing and finding music connected with the masses. As they say, ‘music is the food for our soul’ and I guess the entire world is hungry!

Incase you found this blog interesting, I would recommend you look at my other posts from the Human Technology series. Let me know which technologies touched you. I would love to hear you views.

Have you heard about this one? I was aked by a friend to have a look at this new concept. Initially I could not understand, I couldn’t figure out how to make it work, what to implement, what it achieved. So as usual, I let it slip out of my mind and more simpler things kept my grey matter active… like watching tennis, cricket, and when I wanted to give the grey cells a little bit of breather I watched bollywood movies. This continued till yesterday, when suddenly some anomaly in the universe popped the Yahoo! pipes back into my mind. Since the work schedule was bit relaxed, I decided to unearth the mystery of these weird pipes. After all what followed through these pipes, certainly not crude oil or did it???

Well after some initial read up, it was safe to conclude that Yahoo! still did not have any say in OPEC. And then as I delved more into these pipes, I realized that this was a ingenious concept that I think has the potential to change, hmm well, create a new way of serving information to the user from data scattered all over the web. Normally as it stands today, a user can request information from a single website. He can set filters and narrow the scope of the data that he thinks contains the information he requires.

But here is what Yahoo! pipe promises. You can feed this application data from multiple sources dynamically from the web and channel this information through various pipes applying your custom rules and transform this information so that it maps with any entity and voila! You have something which I am sure has no business sense now, but in time will spark an idea which in a few years will be sold for an insanely huge amount.

Currently creating a pipe is kinda complex, as it uses meta-language and programming constructs that a layman may find hard to grasp. But with time I am sure this will get simpler. And it is from here on that I expect this framework to deliver.

There already is a pipe that takes the top songs list from iTunes and then gives the user links to the videos for these songs. You can check it out here. And this is a fairly simple pipe to implement and actually sounds like something that one may find useful, right??? So Yahoo! pipes has the capability to deliver, but it requires the ingenuity of the human grey matter to realize its full potential…

Looks like Web 2.0 is finally beginning to deliver. Also I must give it up for the guys at Yahoo! to actually come up with this cool technology. Microsoft too, not so long ago, announced what I think is the most exciting technology since Windows, MS Surface. It’s time for guys at Google to pull up their socks… looks like they are falling behind.

For more information

http://www.dashes.com/anil/2007/02/yahoo-pipes.html

http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/02/pipes_and_filte.html/

Useful videos to get you started

Of all the available media for self expression, internet is, in my humble opinion the most powerful and the most liberal. Of course there can be censorship imposed by govt, law, lobbies but there are ways to still get your view out to the masses. Today it’s possible to voice your opinion on almost about anything under the sun and maybe things around it

It’s about time you realize this. Really, don’t let this opportunity just pass you. Write a blog, comment on a blog, make a podcast, create a video blog, join a news group, forum and if you are really inspired start your own website. Our predecessors at most could only talk to people in they knew, family, people they grew up with, studied with, worked with, people they met at social events. That was it. Today, you have the power to communicate with a person living in Santiago, know him, his way of life, discuss global warming if that’s what you care about. So if you have a point of view, then make it known! Currently, YouTube and CNN are asking netizens to post questions to the Presidential Candidates in the US. Similar things are happening all over the world… Isn’t that great!

We perhaps are at the gates of the mythical ‘Global Village’ and the doors have started to open, and it may be the beginning of the most exciting journey we have ever embarked upon. So come, join in!

Free tools to help you out

Blogger
LiveJournal
WordPress
MyPodcast.com
YouTube
Google Pages

What more do I have to say. This one uncanny word has today become synonymous with goodness, nobleness, ‘do no evil’, usefulness, innovation, user centric principles, almost miraculous products… the list could go on. Google has touched our lives in some way or the other and for good. What started with a simple page with a colorful name which fetched precisely the results that you wanted in .232 odd secs has today become the biggest brand in the world. Though search is still its core, it today provides an amazing mix of services to all the netizens, and for free. Today you can mail, chat, find directions to that new restaurant that your friend told you about, publish your thoughts, ideas, get in touch with your school friends, manage your calendar, share it with family and friends, buy gifts, watch steaming videos, share pictures, well you get the point right.. Google helps us to make the things that are important to us simple. And isn’t that what we all want!

I was introduced to Google in 1999. A friend of mine advised me to give this search engine a try. And after it fetched me my first set of results, search on the net was never the same. It delivered results that really mattered. And over the time it just got better and better. One major thing that I think added to the popularity was the absolute basic interface. No fancy categories, no heavy graphics. And in the era of dial up internet connections that made all the difference.

Over the years, it has grown. Today it’s one of the biggest companies around. It has kept adding services to its arsenal. Gmail, Froogle, Adsense, Youtube. But the principle of KISS still remains at its core which probably is the biggest reason for its unprecedented success.

I still remember the day Gmail was announced with a storage space of 1gb. People, including me thought it was another of Google’s brilliant April Fool’s joke. But when it became official, it changed the whole web email domain.

Google too has managed to rally huge public goodwill. It has become a standard by which people judge any service provider today. Google has managed to convey very successfully that it genuinely is concerned and committed to provide its user the best net experience. It has used its many official blogs to keep people updated on all that is happening with the company. I personally think that this is a master stroke in marketing and connecting to its customer base.

I expect Google to grow even further but not unchallenged. Until the next epic idea… here’s three cheers to Google!