tribeIn.com - Would you rather discuss stuff with your friends?

tribeIn lets you create topics which you can share and discuss with your friends.

Start by adding friends to your tribe. Then create topics which could be news, links, embedded videos or just what you are up to. Share topics with your tribe. Your friends can in turn share your topic with their tribe. Let your topic snowball and enjoy the discussion.

We are your next door Joes who have regular day jobs and spend a lot of their free time on reddit and digg. Even though we read all the comments, we rarely participated in the discussions. This had us wondering “Would we be more willing to participate in a discussion if it involved people we know?” The quest for an answer led us to create tribeIn. Try it out and let us know what you think.

That was from the site.

The site got a review at KillerStartups.com
"TribeIn is a site dedicated to discussion. The idea behind TribeIn is that people would be more involved in exchanging their ideas with their friends and people they know, rather than with complete strangers..."

For a while I will be blogging at tribeIn. Do check it out. See you there!

How is fuvoo doing?

It was doing great till I decided to completely neglect it. There were days when it saw over 20,000. Also the Alexa rank climbed to under 70K globally and under 18K for US. By that time there were too many competitors in the space. I could have kept going, but I decided to move on to something new. I picked up a common problem and decided to solve it.

Meanwhile enjoy the videos at http://fuvoo.com

fuvoo

It has been a while since I wrote any interesting article for this blog. The reason being I was busy trying to finish up my latest venture www.fuvoo.com. After weeks of hard work it is finally ready for launch. And with that begins the most difficult phase of any commercial website: getting people to use it. So without further commentary let me introduce you to fuvoo.




blog: http://fuvoo.blogspot.com
about: http://www.fuvoo.com/FuvooAbout.aspx


Here is snippet from the about page:

What is fuvoo?
Remember those times when you read all the news from Slashdot, digg and reddit? Then logged into facebook and poked all your friends? And checked your 9 emails accounts? Then you went to the video section of digg, Google video, Grouper, and YouTube and watched all the videos? And then suddenly you realize that there is nothing more to do on the Internets. Your head is aching, your eyes are hurting, you can hardly keep awake; but you want more. That’s where fuvoo comes in. You can go to fuvoo.com and watch – hold your breath – VIDEOS!! Yes folks, you heard it right. Fuvoo is a website where you can watch videos.

Microsoft redesigns iPod packaging

Microsoft guys are wizards when it comes to packaging. Unlike the guys at Apple they pay attention to every detail. I wish Apple steals some of these ideas for their next product.



Are you listening Steve?

Yahoo Attempts to Fight Phishing With Sign-In Seal

Earlier today I read that the new Yahoo Mail is open to all. So I decide to check it out. But even before I logged in, I noticed something different. The top right corner of the login box read “Prevent Password Theft”


I clicked on it and was redirected to a page that read the following:

Protect users on this computer against password theft with a sign-in seal.
A sign-in seal is a secret message or photo that Yahoo! will display on this computer only. Look for it every time you sign in to make sure you're on a genuine Yahoo! site. If the message, photo, or colors are different, you may have landed on a phishing site.

Pick Your Boss

This morning on my way to work I heard the results of an interesting survey over the radio. I have no clue as to who conducted this survey or where the results are published. The results are as follows:

1. 75% of the females interviewed preferred a male boss over a female boss

2. If they had to pick a female boss, most of them said they would pick Oprah Winfrey

3. If they had to pick a male boss, most of them said they would pick BILL GATES

Can a few people from Microsoft please confirm that it would indeed be a wise decision? The announcer said that he treats his employees very well.

Note: I thought of posting the exact same survey here on my blog, but ruled against it when I recollected that females don’t read this blog.

Flying Images

I found this script making rounds of the social networking site that I frequent. Here is what you do: Browse to any website with a few images. Copy the script below in the address bar of your browser and hit enter.

javascript:R=0; x1=.1; y1=.05; x2=.25; y2=.24; x3=1.6; y3=.24; x4=300;y4=200; x5=300; y5=200; DI=document.images;DIL=DI.length; function A(){for(i=0;i<DIL; i++){DIS=DI[ i ].style;DIS.position='absolute';DIS.left=Math.sin(R*x1+i*x2+x3)*x4+x5;DIS.top=Math.cos(R*y1+i*y2+y3)*y4+y5}R++}setInterval('A()',5); void(0)

Note: I dont know the orignal source of the script to give credit to the author.

Happy Birthday Boss

Myself and three other co-workers decided to play this office prank on our boss on his birthday today. Last night we reached office at around 9:00 PM armed with sticky note, aluminum foil, memo notes etc. This operation took about an hour and $10.

If you are my office secretary please note that office supplies were not used for this prank.









I’m sure you guys have played better office pranks. If you have pictures or videos please post links in the comments.

I/O Brush from MIT

Check out the I/O brush from MIT. The world is your palette.



Here is a link to the article: I/O Brush: The World as the Palette

10 Things I Noticed About IE7 Beta 2

1. More real estate. Now you see less of the client and more of the webpage. I think the IE team totally got it right.

2. Backward compatibility for toolbars. My Google toolbar is right there and seems like a party of IE.

3. There is a search box. I don’t know what all the fuss earlier today was about, because mine was defaulted to GOOGLE. Yes, if you had set Google as your default search engine in the older version, the search box remembers that.

4. No classic menu. You want it? Just right click and select and select “classic menu”.

5. Tabs. If you have no experience with tabs, the default tab page will tell you how to go about using it. Convenient to open and navigate new tabs. Also check out the thumbnail view of open tabs.

6. Like the search, my hope page was carried over from the previous installation.

7. The standard browser buttons are smaller and rearranged or should I say too small and scattered? The refresh and stop buttons are to the right of the address bar while the front and back buttons are to the left. Also there is a single list to display the history next to the front and back buttons.

8. RSS feed icon lights up when the website has a RSS feed. It somehow does not like my website (redigg.net) because even though the site has a feed the icon is still grayed out.

9. Phishing filter. I’m not sure how it works, but I believe it should.

10. Manage Add-ons. Shows all the browser stuff like ActiveX and toolbars in one convenient place and also allows you to add 3rd party Add-ons.

Newster Update

The users of Newster.net must have noticed that their bookmarks stopped working a while ago. Now those who know me would also know that I have almost no budget for my projects. So I decided to change my host form Brinkster to GoDaddy because it works out a bit cheaper for me. The shift was not as smooth as I would have liked it to be. The transfer took little over a week during which Newster was inaccessible due to DNS issues. Now things are finally back on track, but the URLs have changed.

Please visit Newster.net and update your bookmarks. Don’t forget to update the URLs in your news readers.

Why did I change the URLs? Because I’m using a single hosting account to host multiple applications (remember, no budget?). So now Newster.net is an aliased domain with the domain for my other applications. Sorry for the inconvenience it has caused.

Driving In India

Organized chaos!!

This is amazing stuff. Who needs traffic lights and stop signs?

husssssshhh...

A-weema-weh A-weema-weh A-weema-weh A-weema-weh
A-weema-weh A-weema-weh A-weema-weh A-weema-weh
A-weema-weh A-weema-weh A-weema-weh A weema-weh
A-weema-weh A-weema weh A-weema-weh A-weema-weh



In the jungle, the mighty jungle
The lion sleeps tonight
In the jungle, the quiet jungle
The lion sleeps tonight.

Stealth Submit Using AJAX

Have you ever started filling a web form and halfway into it decide against submitting because suddenly you no longer trust the website enough? You closed the browser window and that was the end of story, right? Wrong! The website might still have your information. You think it’s impossible? This article will show you how it can be done. I call the technique Stealth Submit.

Unless you have been living under a rock there is no way that you wouldn’t have heard about AJAX. Stealth Submit uses AJAX to save the values entered on the web form to a database.

To implement Stealth Submit the following example uses two files:

majax.aspx: This file implements the web form. It consists of plain HTML and Javascript (and hence the AJAX functions).

majaxSaveToDB.aspx: This file is the server side script which implements the database operations. Values to be saved are passed as a part of the query string. After saving the values to a database the status is posted back.

Click here to view a complete working example.

To view the complete implementation, do a “view source” for the above page in your browser.

Stealth Submit can be used for constructive purposes like implementing auto save for your web applications. Some of the Web 2.0 applications already take advantage of this technique. At the same time, in wrong hands it can be used to capture information without the user’s knowledge. I hope the technique described here finds good use in our future applications.

Note: The intent of this article is to educate the readers as to how AJAX could be used to capture information without their knowledge or consent by malicious websites. It is advised that no information should be entered on a web form that you do not completely trust.

Liked this article? Please digg | reddit. Thank you!

What Cingular Did Not Tell You About International Text Messaging

Recently I switched from Sprint to Cingular because the later has GSM network and hence GSM enabled phones (I got the W600 from Sony Ericsson). Now when I travel abroad I can continue to use my phone. All I need to do is buy a pre-paid SIM card of any local service provider over the counter and slip it in. This works out much cheaper than using the roaming feature.

Cingular offers international text messaging for 20 cents a pop. Personally I feel that this is very expensive compared to what I have paid in other countries. But still I decided to try it out. So I sent a text message to my friend in Asia and asked her to reply back so that I have a confirmation. Here is her reply: “got ur sms frm a local no, got confusd”. I tried sending another message and again it was delivered from a local number. Every time it is a different local number. So I called up Cingular today morning and they confirmed that the messages are sent from a local number in the receiver’s country. I asked them if they state this fact along side their advertisements of international text messaging service. They said that they do not. I checked out their website and could not find any information of text messages being sent from a different number other than the subscriber’s.

The above problem is bigger that it sounds. You, me and any other person I have met hits the reply button to reply to a text message. In the scenario above this would send the message to a non existing local number and you won’t receive the reply. Also since the messages are delivered using a different local number each time, you cannot hold a conversation using text messages (many phone allow “conversations” using text messages). And one more thing, be sure to sign off all your messages with your name, else the receiver wont know who it is from.

This post is to inform the readers of a problem with international text messaging using Cingular. This post should not be interpreted as Cingular to be a bad service provider. In fact I’m very happy with the phone, the coverage and most of all the costumer service (till now). But I have been a customer only for a week and hence not the right person to judge.