Deepak dot com

Last year it was GMail. Now its reader’s turn. Feeds have been deleted from peoples account. My feeds are fine. Or may be it broke and got restored before me realising. May be google is trying to integrate the FeedBurner (recently acquired by Google) database into its system and resulted in this. Did you experience the problem? Wait, do you use Google Reader, to begin with?

Source : TechCrunch

I just came across Picnik, a web 2.0 company that offers picasa-like online photo editing. The first time you visit their website, you will have to wait for the full fledged flash application to load. Looks like they set the expiry date of the main flash application to a very later date (for obvious reasons) and further loads are instant.

You can try picnik with out having to create any account. If you decide to create an account (which is free), you will have to spend less than one minute in their ultra simple registration form. Just give them your preferred username, password and email. Thats it. Although I dont understand why one need to give the email address twice. Instead just take what ever is typed and until the email is verified, disable all the services which require email.

Once you are done with registration, you will be taken to the welcome page, along with a “Continue editing” button which will take to you to the last photo you were editing before deciding to register. The photo edit tab has all the common tools like : resize, rotate, crop, sharpen etc, which is expected from a photo edit application. You can also find a “Autofix” button which looks to be a mock up of “I’m feeling Lucky” of picasa. But the output of Autofix is not at all satisfactory when compared to “I’m feeling Lucky”.

On the bright side, you can link picnik with your picasaweb/facebook/flickr accounts and import photos, edit and save back. But the saved photo is added to the album, not replacing the original file. Picnik, are you listening?

Recommendations: Picnik should give webspace to users for storing photos, so that the edit and save (replace) process would be ultra smooth. This will also remove the delay in transferring the photos from/to picasa or what ever is your photo source. One may ask, how will own storage solve this problem? You tell me. (Its not difficult for a computer engineer to answer this)

“IIT divas rocking performance” the mail said. And the URL read “IIT divas rocking performance a fest , awesome performance! sure can give Shakira a run for their money:)”. Got the mail forward from two different persons. Am sure in a couple of days and will get it from other sources also. The song is too good. But the video is not outstanding (of course, no one can appreciate such performances after watching Alizee’s live performances’ videos), but considering (for now) that the performance is by a non-celebrity, people (and me too) appreciated it.

As some of you might be knowing, its difficult to decieve “the googling machine of Deepak” (For those who dont know, I google about anything and everything, just to have the pleasure of reading about stuff around in the world). It turns out that the lady in the video is neither a IITian, neither a student, neither an Indian, neither a non-celebrity….. She is a famous singer from Pakistan, called Annie.

Looks like http://www.youtopia.in/ wants some quick publicity and trying it this way. Nice Try.

Any how I thank youtopia for shouting out about this song. Here is the youtube video of the live performance :



And the original video :



Lyrics can be found at : http://www.banglacommunity.com/showthread.php?p=20893

Let me know if you like the song too.

Recently John Chow wrote a review about a website called bla.st. And as you can see it has boosted the traffic of bla.st for a while. Here is what John Chow has got to say about bla.st:

bla.st is a free visual card directory. The concept is unique and has the potential be a viral marketer’s dream (like the Million Dollar Homepage). In a nutshell, bla.st is like the Million Dollar Homepage but with unlimited potential. Instead of selling a limited amount of pixels, bla.st lets you display a free advertising card to promote you site or blog. bla.st cards can be online from 1 day to 10 years and can be placed into any categories. Payment is optional, and how much you choose to pay per day decides your card position.

bla.st has recently started a referral program. You can add a bla.st widget to your website and when users click the widget and eventually purchase (with in 30 days of the click) card position on bla.st, you will be paid 50% of the sale.

Not a bad idea. But should we stop there? No. This is where our evil strands come into picture. So why dont we refer ourselves. Here is how you do it:

Create an account in bla.st

generate widget code and paste it into your website

click on the widget within your website

and then purchase card position from bla.st

At the end of the month you will get back 50% of what you paid.

I haven’t tested whether the website showing the widget and the website purchasing the card have to be different or not to avail the referral bonus. Let me know if you have tried it.

I have received requests from friends asking about procedure to add Cricket World Cup 2007 schedule to google calendar :

Open http://calendar.google.com/

type “ICC Cricket World Cup 2007″ in the “Search Public Calendars” and hit Enter

Select the calendar of your choice from the search result and click “Add Calendar”

For reasons unknown SMS notifications are not sent for events from public calendar. This question is unanswered in google groups. Do you know how to do it?

P.S.: Dont come back cribbing that this is trivial. This is intended for netizens who are new.