Digg. Delicious. Reddit. Google Reader. iGoogle. Pageflakes. Netvibes. Facebook.

Web2.0 is teeming with hundreds of sites that will let you save your bookmarks online, aggregate the different feeds subscriptions, and do all this all with a very neat and slick interface and for free, too. All of your data can be made accessible to general public, again in very ‘social’ way.

Consider this: people can now bookmark and share using any bookmark manager, social network, instant messenger, browser and/or the plain jane email addresses. They can subscribe using any web-based feed reader,  desktop feed reader and widgets. This is what web2.0 means to me, however, there are just a bit too many options to choose from. For any layman, this simply means information overload!

So, gone are the days when you provided your visitors with a simple notice to “Please bookmark this site”. Now you have to help ‘em share, save and subscribe to your content. On digg, reddit, delicious, and what not. For a naive (and lazy) blogger like myself, this is too much work to do. It will need some maintenance too, which, my lazy ass just won’t allow me to do.

So what do we do to become more ‘social’? Time tested out-sourcing to the experts, ofcourse. We out source this job to an external provider, who’ll happily provide us with a slick interface, maintain the different technicalities, and somehow do it for free (by capturing our visitors data). We need a service that will be automatically updated, cross-browser and reliable. Aaah. That would be delightful, and not to anyone’s surprise, such services do exist. A day of hard work (googling is hard to do these days) led me to zero in on the following three providers -

• AddThis
• Add To Any
• Share This

You can read a pretty good review of the above three on Richard’s FilioVision blog here:

• Social Bookmarking Plugins for WordPress: Bookmark Me, AddThis.com, AddToAny.com and Share This

For my blog, I will be using Add To Any, mainly because Share This is somewhat slow to load and AddThis seems a bit more commercialized than I would prefer.

Happy socializing!

There’s a saying in India which essentially means that “An idle brain is the house of devil“. Sitting idle at home is something that I truly dislike. So, to fight the boredom, I have been trying to find interesting stuff on the net. Following a thread of links, and a barrage of garbage, I have finally settled on to trying to create a Google Gadget or Orkut Plugin or a WordPress theme to consume most of my day.

Now, while doing all this ‘research’ I was amazed, yet again, to see that Google corp. is still launching so many products. New products, and yeah, they are already updating products that they already have, like Docs, Gmail, Picasa and Google Search. Man! they are throwing away goodies right (Lively), left (Gadgets) and center (Android). Man! I wonder how they are able to manage so much, so seamlessly. Yet keeping most of their products interoperable. Its as if they own the net.

Recently, Google has started giving some competition to Wikipedia (which happens to be one of my favourite places on the net) with their own Google Knol – “a unit of knowledge“. One major difference between the two is that Knol is not so open, the authors have to give their true names, get verified and all, unlike Wiki.

A quick look at World’s top 500 most visited sites (courtesy Alexa) points that they own around 20+ of the top 100 of these sites. Sometimes I am scared that they know a lot more about me than my closest friends do. What if some random Google Employee decides to keep a watch on some random internet surfers life. He’ll know what videos you watch, what goes on in your chats and emails about and with whom, you search queries and the sites you finally visit. If Google AdSense is setting a cookie on your PC (which they surely must be doing right now, I never checked though) they’ll also know which sites you have been visiting, even outside of Google searches. And yeah, that evil-maniac will also be able to see your private photos with your loved ones. Scary.. huh! And now, as Google Docs is catching on, and people are starting to migrate to the cloud, they he’ll also have access to your personal documents. {Gulp} “Don’t be Evil“, Google. Please.

Well, here are a few links if you want to -

• Google – Products list (Grossly inadequate)
• Google – Code of Conduct
• Wikipedia – Google Knol
• Wikipedia – List of Google Products

This tip is tried and tested on Windows XP. Basically we’ll be removing all the startup programs that are not needed.

1. START -> Run -> “msconfig”

2. Go to the “Startup” tab

3. For all the programs with small ticks on the left (meaning they are loaded each time your PC boots up) do a quick search (tempted to say google-search) for the program name, find out information about the process, and un-tick the program if you think it is not needed (for example, Yahoo messenger need not load up each time you boot up your PC).

4. Done !! restart and enjoy a faster PC