I read about some of the drama about friendfeed over the last couple of days and thought id try it out.

While playing with it I started realising that what friendfeed really would be awesome as a feature for twitter. Right now its the other way around, twitter is a feature on friend feed. If you could create a friendfeed client like snitter, wouldn’t that pretty much eliminate the need for twitter for a lot of people?

I dont think you can send messages to twitter using friendfeed as of right now, but that shouldn’t be too difficult to to do. But once that functionality is in their, twitter becomes superfluous to a lot of people.

Fuck Hulu

Absolutely Hilarious

I’ve been reading Mistborn, by Brandon Sanderson, who has been chosen to write the final book of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series. This is a really really good book, I’m enjoying it tremendously.

Every time I look at Sandersons blog though, I can see that he gets these books in the same way i did. I had remarked earlier about how he agreed with one of my keys to being a WOT fan. And now I see another point of agreement. The person who first told me about the series recommended I read it years ago, before Path of Daggers came out. I never got around to it till right before the release of the 11th book Knife of Dreams. When I spoke to him after I started reading, he told me how its starting to get too much for him. Too long, and the pace has started to slack off. I loved the series all the way through(though I would have to say if books 7,8,9 and 10 were 2 books instead of 4 it would probably be even stronger). We have very similar reading tastes, so we tried to break it down. What we came up with is almost exactly what Mr. Sanderson talks about in his post on Crown of Swords:

I object to complaints about pacing.  I thing the pacing across the series has been even, and I certainly didn’t find this book to be any slower than previous volumes.  However, perhaps that’s because I’m able to read these all through without any wait in-between.  One thing that is happening is that as the series grows longer, the viewpoints per character grow less and less frequent.  There are enough main characters with important plots that we can’t spend an entire book focusing on just two or three of them like we did during the early books.

These books are so detailed, that it becomes difficult to enjoy that detail if your struggling to remember specific plot points while your reading. If the whole story is fresh it works better, and the details become something one savours.

An Interesting take by Vir Sanghvi on the Pakistani politician’s affinity for Plastic Surgery versus the seeming indifference of the Indian Politician to any kind of vanity.

One answer seems to be that while Indian democracy, for all its faults, emerges from the grassroots and deals with issues of substance, Pakistan’s spasmodic attempts at democracy are dominated by a tiny elite of wealthy feudal barons who have systematically robbed their country blind. The plastic surgery has nothing to do with the voters. It has to do with the vanity of a ruling elite, eager to splash out money on London residences and new heads of hair. In a shallow democracy, appearance is everything and the superficial takes precedence over the substantial.

Indian politics might not be as feudal as Pakistani, but its close. I think there is an oversimplification of the Indian politicians motives pertaining to the lack of care most of them put towards their appearance. The shabby clothes, the lack of a comb, the out of control ear hair, many of these seem like as much an affectation as the hair transplant. For many of India’s politicians, there is an arrogance in their humility.

Went for Mobile Monday this week after reading that the topic was going to be Mobile Payments. Very interesting presentation by the CEO of mchek, a Bangalore based mobile payments company. Interesting how many different ways they have of being able to complete a payment on the mobile phone. Some of the challenges discussed were probably not very surprising considering the number of regulators they have to deal with. But I really liked some of the ideas they had pertaining to Bill payments, and how to make the solution a Card present

They won an award at the Mobile Congress in Barcelona earlier this month for how well made the payment process was. I learnt a lot from the session, and was glad that I made it for a Mobile Monday after such a long time.

The second presentation was from Make my Trip showing off their WAP site, and the apps they were developing to complement the site. Not as interesting, but probably more useful for me considering, I would up buying a ticket of their WAP site, when my internet was down at home. Cleartrip is my website of choice for travel stuff, mainly die to the clean layout  they have. But the experience on Make my trips WAP site was very good(I have a Nokia E61 so he full keyboard made entering in all the fields a breeze. I don’t know if it would have been as good if I had to use T9)

I really need to start attending these events a lot more regularly.

A toy available from amazon . Read the user reviews. They are awesome.