Ashutosh tells me about FeedTier

Ashutosh Nilkanth Blog » Blog Archive » Introducing FeedTier

 Ashutosh Nilkanth emailed me today about a new tool that he is working on. It’s called FeedTier and is meant to be a tool that creates RSS feed for webpages that are not web feeds enabled. It’s still in Beta.

Ashutosh on his blog says that he has some kind of simple algorithm that scrapes the data from the wepage and creates a RSS feed. Ashutosh, I did some testing and the results were not too much impressive. Let me give you an example, I wanted a feed for Google Search results for Tejas Patel . I went on FeedTier and entered the URL  and the resultant RSS feed that I was given was http://feedtier.somee.com/?http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=tejas+patel&btnG=Google+Search. Now the results did not meet my expectations. I just get one link in the RSS feed, but obviously there are more links on that page! Did I test the system wrongly? OR was I supposed to do something else here?

“Play with Mr. Bush” is making rounds

I have got an email today with heading “Play with Mr. Bush” today more than 7 times. Initially I did not even bother to open it, but when I got it 7th time from one of my friends who does not normally SPAM me until it’s something important, I checked the link out at www.planetdan.net/pics/misc/georgie.htm . Ah, seen this Flash before called Bubble Girl. Playing with the bubble girl is more fun for me than playing with Mr. Bush :).

My views on Ojos screen shots

Munjal Shah responds to my request on Ojos update and posts some more screen shots. To the least I can say that I am excited and looking forward to get my hands on the system.

Now I am no expert on UI, but I am just a normal day to day user using different services. So my thought is no matter how many experts you get to design your UI, but if your home page does not give a normal user enough information about what the site does and what are the benefits of using the service, than the site developers are lacking somewhere. As I always say, I see so many smart applications on the Internet today, so many cool services which can increase the productivity. But the developers lack to communicate the potential uses of these applications and services to their first time users. And thus it never becomes too much visible in the market. Why do developers and writers assume that users will be able to figure out the uses of their application or their own?

Now coming back to Ojos, I think the first screen (home page I assume) looks good. It’s clean and clutter free and I think that is important. Munjal, is there a possibility of creating a “Try it” area? Now I am thinking like a typical user. I would really love to try any service before I go ahead and invest my time in using the service and learning how to optimise it’s use. If I try out the service and looking at the capabilities if I say “wow, that’s amazing” I know I am ready to use that service for a while. I had that feeling last night when I tried https://www.thinkfree.com/index.jsp service online. It is amazing. And I know because I like it I will use it and recommend it to others. If providing live examples is a problem than just have a flash demo or something or that sort. Yes, I know people can just search photos at the top and try it out that way!

I would say do have a section somewhere on your site where you can list down all the potential uses of Ojos and also how others are using it. I am sure people will have some weird uses of your service. Who knows!

So will Ojos just be face recognition service or even object recognition as well? Won’t I be able to search for all the pictures that have “iPod” somewhere in it?

With all the search features listed, I think I am going to love it! I think it is a important and a needed feature where I can search the albums shared by others users with me. It makes the system more usable for me. I might be one of those who don’t share any pictures but have many people sharing their own albums with me. I can than just search from what they are sharing.

I don’t know the other features of Ojos yet, so will wait for feature requests till I get my hands on it :).

Got scratches on iPod Nano, here a suggested solution

Todd Dailey – Weblog – Blog Archive – Restore your iPod nano to new condition with a $4 can of Brasso

I love blogs and blogging. Somebody puts a problem and some other person finds a solution to that problem. The way the forums work, but with blogs it is easily searchable using most search engines whereas that is not the case always with forums.

Todd Dailey shares his solution of getting rid of scratches on iPod Nano. Cool and easy.