weRead – what’s new?

Ever since I blogged about iRead back in April, a lot has changed. We have introduced tons of new features, and there is really not one place where we have captured all of them.

So this is my attempt to describe the features to our readers.

• iRead is now called weRead and we have partnered with Lulu
  This post from our official blog has more details.
• We now have a destination site
  You don’t have to login to Facebook or some social network to access weRead. You can directly access your bookshelf from our destination site. If you have already used weRead in Facebook or one of the social networks, you can link your account and access the same account from the destination site.
• Connections – find people like you
  This Facebook feature allows you to find people who have similar book tastes like you. You can look for people of a specific gender, people in your network and people in specific age groups.
• We now have friend activities in the homepage
  We now show activities from your friends on weRead in the homepage. This helps you keep track of which books your friends have been reading, and if they have participated in any discussions.

  

• Book discussion boards
  This is the place to discuss with your friends and network about your favorite books, what you liked, what you didn’t like, why someone should or shouldn’t read a book.
• Author discussion boards
  If you want to discuss about a specific author, talk about what works of an author are good, or what you would expect his next book to be like, this is the place to do it. Check out the latest discussions here.

  

• Author profile claim
  Are you an author? Then you should be on weRead. weRead makes it ultra simple for you to setup a profile and interact with your readers. Writing a new book? Want to know who might like it? Want to get suggestions from your readers? Want to promote your book on various social networks? Start here

  

• New catalogs
  We now have catalogs from Amazon, Google and OCLC integrated into weRead. This means you have a whole range of books to choose from. More catalogs are coming soon.
• weRead is now available in multiple languages
  weRead is now available in 6 different languages – English(US), English(UK), German, French, Spanish (on Hi5 only) and Portuguese (on Orkut only). We have more languages being added soon. Want weRead in a local language? Help us translate weRead here.
• We now have limited previews of books from Harper Collins and Google Books and full preview of some books from Gutenburg
  This will give you some sort of a ‘bookstore experience’ by allowing you to preview books.
• See how a book fares in your network
  Curious to know how a book has been rated by people in your network? We now give you near realtime statistics about a book – how people have rated the book in your network, how many people own the book, how many have marked it favorite etc.
  
• Readers now have a profile page which displays their bookshelf
  Each weRead user gets his/her own personal page that they can then share with their friends, bookmark, etc. In order to set up your own profile page, link your account from Facebook to our destination site and click on the “Profile” link in the top blue bar. Check out my profile page here.
• Readers can showcase their bookshelf in their blogs and other sites
  Want to advertise your bookshelf in your blog? It’s simple! Go to your profile page and then click on ‘Take weRead with you’, get the code and put it in your blog. You also have some customization that you can do before you get the code. Check out a demo here.
• The Facebook Wall application allows you to post information about books, write reviews etc directly from the Facebook Wall.
  You can now chuck a book at your friends directly from the Facebook wall. Go to your Facebook profile page: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php. Under the Wall tab, you should see the Books iRead option. Clicking this opens a dialog that allows you to pick a book from your shelf or search for a book and chuck this at your friend.

  

• Similar authors
  Under every book detail page, we show similar authors that will help you discover authors who write books similar to the one that you are viewing.
• Mis-spelt searches
  weRead now has builtin suggestions in case you make a misspell some work while typing your query.
• See more like this
  We have launched some kind of a ‘Stumble upon’ feature. When you are viewing a book in weRead, you will see a button ‘See more like this’, clicking which, takes you to a random but related book.
• External integration with OCLC
  We now power the OCLC related books and reviews.
• We have also moved to bigger and more powerful servers, which means a better user experience for all our readers.

As you see, we have been busy! We have tons of new and exciting features lined up and we promise to provide feature updates as frequently as possible. A lot of these features revolve around making weRead a truly social application.

By the way, you can get some quick updates on weRead in our Twitter page.

Happy reading!

PS: Features and feature names are subject to change.

Who do we believe?

As information is becoming cheaper everyday and as we are getting access to more and more information, I see one problem. There are certain ‘well known theories’ which are being proved to be untrue. Also of how ‘facts’ are generated when in fact it had never really occurred. These are things that we studied during our schooling as ‘facts’.

On one side, this is a good thing. It makes you question everything you read or hear and not just accept things blindly. But on the other side, it makes you feel, well, then, what do we believe?

Wikipedia is a classic example of information accuracy and the arguments around it. Do you trust Wikipedia? Take an example of a controversial article – say Scientology, or about Crop Circles, or say the Nazca lines. Would you believe what Wikipedia has to say? Well, isn’t there a slight possibility that the theory is wrong, especially when there are mathematicians, archaeologists, physicists or historians who subscribe to either sides of the controversies.

What if a vast majority of the people actually believe something that is actually not true? Wasn’t the earth believed to be in the center of the solar system and that the sun revolved around the earth?

Here are some things that I came across in recent days:
1. The theory of evolution and the theory of Intelligent design.
2. The Sphinx mystery – is Sphinx older than it was initially thought to be and does it have connections to mars?
3. The Aryan invasion theory – did it really happen?
4. Global warming a myth?
5. Aliens and UFO’s – has anyone really spotted them?
6. Man landing on the moon

Well, the list is endless. If you look for information on any of these, you will see tons of information that can convince you either ways.

Not all of us are mathematicians, not all of us are theoretical physicists. Nor do we have the time to verify every single ‘fact’ we come across.

So the question is how do we believe what we read and who do we trust and believe?!

It's official – Lulu partners with weRead

So finally the news has been made official.

Lulu today announced partnership with weRead (iRead).

Lulu is a platform that enables wanna be authors, musicians and other creators to bring their work directly to their audience. Publishing is free, and the lack of middlemen means that the freedom lies in the hands of the creator. Lulu was founded by Bob Young, co-founder of Red Hat and an extremely successful entrepreneur. Lulu is the world's fastest-growing provider of print-on-demand books.

With this partnership, there are several exciting things that we are looking at.

With weRead, Lulu users now get a simple way to make their creation available on all popular social networking sites and promote their work. As for weRead, users get a much larger catalog of books, some of them which are not available anywhere else.

Well, this is definitely just the tip of the iceberg and we see several other exciting things ahead.

News about the partnership from the Lulu site:
“Lulu (www.lulu.com), the world's largest marketplace for individual, educational, and corporate authors and publishers to bring their books directly to market, announced today an alliance with weRead (www.weread.com), the leading social networking application for books where readers can easily discover and recommend books to their friends on social networks and therefore, the world.”

Over the next few weeks, you should see several new features on weRead. There is one theme that we are concentrating on – make weRead more social, which is why we thought it makes better sense to name it weRead rather than iRead.

The future now looks promising!

The Afterthoughts – If Google came up with an RSS Reader

So here is another post in The Afterthoughts series.

Post: If Google came up with an RSS Reader
Originally posted on: 2005-01-30

This post was made long before Google came up with Google Reader. I was experimenting with RSS readers and started wondering what it would be like if Google came up with an RSS reader.

Now that we have one from Google, it is time to look back and see how my expectations matched with the actual product.

> * It would first buy the domain “greader” or something similar.
This didn't happen. However, Google Reader is popularly called GReader. I guess I made this comment because of Gmail.
On a side note, Google does own greader.net.

> * It would have an index of more than 8 million different feeds.
This is not how an RSS reader has evolved. Google Reader does have recommendations based on the feeds you already have. It would be good to see an integration of Google Blogsearch or even Google News with Google Reader. The only integration I see is the subscription of search results from both of these in Google Reader (a 'new' feature).

> * It would offer 1 GB space for storing posts.
The storage in most online readers is unlimited.

> * It would have an excellent search feature for searching posts.
This was a surprise! The feature came in so late. Totally unexpected.

> * The interface would be simple, but at the same time powerful.
You bet this has been true. The keyboard shortcuts are just superb. The speed with which you can navigate and read feeds is extremely good. (You will need my script to make it even faster. )

> * We would be able to mail any post just at the click of a button.
I guess this feature has been around since quite some time now.

> * It would allow us to filter posts and also label them for future reference.
With tagging and folders, this has been better than expected.

> * It would also allow us to make blog entries (of course the service would be integrated with Blogger.)
Again, this is a surprise. Google has not provided any integration with Blogger. However, recently Google added a feature to share an item with notes. With the microblogging revolution, and Google having acquired Jaiku, I guess that integration will happen first.

> * It would integrate greader with other offerings like mail, groups etc.
The integration is not that great as of now. It would be cool to see posts related to a mail, or a message in a group etc.

> It would be Beta forever.
Surprise! This isn't true!

Final thoughts:
So after more than 3 years since I made the original post, (which is a lot of time in technological evolution) I should say, Google did match most of the expectations that I had back then, some features were developed much better than what I had expected. However the integration with other services is one thing where it could have done better.

Getting Rosegarden to work in Ubuntu (Gnome)

I am one of those many people out there who had trouble in getting Rosegarden to “sing” in Ubuntu under Gnome Window Manager. Finally after trying a lot of permutations and combinations, I got Rosegarden to work. I made this post to share what I did so that others don't have to go through the same trouble I did!

So let's proceed.

Required software

Rosegarden requires some other applications to be installed in your system. So before you fire up Rosegarden ensure that you have the following:

1. qjackctl
2. qsynth
3. rosegarden

If you don't have any of these you could execute this:

$ sudo apt-get install qjackctl qsynth rosegarden fluid-soundfont-gm

Ok, now we have everything we need. Let's proceed to the configuration steps:

Start the Jack server

(Somehow not using sudo gave me problems)

$ sudo qjackctl &

Jack Audio Connection Kit setup

Click on Setup
Here are the settings I used:

Start the Jack server

Start the synthesizer

$ sudo qsynth &

QSynth setup

MIDI Setup

Audio Setup

Soundfonts Setup

Start rosegarden

Ok, it's time to fire up Rosegarden.

$ sudo rosegarden &

Configuring Rosegarden

Go to Settings – Configure Rosegarden.

Ensure that the connections are right in Jack Audio Connection Kit (Connect):

Play one of the sample files and you should hear music!

Troubleshooting

In case your Jack server is not running, you might want to execute this command and then start the Jack server:

$ sudo /sbin/alsa force-reload

Adventure with Ubuntu, Wubi, yum, libc and the like

Note: This is not for the casual reader. If you are facing any issues with any of the keywords mentioned above, you might want to continue…

So here I was trying to install some packages from a YUM repository on my Ubuntu 8.0.4 system. Why YUM when you have apt-get? Well, let's just say, the situation demanded it.

The installation seemed to be going fine. What I did not realize is that, the installation had innocently relinked my libc files to a new location (actually to an older version of libc). The yum installation failed. Without checking the error, I executed sudo yum install again.

And I got this:

sudo: /lib/tls/libc.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.4' not found (required by sudo)
sudo: /lib/tls/libc.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.4' not found (required by /lib/libpam.so.0)

Next I executed ls. Same error! And soon I realized, I was not able to execute most of the commands. The only things running were, things that were already open. I had closed my terminal by then, and was not able to bring it back neither was I able to login in an alternative terminal.

It is extremely difficult to figure out what has gone wrong without a terminal. I tried out various things, but I soon realized that since I don't have sudo access anymore, I won't be able to fix anything in the /lib directory, so no point trying.

The only solution was to reboot in recovery mode and then see if I could relink the libc files. So I popped in the Ubuntu live CD.

Now here is an added twist to the tale. I run Ubuntu on Wubi. So how do I mount my NTFS 'file' which is actually a Linux partition?

With some pointers from my colleague, I realized that it is possible to mount a file as if it were a filesystem. I executed this:

mount /dev/windows/filesystem/containing/wubi/installation /media/disk
mount /media/disk/path/to/wubi/disks/root.disk /media/root -o loop

Guess what! The Wubi file got mounted and I was able to access the files.

After some inspection I realized that the problem was that, while Ubuntu has all the libc files in /lib/tls/i686/cmov, the message indicated that these files should be in /lib/tls.

I did a 'ls' in the /lib/tls directory and found that there are some files of an older version of glibc at this location but the live cd version didn't have any files there. So it was apparent this is what is causing the problem.

I unlinked all the files, and relinked them to the new location and rebooted.

This time although it was able to boot Linux, it did not bring up the UI. I booted once again in recovery mode and ran xfix and continued with the boot.

Things seem to be fine now.

Update: Not everything was fine. Some applications, like Totem threw a SEGFAULT. So I did this:

sudo apt-get install --reinstall libc6

Things seem to be fine now.

How to ensure that your extensions work on Firefox 3.0

Here are the steps that I found useful to port my extensions from Firefox 2.0 to 3.0:

• Step 1: Just start Firefox and allow it to update the extensions. You could go to: Tools -> Add-ons -> Extensions -> Find updates.
  This should update many of the extensions. Restart Firefox.
• Step 2: For those extensions where the auto-update has not functioned properly, you might want to manually see if an update is available. This is because for some extensions, the auto-update may not recognize that a new version is available.
  • Uninstall the older version and restart Firefox.
  • Search for the addons here and add them.
• Step 3: Install the MR Tech Toolkit extension.
• Step 4: For those extensions that have still not been updated and you need desperately, just see if the option 'Make compatible' from MR Tech. This option is available when you right click an extension in the Extension tab. If the compatibility range is upto some older version of 3.0 (for example 3.0b5) then this might work.
• Step 5: Look for updates at a higher frequency over the next few days. Developers will be forced to ensure that their extension works in new version of Firefox so you can expect an update soon.

The Afterthoughts – Gmail forwarding and service interoperability – an interesting observation

“The Afterthoughts” is a series where I revisit some of my older blog entries and see how things have changed since the time I made the blog post and now.

The posts that I will choose initially will be from 2004 to 2006.

So here is the first one in the series:

Post: Gmail forwarding and service interoperability – an interesting observation
Originally posted on: 2005-11-21

The entry goes about explaining how when you connect various services together, you could end up with the same information multiple times.

This is increasingly becoming a problem these days. Services like Twitter and Friendfeed are not solving the problem elegantly, so you see more and more duplicates and links to the original post.

Here is a typical scenario today:
I make a blog entry. In order to ensure that my readers see my post immediately, I have a service that automatically posts a message in Twitter. This is like instantly messaging my friends (actually Twitter followers) telling them, “Look, I made a blog entry”.

Now, I use a lot of Web 2.0 services. So, in order to ensure that all my friends have a single feed to follow my activities, I use some aggregator like FriendFeed or Tumblr.

Some friend of yours (let's call him Bob) likes your blog entry and bookmarks it on del.icio.us. Another friend, Andrews bookmarks it in Magnolia.

Let us now say, there is another person Dave, who is a friend of you, Bob and Andrews. He is following all 3 of us in Friendfeed.

How many entries is Dave going to see of the original entry?
6 in total! 3 from you – 1 from your blog post directly, 1 from Twitter, 2 from Tumblr (1 via the blog post and 1 via Twitter), 1 from Bob via del.icio.us and 1 from Andrews via Magnolia.

The screenshot shows duplicate entries from mashable's blog feed and from Twitter:

Now this is real noise. And this is more true if Dave is not even interested in the blog post to begin with.

So the solution?
Friendfeed allows you to hide specific feeds from specific people. For example, Dave can hide all bookmarks from Bob or all Tumblr entries from me.

Now that is not a good solution because not all bookmarks from Bob are duplicates.

Tools like Feedblendr and Blogbridge have solved this problem for simple RSS aggregation. However things are different when it comes to social network and aggregation.

So right now there is no simple way of detecting duplicates and more and more people are complaining about this in the blogosphere explaining how Friendfeed is more noise than information and why the good old Google Reader is still relevant.

Here is one such discussion. As the discussion suggests, it is not just about eliminating duplicates; it also requires you to merge discussions/comments in each of these posts keeping in mind that not everyone is a friend of everyone else.

So what has changed over the last 2 years?
If anything, the problem has become a tougher one. I am sure the startup that does duplicate elimination and gives you a filtered feed taking your social networks into consideration is going to be the next hyped startup in the Web 2.0 world.

Privacy disasters with aggregation services

Imagine you have a host of aggregation services like Friendfeed, Tumblr, Suprglu, Lifestreams connected to each other, such that each one is reading from your various feeds and republishing the content.

Now imagine a disaster where one of these services, say Twitter, suddenly, because of some flaw, exposes your private messages.

It's like a Tsunami that cannot be controlled! Your private data would flow into various input streams in a matter of seconds and there is no turning back.

Things will only get worse with activity feeds and Beacon.

The bottom line is: Be careful about where your data is going and what data you put online.

Big fish, small fish – my personal experience of working in a startup

It’s been about 3 months since I joined Ugenie.

Having spent about two and a half years in IBM, which is a mammoth on any scale, and working in Ugenie now, which has a really small employee strength, what changes do I see?

I guess most large organizations have similar characteristics, so instead of naming IBM in the rest of my post, I will just mention it as ‘Big Fish’ to represent all large organizations. Again, I guess nothing is unique about my feelings of Ugenie and most startups have similar characteristics, so I will call it ‘Small Fish’.

If I look back into the days I spent at Big Fish, I have mixed feelings. There are quite a few things that I have gained, but some that I had to lose.

The immediate change that I saw in Small Fish is the rate at which things move. Ideas emerge by the minute, and are implemented within a couple of days or for ideas taking more time, a week. More time is spent in getting things done than on planning and processes. Long term goals are perhaps goals for the month and I guess there is no point thinking about a year down the line or anything on a similar scale! The ‘tomorrows’ or ‘over the next week’ are replaced by ‘now’ and ‘today sometime’. There are lesser ‘meetings’ and they are short. You definitely don’t need a calender for your meetings.

The second change I see is how large organizations spend lots of money on infrastructure and how startups tend to save on every penny. I remember the ultra modern conference rooms, the posh pantries/wash-rooms, the money that was spent on things like events, all hands, yearly gifts, interior decoration, posters talking about “X” day (replace X with Innovation, Mothers or something like that) etc, I could go on. Don’t get me wrong. I am not saying Small Fish does not spend on its employees, but every penny spent is done so cautiously.

And now let me delve into the differences in terms of:

Breadth/Depth: I guess one of the reasons that made me stick to Big Fish is the breadth of technologies on offer. Every day, you would come across someone working on a project that you never knew existed or you come across a page on the Intranet that excites you. Every day, you keep widening your breadth of knowledge.

Things are different in Small Fish. Small Fish offers the much required depth.

I remember someone telling me of how there needs to be a balance between the breadth of our knowledge and the depth in some specific field. This is like the letter ‘T’, with the top horizontal line representing the breadth and the vertical line representing the depth.

Ownership: I don’t see too much of a difference here. While in Big Fish, I used to own the components I developed and I was responsible for timely delivery of that component and ensuring that the consumers of my work are kept happy. Things are similar in Small Fish, may be with minor differences. The ownership here tends towards the whole of the product/application than just the component you own. (This is closely related to the Roles/Responsibilities observation below).

Priorities: Back in 2005, when I was working on product development, there was a phase where I found it difficult to prioritize my tasks. There were a bunch of bugs to fix, there were some mails to respond to and there were some bug databases that I had to update and it seemed like all of them had the same priority.

If I compare that period with the present, I would say it’s quite similar. There is more work than anyone can handle, there are some things that only you can do and the deadlines are sometimes impossible to meet because of various technical/non-technical issues.

However I seem to be a bit more comfortable in my present position than I was back in 2005. This could be attributed to the fact that I have two and a half years of experience behind me now or to the fact that I am in a startup now and it is normal for everyone to have their plates full.

Roles/Responsibilities: I would say there is no such thing in a startup. While in Big Fish, we had clear responsibilities and having completed those tasks, we could consider our job done, in Small Fish, things work differently. There is no such thing as ‘my responsibility’. Or if you really want to put it in terms of that, you would have to say, ‘everything is my responsibility’. While many people don’t like that, I see every such occurrence as an opportunity to learn and I really enjoy it.

Opportunities: There is no dearth of this in Big Fish or Small Fish, but there is a difference. In Big Fish, you need to search for them or understand that ‘x’ is opportunity knocking at your door, while in Small Fish you would just take it up, without perhaps realizing that it was an opportunity.

Social network: Well, if we are talking of getting to know more people with diverse personalities and skill sets there is really no end to how many people you can connect with in Big Fish. This is severely restricted in Small Fish. I remember having some technical discussions with people who have significantly more experience than me in Big Fish and I should say the things that I learnt then are things that you don’t get to learn from a book. This has definitely added to my experience. It was about ‘learning from the failures/experiences of others’.

Smaller fishes tend to have a younger crowd. So while the teams are dynamic, the number of people with more experience than you and with diverse skillsets is limited. This has nothing to do with the actual people in Small Fish, but is rather because of the size of Small Fish, which, because of its very nature is small.

Awards/Recognition: Frankly, there was no dearth of it in Big Fish. But on second thoughts, other than the monetary rewards and the benefits of the actual work that you did to earn the award, do these awards really matter to the rest of the world?

Other activities: This is severely restricted in Small Fish. Big Fish invests a lot on employees. So every day you hear people being on training or attending some conference or even having gone abroad to learn some technology.

Processes: If you ask anyone working at a startup, especially someone who has worked in a large organization before, I guess one thing they would mention is the processes. What is my take on this?

I would say there needs to be a balance. While on one side too many processes is definitely going to be time consuming and a pain on the employees, having a well defined process would mean that everything that needs to be taken care of is actually taken care of. So if Big Fish is tending towards one end of this spectrum, Small Fish is towards the other end, with the best point being somewhere close to the middle.

So people ask me, do you think it was worth it?
Well, no doubt about that. I guess you have to lose some things to gain some things. And the things that Small Fish offers it’s tough to expect that from Big Fish and this, to a major extent, holds the other way round too. Now having had enough experience in Big Fish and no experience in some Small Fish, I would say, yeah, it was worth it and I am glad I decided to join Ugenie.

Now remember that these are my observations and I could be wrong in terms of how various Big Fishes/Small Fishes work or even in terms of the Big Fish where I worked and the Small Fish where I currently work. Also my own opinions might change as I gain more experience at Small Fish and compare it to my experiences in Big Fish.