Category: Technology

I work in technology sector. And I do round a clock, not only from 9 to 5. It is my bread and butter, it is my hobby, it is the fascination of my life. And with the current rate of change particular in information technology (IT), there is always something new to learn, to try, to talk about. I often post news, thoughts, and reviews. And when I do, this is the category I use.

Happy 8th birthday, YouTube!

YouTube is one of those services that feels like it was here forever.  In digital years it might have been.  But in human years, it’s a few month younger than my son.  YouTube blog reminds us that it was launched in May of 2005.

Today, more than 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. That’s more than four days of video uploaded each minute! Every month, more than 1 billion people come to YouTube to access news, answer questions and have a little fun. That’s almost one out of every two people on the Internet.

Millions of partners are creating content for YouTube and more than 1,000 companies worldwide have mandated a one-hour mid-day break to watch nothing but funny YouTube videos. Well, we made that last stat up, but that would be cool (the other stats are true).

Happy birthday, YouTube!  You are awesome.  Keep it up.

Exclusive: Inside Hangouts, Google’s big fix for its messaging mess

Exclusive: Inside Hangouts, Google’s big fix for its messaging mess

How Google built its new messaging platform for Gmail, Android, iOS, and Chrome… and what took so long

1TB free Flickr storage

Gigaom reports:

“We want to make Flickr awesome again,” Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer said.

Flickr is getting three big updates. All users will get 1 terabyte of photo storage for free. The site’s s interface is also being redesigned to focus on full-resolution photos — both in photo browsing and in search — rather than words and links. Users will be able to share the full-resolution photos by email, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Tumblr.

This sounds amazing!  Also:

Flickr Pro, which had allowed users to pay for more storage space, is going away. “There’s no such thing as Flickr Pro today because [with so many people taking photographs] there’s really no such thing as professional photographers anymore,” Mayer said (though she acknowledged that there are “different skill levels”). There are still a couple of paid options: Users can pay $49.99 a year for an ad-free interface, and can add a second terabyte of data for $499.99 per year. It’s unclear what will happen with existing Flickr Pro memberships that users have already paid for.

I’ve been a paying customer of Flickr for years.  It was worth every penny.  But, at the same time, it was difficult to convince my friends to use it as there were some severe limitations for free accounts.  It’s nice to see them gone now.

The only weird bit of the blog post is this:

And, in addition to the iOS app Flickr launched last December, Yahoo is launching an Android app.

Flickr already has an Android app.  So I’m assuming they will just revamp that as well.

How To Survive a Ground-Up Rewrite Without Losing Your Sanity

How To Survive a Ground-Up Rewrite Without Losing Your Sanity

Developers tend to spectacularly underestimate the effort involved in such a rewrite (more on that below), and spectacularly overestimate the value generated (more on that below, as well).

Actions in Gmail

gmail actions

I think this is the greatest innovation in web-based email since Gmail’s own release of large mailboxes (what was it? 1 GB?).   Web mail has all the benefits of a website, but offers greater contextual focus.   Adding specific actions to message has been a possible with extensions and plugins for a long time, but those were traditionally added by the recipient.  Giving such power to the sender is quite interesting.

Of course, there will be a variety of misuses – spam, phishing, etc – but, I’m sure there will be an even greater variety of useful functionality.  Like this “Send money with Gmail” example.  Here is more information on what’s possible.