The new Digg Reader

Being  a Google Reader user for more than 4 yrs, I'm suddenly  thrust into the world of RSS feed aggregator sites, none of which have the features or the useability like Google Reader, and its getting increasingly tougher to keep myself updated. It is difficult to point any 1 feature out but G R filled all my needs perfectly. Whether it was Starring or Sharing or commenting or just mark as unread. Its very surprising that features which seem insignificantly mundane have not been included in the newer readers.

The Digg Reader gave me a lot of hope but it does not match up either. But it does seem the best among the alternatives available. Some of the features they could add/ modify are

• I cannot see how articles are unread. And if I do not know how many articles are unread, then I will not know how long it takes for me to finish that segment and in that confusion I lose the interest to read. 
• I do not have the mark as unread feature.
• While adding a new feed, I discovered Digg's very well hidden Browse feature. It would be extremely useful if that option was highlighted.
• In Google Reader, the fonts, layouts and colours were such that each post seemed separate from the other. In Digg, all the posts seem a huge cluster and it feels intimidating to start with.
• I again cannot stress enough how important the unread count is for me.
• The dull theme in Digg is boring. Bright white in Google Reader is energizing as well as increases clarity.

I am posting these suggestions to Digg as well. I hope they are added in the list of features to be implemented.

What should Whatsapp do?

Whatsapp has taken over Mobile SMS and has sort of become the defacto messaging standard. They were probably responsible for the fall of Blackberry, especially in India. With constant updates making the App easier to use and more beautiful, at some level Whatsapp is the biggest App on the web. I for one use it a lot more than any other App. So if Mobile is the future, Whatsapp has the most firm footing on that front. Infact whatsapp like google is now a verb in the urban dictionary
The only problem, how do they make money?
At the moment Whatsapp charges the user a small measly amount per year. The amount also depends on the OS and the country. Windows OS and Android is free for a year and after that is $0.99 per year, iOS has a one time fee of $0.99. In India they have not yet started charging. I have not paid for the service and am using it for more than 3 years.
Now Whatsapp cannot start charging higher than they are right now. Users will simply shift to another cheaper App and developing an IM App is not rocket science. Whatsapp should also be wary of Google. The search giant has killed a lot of companies by coming up with already existing services. The most recent being Drive and Keep. They just might tweak their GTalk and make it an effective competitor for Whatsapp.
Whatsapp backs up all their user data. At 10 billion messages a day, that is a lot of storage. To aid further development they do need funds, however efficient they are as a company.

Whatsapp in my opinion has 2 options

• Sell to Google, Nokia or Samsung - make a cool truck load of money and leave. Those companies I am sure are ready to pay top dollar to integrate the world's most popular instant messaging App onto their OS.
• Develop related services and increase dependencies by linking and integrating all those services, just like how Google does. This would make Whatsapp a mini OS under the main OS. 

Recent rumours were that Google was looking to buy Whatsapp for $1 Billion. Now that would put Whatsapp on par with Instagram. But I personally think Whatsapp has more potential and with a little financial backing, can reach for the skies.

The Best to-Do List on Android

Productivity tools are great. A great calendar App and a good to-Do list App are a must for any power user.   Being extremely interested in getting organized (following through is another matter), I went on a quest to find the best to-Do list out there.
Lets get to the requirements.

• A good looking to-Do list on android market
• Should have a web version so that I can add tasks while working on the laptop
• Easy to use
• Should have a nice widget which makes my tasks visible without spoiling the look of my home screen
• Preferable if they have an extension on Chrome

What one might need or like in an App is extremely subjective, so I suggest you get the one that works for you.

Samsung memo

This is the stock one I got with my phone. Hardly any features to talk about.

TaskOS

A nice good looking App. But the widget is not that elegant. Plus at the time I installed it almost 6months back, they did not have any task repeat features. At that point I needed an App which would give me the option of repeating several tasks

Wunderlist

A lovely App. An extension in Chrome as well. Nice and Easy to make lists. A decent widget on the home screen. Again not task repeatability.

Gtasks

A nice App. Has sync with Google option which is good I assumed. But basically Google has a very bad product in the form of Google tasks. I wonder why that is though, considering they are making so many Web applications, a decent Task functionality and a simple Note taking App shouldn't be that hard. 

I started making a lot of mundane tasks repeatable and added them to the list. After sometime, looking at these mundane tasks show up and cover the entire widget area, hence restricting visibility of the important tasks made me realize that I needed to prioritize tasks. Unfortunately GTasks did not have that feature, so out it went.

Astrid

This App was perfect. Easy to make lists. A nice web App. Task repeatability and priority options. This was perfect until the notifications for the several repeatable tasks started bugging me. The App seemed too noisy at that time.

Any.Do

The most beautiful to-Do list App by far. Had all the features I needed. The inbuilt dictionary and word prompt was very handy. I could link it to my contacts. For Eg: Call X, would link it to X's contact so I could call directly from the App. Also it would remind me of missed calls. A Chrome extension. Overall very nice, very neat. Only problem was the user. I realized that putting mundane everyday tasks on your lists in repeat mode was actually a dumb idea. For that I suggest you use Routinely or Habit Streak. 

So I decided to remove all existing tasks and set it up again. But the App does not have a clear all tasks option. Extremely ridiculous. And deleting tasks the repeat is a hard troublesome task on this App.

Anyways I shifted back to wunderlist. But the problem with wunderlist is that some pending tasks which I do not have to finish by any time are not displayed on the widget. Only Today's tasks are displayed. It shows an empty screen if there are no tasks today but not the pending tasks. 

Finally shifted back to Astrid which with out my several repeatable tasks is perfect for my needs. Works like a charm and I have nothing to complain about at all.

If you need a to-Do list App, I suggest you try Astrid first.

EVERNOTE HELLO

Ever since I started using Evernote, I have been constantly following them as I think they come up with some good stuff. So after a long wait for Evernote Hello ( the ios app was out a while back) I finally downloaded a coupla weeks back. The app was good. The idea behind it was nice. Probably the me of a coupla yrs back would have definitely used the app. But I am not in the novelty-for-novelty-sake phase anymore. I really could not see myself doing the whole shendig to add a simple contact.

What Hello does or says is there are ways a person remembers thru people he meets. So Hello is supposed to help you sort your contacts in that manner. The app itself has a nice UI. I liked the look and feel. The idea of saving contacts in a why your brain remembers them is innovative as well. Some features are a little buggy but I am assuming Evernote will iron these out. 
What I did not like is I cannot sync all my contacts from Google to Evernote. I need to do them one at a time.
The whole process of how you meet a contact is complicated. You really will not have the patience to complete it out in a regularly. 
So far I have not been able to change the gps tags of the few contacts that I did add. It doesn’t seem to be a bug. I just don’t have the option to.
I hope Evernote comes up with better sync and integration options. Else it will just be an app people might download but never use.

* Just tried to add a new contact. It randomly chooses my current location as the the location where we met which is understandable. But it links the note I edited just before as a related note. That was a note about my bank details which is a bad mistake. 
I uninstalled the app

Twitter's Revenue Model

Few days back, the number tweets exceeded the world population.
Also Twitter got to know about a recent small earthquake faster than the local media could get to know about it.
They have 70million users and they’ve grown 1300 odd% in a year.
But yet they don’t have a revenue model and don’t make any money.
So here are a few things I think they can do to become profitable.

• Divide the screen space and display ads.
  This is a tough one as people like Twitter for its simplistic view. But still there is a lot of screen space they can utilize. They can probably divide the page and on one side are the ads related tweets. These tweets can have graphical content which will stand out in comparison to the text based tweets. To tweet here ( lets call it b-tweets) you need to pay something to Twitter. They could charge you per tweet or per month with a usage limit or for the data content. Put in a lot of options which will give a lot of choice for businesses.
  


• Customized feeds.
  Twitter should ask people if they would like to subscribe for customized feeds of they're interests. Something like Yahoo does when you sign up, they ask you to check your interests. There would some people who would check for something which would make a portion of the users not complain about ads since they asked for it. Of course others like us should have the option of not getting any ads on our personal area.
  


• Communities/ Fan clubs
  Twitter should also have this thing like fans/communities where people with similar interests could have conversations. I think since Twitter is so open, there is no directions to the tweets; which is nice in a way but people should be able to direct it if they want to. Twitter could charge businesses for starting these communities to give people info about their product/services.
  


• Strike a deal with GOOGLE
  Also Twitter can strike a deal with Google and allow Google to access their site for real-time searches. This works for Google as well as they need to combat Facebook on the real time search front.(btw It takes a Facebook with 360mil users and Microsoft to take on Google and Google still rocks!!!)

I still haven’t given this much thought; I need to come up with more points.

KILLER APPLICATIONS THAT GOOGLE SHOULD COME UP WITH

• A much awaited “G Drive” where you can just drag and drop onto your Online Storage device. Pretty much like Microsoft’s Sky drive, only a lot cooler as it is by Google.



• An “OFFICE G” to replace MS office.



• A “MEDIA G” software which plays audio and video in all formats, searches for related media info and updates the files. For e.g.: it should be able to search for the subtitle track for movie file. Also with handheld music players becoming popular, MEDIA G also sorts the music and updates info such as genre, year, artist etc so that it’s easy to use on your “G POD”.
  
  
• A G POD.



• A "G MONEY” for people to manage their personal finances. This is pretty simple yet necessary. I don’t know why Google hasn’t done something about it yet.
  BUY FACEBOOK, not just delete Orkut but Shift Delete it.



• Google handsets to go with Android with limited ads on your mobile if you go in for the subsidized version of the phone.



• Finally a Google OS that’s awesome enough to make Microsoft and Apple go out of business.