30 Boxes, an upcoming, "Web 2.0" calendaring service has been receiving a lot of attention on the web this week. Thomas Hawk has a detailed preview, including a few screenshots, of what he calls the "best calendar ever."

I can see how an online calendar with good social networking capabilities could be really useful for some people, but looking at my own calendar in Outlook 2003, I realize that almost all of the data in there is private - deadlines, exam dates, and other events and appointments that probably really wouldn't be of any use to anyone else I know. So I'm not quite sure I need a social calendar just yet.

I've also found that even with the advent of many fancy new "Web 2.0" apps, I generally tend to prefer rich-client, desktop applications for most purposes (feed aggregation probably being the only exception). Now don't get me wrong - I think many of the new web-apps are really cool and definitely have their advantages. But if you ask me to choose between Word and Writely, for example, I'll take Word, please. Outlook or webmail? Outlook, no question.

Even then, I'm quite curious to try 30 Boxes when it launches this Sunday. I might even consider using it as a backup store if it can somehow sync with Outlook, just like I forward copies of all my email to my Gmail account. And if everyone's raving about it, there must be something special about it. Should be interesting. :)

Walter from the IE7 team has posted a great piece of news on the IEBlog today. The Windows RSS Platform, which is supposed to be a part of Windows Vista, will now also be included with IE 7 for Windows XP and Server 2003.

I attended Amar Gandhi's session on "Windows Vista: Building RSS-enabled applications" at the Professional Developers Conference (PDC '05) in September last year, and was impressed by how simple and powerful the platform and API is. Integrating RSS capabilities into applications becomes a breeze, so developers can focus their time and attention on additional features and other important aspects like useability. The common feed store and the sync engine are also great for end-users because they essentially allow you to maintain one single feed list that can be used by every RSS-enabled application on the system, rather than having to subscribe individually in every one of them or having to manually import and export OPML files. You can read my report on the RSS platform from the PDC to find out more about all this, in case you missed it the first time around.

While one can argue that back-porting features to XP that used to be Vista-exclusives undermines the upcoming OS, there's still so much more to Vista. I think this is a great move. If the RSS platform were a Vista-only feature as originally planned, we'd see fewer developers actually making use of it since it would mean their apps would be restricted to Vista. Now that it's available on XP, the probability of it being widely adopted suddenly becomes much higher.

From the Associated Press:

Google Inc.'s rapid financial growth decelerated in the fourth quarter as the online search engine leader's profit fell below analyst expectations for the first time since its August 2004 initial public offering.

Tuesday's disappointing financial report rattled previously bullish investors, causing Google's stock price to plunge by more than 12 percent in a backlash that wiped out $16 billion in shareholder wealth. [...]

Google released its results after the stock market closed Tuesday. Company shares plummeted $53.65 -- 12.4 percent -- in after-hours trading after gaining $5.84 to close at $432.66 Tuesday on the Nasdaq Stock Market. The shares had fallen by as much as 19 percent earlier.

The letdown might herald the end of investors' love affair with Google's stock, said Standard & Poor's analyst Scott Kessler. "If you ask a lot of people on Main Street why they own Google, they will tell you, `Because it goes up every day,'" Kessler said. "Well, that's a great thesis until it goes down."

Yikes! Is this just a one-time thing, or is the bubble getting ready to burst? Nathan Weinberg from "Inside Google" isn't very optimistic.

In twenty days, Google has fallen over a hundred dollars, sliding from the record high of $475.11 on January 11 to the current $371. GOOG bottomed out as low as $394.74 on the 20th, losing $44 on that day, but it seemed to be in recovery mode ever since, inching higher since, reaching as high as $454, but now I’d wonder if it’ll recover at all. I wouldn’t be surprised if we don’t see a new record high until after the next earnings report.

See more reactions on tech.memeorandum.

My brother has posted a beautiful tribute to our grandpa, who suffered from Parkinson's disease for several years, and passed away on Friday.

My mom had a chance to spend time with him and comfort him when she and my dad were in Bombay last month, and she is so thankful for that. I wish my brother and I could have been there for him too.

We will never forget how much he loved all of us, and he will be missed greatly. May his wonderful soul rest in peace.

One important component has been missing from this site ever since it went live back in 2003 - search. As you might guess, Blogger doesn't provide this functionality, so whenever I needed to find something from an old post, I had to rely on Google's site-specific search.

The other day I decided that it was high time I added a search box to the site, but just throwing in a search box that directed you to one of the many search engines wasn't very appealing. It just looks out of place, and you're essentially directing visitors away from the site, only to have them come back in through a search result.

So I used the MSN Search API, which uses the SOAP protocol, to build a search page that fit in with the rest of the site. Now I know that most of you are scratching your heads and wondering - eh, why MSN Search? Search equals Google, no? Not quite. I personally use Google for all my web searches on a daily basis, and I'll admit that my initial intention was to use the Google API, but I experimented a bit and the results changed my mind. Read on...

1) Relevency: a good search engine should be able to take in a search query and return the "best" possible result first. Now the definition of "best" is subjective in most cases, but when you have a smaller subset of data (in this case, site-specific as compared to the entire web), it's sometimes quite obvious what the best result for a set of keywords should be. Let me illustrate this with a couple of examples.

Let's say a visitor came in and wanted to see what I had to say about desktop search apps. Google's first result links to the general reviews page, while MSN's first result takes you straight to my Windows Desktop Search review. In fact, the WDS review doesn't even appear in Google's search results, even though the page has been online for several months already.

Let's consider a more general example. If you remember, I went on a ski-trip on New Year's eve and posted the pictures a few weeks later. Searching for "ski-trip" on MSN Search includes a result that takes me right to the pictures page. The same search query on Google returns only a link to a page with a post linking to the pictures page. Again, surprisingly, the pictures page is absent from Google's results, even though it explicitly includes the term "ski-trip."

Just two examples right there, but I did try several other combinations of keywords and phrases, and the results matched my predictions.

2) Freshness: relevency is important, but effectiveness also depends largely on the freshness of the search index; i.e., how often the index is updated. I was unintentionally led into comparing this aspect of Google and MSN's index some time ago when we lost a chunk of the OSNN forum database. I was trying to salvage significant threads and posts from search engine caches, and the results were quite interesting - MSN's search results contained recent threads that the Google bot hadn't indexed yet. Apparently, MSN's crawlers are quite a bit more aggressive compared to their Google counterparts. I suppose this could be an issue if you had bandwidth constraints, but if you want fresh search results, it definitely works to your advantage.

That incident prompted me to do a similar experiment with site-specific search, limited only to this domain. Search for Honda, and you notice that the post about the ad appears in MSN's results, and, as you might have guessed, doesn't appear in Google's. Try searching for the blonde joke. Or try looking for XMPP (referring to the Google Talk post). Same results. In fact, searching for unique terms that were contained in posts made about 21 days ago return nothing in Google. Odd!

Anyway, the actual point of this post was to let you know that we finally have search that looks and feels like it's part of the site. But now you know the reasoning behind my choice too. :)

Technorati Tags: Google, MSN