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I ran for Chocolate!!

Jhanvi and I successfully finished the 2009 Hot Chocolate 15K, held on the lake shore of Chicago last weekend. Not a surprise that Jhanvi beat me by 1 second :). Her finish time was 1:46:27 and mine was 1:46:28. It was a chilly day, but after a couple of miles we fell into the rhythm and enjoyed the race. The only disappointing portion of the race was the watery hot chocolate that was provided at the end of the race. I am not sure if it was a case of the organizers underestimating the crowd or if they were being cheap, the hot chocolate (which was supposed to be the attraction of the race) was pretty watery.

Yes.. people do run ~9 miles to get a cup of hot chocolate :).

November 3, 2009 by Running Sports Uncategorized 2

Twitter is not going to make it..

Pretty dramatic prognosis eh..Esp, after all the hype that twitter is getting in the media, one would think that the whole world uses twitter. Here’s why I don’t think twitter will not be such a darling 2/3 years from now. It might still exist in some shape/form (I think it is going to be acquired and integrated into a larger offering), but it won’t be the buzz word anymore.

First the good part.. Let’s take a look at some data from Compete and Alexa (companies that provide web statistics about sites) in comparison to facebook and myspace (the 800 lbs Gorillas of social networking)

Traffic Ranking :

Similar data from Alexa (where the long term data is available for free, unlike Compete)

No surprises here. We see that the ranking of Twitter has gone up drastically and is staying there..

Reach :

Interesting trend. One would expect that the reach (i.e. the number of people accessing the site) would go up as drastically as the ranking, but it is not as linear. Facebook is doing pretty well in this statistic.

Page Views :

I think this is to be expected. Twitter does not rely as much on page view due to the design and nature of the site.

Looking at all the data above, it looks like twitter is in a good place right. Now let’s add another dimension to the analysis. Let’s take a look at how Google views twitter. “Google Insights” is a service offered by Google to help analyze the “search” volume of keywords across regions and timelines. Since Google has ~70% of the search engine traffic, this is a good way to observe the trends.

Here is a graph showing the “interest” starting from 2004…

Zooming into the last 12 months..

Interesting to see that while facebook is getting more and more “interesting”, twitter is not catching up. This might be due to two reasons.

  1. Twitter really did not promote it’s search function until July 2009, meaning the search engines did not have a way to scrape the site and as such did not have a lot of content to show to users.
  2. Twitter partnered with Google and Bing in Oct 2010 2009 to index it’s posting. Again, this means that the search engines just got to the data and it might take some time for them to start showing the data in the search results.

I don’t know if this is conclusive evidence to show that Twitter will not make it. Twitter definitely has its place, but I don’t think it is all that the media has hyped it to be. Even though the media hype has driven more and more users to Twitter, the company has to yet come out with an viable business plan. I think that businesses are flocking towards twitter, because users are.. but once the fad passes on, the world is also going to move on.

P.S : I don’t think I need to mention to anyone looking at the data presented above that MySpace is on a downward spiral :). Who still uses Coldfusion to run a site?? That is so 90s!! :).

November 3, 2009 by Rantings Technology Uncategorized Web 9

Microsoft's confusing online strategy

First there was msn.com, Microsoft’s first attempt to become a major online player. Users were told that this would become the one portal that they would need to go to for all their needs. At that time, it was a competition to portals like Netscape and AOL.

Then came along live.com..Microsoft’t second attempt to bring all it’s on-line properties into one place. And live had(s) some really good features (skydrive, sync, spaces). Esp the revamped hotmail, now called live mail. Life was good right..

No..Microsoft then decides to spend a couple hundred million dollars to launch and promote Bing, it’s new search engine.

So you might be wondering, where is the confusion!! msn.com is for content, live.com is for services and bing.com is the search engine. Makes sense right?? Well, for some reason, Microsoft decides to redirect anyone going to live.com (the site that was once promoted as the only home page you ever need to visit) to the bing site. What about average Joe, that just wants to get to his e-mail and goes to live.com? Well, he gets redirected to bing. And can he at least get a link to his old mail services from the bing home page? NO!! One would think that is common sense, but then I am not smarter than the marketing/product folks at Microsoft :). Or is this just a clever way to drive more traffic to bing to increase it’s exposure? I think that is the case. Take a look at the web ranking from Alexa, comparing bing to live.com and msn.com

Now, if you dig deeper into the clickstream data for bing.com (http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/bing.com#clickstream), you will see that roughly 70% of the traffic originating from live.com is going back to live.com (p.s. : This is a back of the napkin calculation 🙂 ).

Let’s compare that to the all knowing Google God’s way of doing things? If you go to Google.com and click on More at the top you can see links to all the services Google offers. And if you do the same thing on Bing.com, you don’t get the big picture of what Microsoft can offer..

All I am asking Microsoft is to put a link to http://home.live.com (the home page for all live services) on Bing.

Also, it would help Microsoft to start backing up all those millions of dollars in ad money with real content in it’s search engine. I used “kudithipudi” (yes.. I am pretty selfish 😉 ) as a search term in the major search engines and here is the ranking by the number of results

October 28, 2009 by Rantings Technology Uncategorized Web 0

Last half marathon of 2009

I ran the last (at least for now) half marathon of 2009 this weekend along with Jahnavi and Sri. We ran the Northface Endurance Challenge Half Marathon. The Northface Endurance Challenges are a collection of races which take place in the wilderness across the US throughout the year. The race in Wisconsin, held each October, is the easiest out of them. I ran this race last year and wanted to make this of my annual races.

My official time for the race was 3:01:09 (~31 minutes slower than my time from last year). So this makes it my slowest half marathon ever. How do I continue to keep breaking these slow records? 🙂 Well, by not practicing :).

While the run itself was painful (reminder for self.. never ever run a half marathon in the woods without practicing!!), it was fun to have Jahnavi accompany me on her first half marathon. She was a real trooper and kept me company throughout the race. I also took some videos of the race (that again tells you how poorly I prepared for the race 🙂 ). Here is a snippet from my last mile, I was delusional by this point 🙂

The obligatory pre and post race pictures 🙂

Pre Race

Post Race

October 26, 2009 by 2009 : Half Marathons Fun Running Sports Uncategorized 0

Overheard : Comment about weather

Comment from a lady coming out of a portable toilet, during the Northface Endurance Challenge Half Marathon this weekend

You know, it is cold, when you don’t want to come out of the porta-potti!!

It was 36 degrees!! 🙂

October 26, 2009 by Fun OverHeard Uncategorized 0

RECIPE : Palathalikalu

Recipe for Palathalikalu, a dessert from the Guntur region in the state of Andhra Pradesh in India. It is a classical dish and is usually made during the Sankranthi festival. This used to be a “must have” dish in my childhood, but it has become into a exotic dish in recent times. My brother in law made some recently and I was surprised, how easy it is to make the dish. Here is an attempt to share the knowledge :).

Ingredients :

  • Rice Flour (1.5 cups)
  • Brown Sugar (2 cups)
  • Milk (1/2 Gallons)
  • Butter (Ghee) (3 tablespoons)
  • Cashew Nuts (1/2 cup)
  • Cardamom Seeds (eilachi) (~15)

Preparation :

  • Knead the rice flour into a dough by adding 1 cup of brown sugar and some warm milk.
  • Add the rest of the brown sugar to the milk and bring it to a boiling point
  • Put the prepared dough in a cookie press and drop it into the milk as short noodles (use the cookie press template with round holes of ~0.25 inches in diameter)
  • Roast the cashews slightly in butter and them to the milk (along with the butter)
  • Crush the cardamom seeds and add them to the milk.
  • Let all the ingredients boil for ~15 minutes and you are ready to enjoy palathalikalu

Wasn’t that easy? :).. You can also add raisins to the dish based on your preference.

Visuals :

The Ingredients


The Cookie Press (Indian Version 🙂 )

Creating the noodles

Yummy!!


October 17, 2009 by Food Uncategorized 1

I guess I am a superman :)

I successfully completed the Chicago Half Marathon held on 9/13 in 2 hours and 44 minutes. I know that is nothing to brag about 🙂 (in fact my worst time so far for a half marathon).. but considering that I didn’t train for it at all and had a couple shots of tequila and some beer the night before, I think I did OK. But boy was I hurting at the end.

I ran the race with my friend Sri and his friend Rama Krishna. Obviously, I was the late finisher in the team.

Here is our pre-race picture

p.s : Please don’t take this as advice to start drinking before embarking on a long run :).

September 20, 2009 by 2009 : Half Marathons Running Sports Uncategorized 1

MisCommunication

Another picture from a chain mail :). My friend, Shashi, forwarded this via e-mail. Sarcastic look into communications in the corporate world. Not sure which publication this is from, so apologies in advance if this looks like palgarism. Click on the image to view a larger and legible image.

July 24, 2009 by Fun Management Rantings Uncategorized 1