3 Mistakes of Google's Life - Part 2

Hello Friends,

Hope that you liked the previous part of the Google's Mistake. Now let me take you to the last product which was a disappointment for Google.

3. Google Buzz:

Google Buzz was launched in Feb 2010. It was not a great launch but still it created a lot of buzz around when it was launched (Obviously, it was a google's product. So it has to be) But still, I feel that there is some amount of error which Google committed while launching the product in the market. Few reasons which I feel are as follows:

• Wrong Product Launch At Wrong Time:

I had faith in Google as it is known to launch the product range at correct time. If they want to do some more research, then they will put the product in "Beta" and just let the users test it through Google Labs. But this was not in the case of Google Buzz. They were in hurry to launch the new product and they were under immense pressure from the higher management to launch an assault against Facebook and Twitter. 

This made it clear that they will be facing lot of issues when they launch the product initially. This was a biggest drawback for Buzz.

• Privacy.....:

Google totally forgot one term while launching Google Buzz. PRIVACY....

You wont believe, it just picked up people from your mailing list and automatically followed them or made them follow you. So your privacy is totally F***ed up. They did not even gave a thought about it. Only thing was there in their mind is to make it compete with Facebook just within weeks of launch of product.

Due to this hasty decision, Google faced lawsuit. This was also a kind of setback for Google.

Sorry... Facebook was not created in one day!!!!!

• Gmail?? Wrong Place Boss!!!!:

Buzz was still into making. Google was wondering that the product is ready (Just a thought even though it was not. This usually happens when you develop a software) so what shall we do now? Which is the best way to launch? 

They were thinking of a best platform for this highly innovative product. So the second best product of Google was selected and used to launch their product (GMAIL). 

So one fine day, when everyone woke up, they found a new application next to their inbox and showing people whom they mailed and were in their group... WTF!!!  You should have asked me at least. Anyway, the public reviews were taken into consideration and few changes were done. But I guess the damage was done. No turning back for them.

• Google Profile - Prime Requirement: 

Lot of people will disagree with me if I say that creation of google profile was not a bad option. But believe me friends, there were a significant amount of people who hated to create google profile.

In fact, its very true, why should I create a profile to use some product which is linked to my mail. It already has my details. 

Google is known to connect different application by single id but still it was not able to fetch details from orkut, google chat, you tube or any other sites. May be they would have some other thought in mind. But sorry, I was not able to digest their requirement. So I guess, it was one of the mistake of Google Buzz business model.

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I hope you all like the review. Sorry, if I have been some what harsh on Google, but do not forget that Google has given this world lot of things which will not be easy for any other companies to recreate. And every business needs risks. Some give returns and some does not. But we should move on!!!!!

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 Hardik Upadhyay

© Techbiz Research

Twitter - @HardikUpadhyay

Facebook - Hardik Upadhyay

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Back And Rejuvenated

Hi Friends,

I have been out of regular blogging from a long time. But now onwards, I will be blogging regularly.

Lot of things changed in last few days. New products were launched, new business ventures were established, new telecom trends and new controversies were emerged.

I found one thing which did not change is the greed of mine to know new business trends and innovations throughout various technological dimensions.

I will be putting the trends and acute analysis on the on new and emerging business models. I will keep you posted with new happenings and buzz in the technological industry across the globe.

I would be promoting my blog and expect the readers to comment on the same if you like my article. Please do follow me and all your suggestions to improve the blog are welcome.

You can add me on facebook @ http://www.facebook.com/hardik.upadhyay

Also you can follow me on twitter - http://twitter.com/hardikupadhyay

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Hardik Upadhyay
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Real Time Web?? Now its Real Time - Ads

Hi All,

There is a lot of buzz around for lot of products and services which are creating a cloud of hype in the technology field. Search engines are trying hard to get the real time information on your webpage as soon as possible.

Google and Bing made the deal with real time information source Twitter and on the basis of it, Twitter posted a good amount of profit in 2009. Now this search engines are not satisfied. They want to make revenue also. But ads are the old things.

Now they are trying to get money for the "Real Time advertisements"

This is done by several algorithms and sources. They are taking the trending topics from the internet and showing it to the clients.

Basis of this, they will display advertisements.

Eg: Trending topics - Michael Jackson, Brittany Murphy, Santa Claus, Christmas, etc.

Now the advertisements will be generated based on the trending topics like get the Santa gift for Christmas. Go for shopping at amazon.com

One Riot has already started to implement this thing. You can check it out from the image below.

Also Google is trying to implement this idea in much better format. They are trying to implement better model of this advertisement by using local trends and location based service.

My ideas regarding implementation - If Google implements real time advertisements. 

• Twitter real time results
• Google Trends
• Social Circle Results
• Location Based Results
• News Agency based results
• Personalized web history results
  

Now if the user logs in google account, all the above things will be analyzed by google and will be used to create proper results which are oriented to user to get more clicks.

For more information regarding this topic, you are free to mail me.

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Hardik Upadhyay

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Cyberattack - Learn From Mistakes!!

Cyberattacks – Not a new word in the recent time I guess. At least not to the people who are constantly living life online.

This word has created an impact on our life and has changed the way the concept of computing works.

History:

I remember very properly in the past, before around 12 years, virus was the new name in the internet industry. It was getting its form and developing very fast. There were few simple viruses which just created bad sectors in our floppy drives or overflow the ram buffer making the system to restart after some point of time.

Today:

Now the scenario has changed. We are in the next generation in which there are very beautifully designed cyber attacks and people are spending their day and night designing best in market bots and Trojans.

The virus definition has changed to such an extent that there are incident of hacking the whole network and creating cyber army. Wow. This is what no one would have thought in the past. They created something; someone else uses their brain to make something best out of it.

Today, I would like to focus on one of the recent incident of deadly cybercrime –> Attack on twitter and facebook.

News behind attack:

Facebook and twitter got attacked and hacked.

Denial of service attack!!!

Now what is the impact and what is this DOS all about?
Who did this, why and what was the result of this whole fiasco.
I will give you some insight about this issue.

6th Aug 2009, Lot of people woke up in the morning and as usual, instead of reading newspaper or seeing news, they started with twitter. But to their surprise, the page was not getting loaded. Now the problem was they were not able to get ”REAL TIME INFORMATION” as the only source was not responding.
Later after few hours, they came to know that Twitter was attacked. By thousand of requests which made the whole server to crash.

Why?

According to comScore, Twitter had 20.1 million unique visitors in the United States in June, some 34 times the 593,000 a year earlier. This compares with Facebook's 77 million this June, more than double the 37.4 million in the prior year.


Target?

Twitter crashed because of a denial-of-service attack, in which hackers command scores of computers toward a single site at the same time to prevent legitimate traffic from getting through. The attack was targeted at a blogger who goes by "Cyxymu" — Cyrillic spelling of Sukhumi, a city in the breakaway territory of Abkhazia in Georgia — on several Web sites, including Twitter, Facebook and LiveJournal.

But they could have just as well targeted Twitter itself. That's because the effects were the same whether the excess traffic went to the "twitter.com" home page or to the page for Cyxymu at "twitter.com/cyxymu." Same with Facebook and LiveJournal.

Results:

The outage that knocked Twitter offline for hours was traced to an attack on a lone blogger in the former Soviet republic of Georgia — but the collateral damage that left millions around the world tweetless showed just how much havoc an isolated cyberdispute can cause.

"It told us how quickly many people really took Twitter into their hearts," Robert Thompson, director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University, said Friday.
Tens of millions of people have come to rely on social media to express their innermost thoughts and to keep up with world news and celebrity gossip.

Twitter "is one of those little amusements that infiltrated the mass behavior in some significant ways, so that when it went away, a lot of people really noticed it and missed it."
The attacks Thursday also slowed down Facebook and caused problems for the online diary site LiveJournal. But Twitter, the 140-character-or-less messaging site used by celebrities, businesses and even Iranian protesters, suffered a total outage that lasted several hours.
Those attacks continued Friday from thousands of computers pummeling its servers, said Kazuhiro Gomi, chief technology officer for NTT America Enterprise Hosting Services, which hosts Twitter's service.


Reviews:

"A denial of service attack like this one is a very blunt instrument," said Ray Dickenson, chief technology officer at Authentium, a computer security firm. It's as if a viewer who didn't like one show on a television channel decided to "knock out the whole station."
Or like fishing with dynamite: You'll catch something, but the blast will kill dolphins, sharks and other organisms, too.

Just who was behind these attacks is not yet clear, but the dispute was probably related to the ongoing political conflict between Russia and Georgia.
Gomi said the attacking computers were located around the world and the source of the attacks was not known.

The attacks seemed to come in two waves. The first was a spam campaign consisting of e-mails with links back to posts by Cyxymu. This drove some traffic to the blogger's postings on various social-networking sites, possibly to disparage him as the source of the spam.
The second and more destructive phase consisted of the denial-of-service attack, which attacked the sites' servers by sending it lots of junk requests — presumably to prevent people from reading his viewpoints.

It would have been much harder for the perpetrators of the attacks to isolate Cyxymu's accounts on each social-networking site and shut it down. To do that, they would have needed to access his password by guessing it or somehow luring him into giving it out.
The blunt approach was easier — and more damaging.
On Friday, the surge of traffic to Twitter was about as it was Thursday — as much as 20 percent above normal traffic levels. But Gomi said NTT was better able to filter out the fake traffic, which is why Twitter stayed online.

Security Analyst said Twitter was more vulnerable than Facebook and other sites because the company's servers are hosted by a single service provider, something larger Web sites tend to avoid as they grow.

Although having several providers is no guarantee of avoiding harm, Dickenson said doing so at least gives the sites more tools and space to work with once they occur.
Craig Labovitz, chief scientist for Arbor Networks, a Chelmsford, Mass.-based network security firm, said Twitter's smaller size also made it more vulnerable. "Twitter is just apples and oranges compared to Facebook," he said. "Facebook is massive, and they presumably have massive infrastructure backing it." After the attacks on Twitter started, NTT turned on a technology that protects against denial of service attacks. The problem is it slows down access to the site.
"It's still under attack," he said. "If we turned that stuff off, the Twitter site could go down immediately, to be quite honest."

The Twitter outage was widely blogged, reported and — once the site was back — tweeted about, but was it really that bad? Or a mere hiccup of the information age?

For people like Lev Ekster, who uses Twitter to keep in touch with customers of his mobile cupcake truck in New York, the outage proved no more than an inconvenience. His event planner, who normally arranges cupcake orders for birthdays and bar mitzvahs, fielded phone calls all day from customers wanting to know the truck's location for the day.
"A temporary outage is not the end of the world," Ekster said. "But if this kept happening, people like me who rely on twitter will be in serious problem.”

The cyberattacks against Georgia a year ago were conducted in close connection with Russian criminal gangs, and the attackers likely were tipped off about Russia's intent to invade the country, according to a new technical analysis, much of which remains secret.

Aftermath:

I guess they should understand from their past mistakes and should be well prepared against future attacks. People have the knowledge and power, use it to get yourself protected against future cyber attacks.

Copyright © Hardik Upadhyay

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JSK